Thierry Henry - La Honte!, or, Gods with feet of clay

If "L'Equipe", France's national sports daily, were impartial - or, let's face it, not French - the headline blazing out on its front page today would surely read "LA HONTE!" - "The disgrace!" - after the scandalous way in which Eire was eliminated from the World Cup Qualifiers by Les Bleus last night.
Instead, it runs with "La main de dieu" - the, oh!, so evocative (for English fans) "Hand of God" line, and that in itself speaks volumes.

It speaks volumes of everything that is wrong with football today and, indeed, of why football is the world game and, arguably, the one true religion in this godless age, when other "true" religions appear either whimsical at best or dangerous at worse to the public at large.

The whole language of worship has been transferred from pew to kop, with banners unselfconsciously proclaiming "My team - a religion"; "My manager the god". The faithful congregation gathers to sing hymns of praise every week to the deities whose icons adorn their children's bedroom walls.

These latter-day deities have so much in common with the Roman gods in so many ways; aside from the manifest falsehood they stand for that we all try to deny lest our lives appear as meaningless as they surely are, the old gods (with lower-case "g" for good reason) were all feted for representing a particular characteristic: Mars the god of war; Bacchus the god of bacchanalian roistering; and so on. In other words, they were all one-trick ponies, just like footballers.

Craig Burley, nephew, of ex-Scottish manager George, blew the gaff on the "cream" of that nation's footballers by declaring they were "too thick" to understand his uncle's management strategy. Yet, to quote the song, "Is it any wonder?" All they know is how to kick a ball about and their dedication was invariably at the expense of their education. Yet they are all - at the summit - as rich as Cresus for all that, and live in their bubble like the immortals on Mount Olympus.

So what are gods - indeed God - for? Surely the answer is: to provide lessons in how to live, ostensibly "righteously" (though a moot point when it comes to Muslim fundamentalists).

So what lessons do we learn from the gods of the football field? How to live venally, in celebration of philistinism, selfishly (even small clubs are going to the wall as all football's "largesse" is greedily hoarded by a relatively small cabal) and as filthy cheats.

Thierry Henry, and all of France this morning to give them their due, are looking and feeling sheepish about the events that transpired last night. If he'd been a cricketer (Andrew Strauss this summer springs to mind), he might have held his hand up in a show of good sportsmanship and called a foul on himself (like a snooker player would). But cricket and snooker are not the world's game. Football is. And such an admission would be unthinkable in football. So maybe, at the end of the day (as football pundits like to say), we get what we deserve.

And the legacy for Thierry Henry? They call him affectionately "Titi" in France, the name given to Tweety-Pie as it happens, the bird that "t'ought it saw a putty-cat". Well the world all saw what you did, Titi, and your name will go down in history as "Tricheur Henry", i.e.: Henry the Cheat.

Anyone for tennis?

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier

It strikes me on this Commemoration Day that each of the leading world nations has sent into battle in the great wars its own unknown soldier, and this soldier has always ended up getting killed. Talk about cannon fodder!

Sarkozy the Liar

Not only does Sarkozy come out with the most blatant piece of historical oneupmanship at the Berlin celebrations of Nov 9, when he tries to echo the famous Kennedy utterance: "Ich bin ein Berliner" with his own "Wir sind Berlin" (neither of which the Germans would have said, the first notoriously translating as "I am a doughnut", and the second being pure invention, since the famous chant was "Wir sind das Volk" ("We are the people"); the cocky littly upstart also claims to have been there in the madding throng on that auspicious evening.
I can demonstrate that this has to be complete bollocks.
I was living in Germany then, in Hamburg to be precise, and, like the death of Lennon or the attack on the World Trade Center, moments like this are etched in the memory.
I was sitting to watch the news at home, waiting to go out and see the Pogues in concert. The German evening news begins at 8pm and finishes at 8.15, and I remember distinctly the look of surprise on the (female) newsreader's face when it comes in over her earphones, just before the end of the broadcast, that there was a breach in the wall and that the Easterners were flooding through.
So even if you lived in Germany, you had no idea what was coming, no idea of how the night might have progressed (repression? bloodshed?) and a cat-in-hell's chance of organizing your travel arrangements to get over to the city.
So what of the likelihood of some ambitious French would-be politician just beaming down to enjoy the thrill of it all, apparently accompanied by today's Mayor of Bordeaux, Alain Juppé??
Give us a break, you duplicitous toe-rag.

Photo of me sporting unfortunate moustache, hammering away at the wall alongside all the other "Mauerspechte" ("Wall-peckers")

24

Wife's watching 24 again. I'll tell you what's truly superhuman about Jack Bauer - it's going all day and night without eating or taking a crap.

One-day wonders

Change the first vowel and the third consonant of the third word and you've got the England cricket team to a tee.
What a quandary for the official Ashes tour DVD makers! Having purchased the DVD for the "Greatest Ashes series ever" (I quote) following the England series win in 2005, I looked forward to adding the latest triumph to my video library, and then along came the one-dayers...
The whole misguided exercise casts a long shadow over the superb achievement of the cricketers' test incarnations, and just watch those DVD sales take a hit. Can we not just pretend it never happened?

Harry Grotter

I'm really pissed off that JK Rowling got in there first. I'd written a whole series of books about the apprentice wizard, Harry Grotter, when she happened to publish her first volume. Shite! All mine got rejected on the grounds that I was just some bloke trying to cash in writing some fantasy bollocks for kids, whereas she with her aura of struggling single mum rocking baby in the pram while she writes her books in a café to keep warm and fed on cream teas makes a bastard mint. Makes you sick. I've given up writing fiction and now I do some slaughtering instead and recount it in documentary form.

AA - wAAs geht los?

French bureaucracy: two things to be said about it - it's very bureaucratic and it's very French. The French, like several European states, have until now had a vehicle numberplate system which knocked the UK system into a cocked hat. Rather than underscoring how new my car is or that my husband considers me 5EXY, the French numberplate integrated a final pairing of digits that indicate the French département. This feature is useful in identifying out-of-towners, enabling the casual observer behind the wheel of one's car, in particular, to be wary of the same since they're liable to drive unpredictably due to their unfamiliarity with the local topography.
However, the available numbers inevitably started running out. So what are the alternatives? Let's take the current model, what could be done with it: "123 ABC 75"? 75 is Paris, okay, so what about reversing the order of the sequential numbers and letters: "ABC 123 75"? It must have been considered, and yet this is no doubt where the bureaucrats stepped in. With scant heed to the sociological benefits of the system to date, they surely decided that by making all the digits and letters sequential, and not "wasting" two of them as "place-markers", they would have a system that was almost infinitely expandable - or at least would last until the petrol ran out. So now we have the model "AA 111 AA".
Yet for obvious reasons there was a bit of a backlash about the loss of the department indicator, and so it was decided as an afterthought to include it on the numberplate but not as part of the numberplate, over to the right as a counterpoint if you will to the "F" Euro insignia over to the left. But this is where the "so French" bit comes in: it's only optional (land of freedom of choice); and you can choose which department you want. I ask you! How laissez-faire is that? And what is therefore the bloody point of the exercise? You might live, work and drive all year in Paris but have a fondness in your heart for Corsica and so opt for 2A (south Corsica) or 2B (north) on your number plate. Or state your heart's allegiance to Brittany. Or the Vendée. Or anywhere come to that. Defeats the whole bloody object.
Anyway, about the German in the title. I was quite amused when I saw a tourist coach from Germany parked at the hotel across the way from us, all the way from Aachen. German number plates continue to retain their local identifier, which in this case is at the start of the plate in the form of letters signalling the town of immatriculation. Get the picture yet? "AA". Every new car at the time being driven around France had a plate reading "AA...", since the "AB..." series wasn't out yet. I had this vision of a perplexed coach driver from Germany wondering why so many of his townsfolk were popping up all over the place as he traversed the highways and byways of France.