Postcard from Piriac

Football decadence

Top club. Crap defence. Two choices: blood kids who've scant or zero first team experience, or go out and spend a fortune on big name foreigners. Don't send scouts into the domestic lower leagues because they can't get a tan there. Reflex actions produce jerks.

Neymar on the Silver Screen

They're making a new live-action version of Jack and the Beanstalk, starring Neymar's father (the beans come out of his ball bag) and Neymar himself as the Golden Goose. The role of the ogre is a toss-up between Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini.

Oscar's wild

Pistorius back in the news, more flannel about the window dressing for a guilty man's show trial. What really riled him was when his girlfriend stormed out of the bedroom calling him a "bloody idiot". With her SA accent it sounded like "bladey idiot", and he thought she was mocking his handicap.

PSH

Philip Seymour Hoffman: that came out of left field. The biggest loss to camping since Kenneth Williams' passing. Great actor.

Harold, man and boy and girl

Re: the Roy and Hayley storyline on Coronation Street, no-one seems to have drawn a parallel with the film Harold and Maude (Hayley was after all a transgender man originally called Harold). Come on you fellows of Media Studies (there are a lot of you out there), what price a treatise on Harold and Roy v Harold and Maude. Which is best? Only one way to find out... Fight!

Dr Who - those were the days

Been watching the first ever Dr Who episodes (DVD box set Xmas present). Ian Chesterton, the male assistant, is forever telling his female companions, "Stand back, let me do it, I'm a man, I'm wearing a cardigan and a tie." Oh how manly men used to be, and how vulnerable and in need of protection the fairer sex.