England is Mine

I'm trying to get into this whole world cup thing. Really I am. A couple of days ago I found myself in Clintons holding a £2.99 flashing badge that read "proud to be English", but fortunately I thought "what am I doing?!" before I got to the till and put it back. Then I drew Poland in the office sweepstake and it seemed it was all downhill from there. Could have been worse, of course. One of my colleagues got Togo.

But then Lisa, who I work with, and I whiled away a long fire drill (and the hour that followed) meticulously predicting goals and winners and losers etc for a "World Cup Predictor Game". Our thorough and highly scientific calculations have led us to predict a Brazil-Germany final (hey, they're the home team, that's just the way it goes) with Italy-England fighting it out for third place. This would be fun, since my boss is Italian.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately for employee relations) the chances of our predictions coming true are, well, nil. We have been rather oventhusiastic with our score predictions, forgetting that so often games result in 0-0 draws. We have also predicted that over the course of the competition Britain will get 15 goals. This is quite obviously bollocks: last time they got 5. Where tonight's matches are concerned we've predicted 3-0 to Germany and 2-1 to Poland (I'm feeling rather loyal towards Poland for the time being.) So, depending on the result, my interest in the World Cup may both start and end tonight. (Although the viewing alternative is Big Brother, so I might persevere for a while longer yet.)

On a completely unrelated note, I think that this (follow the link and click on "Yorkshire Glossary") is one of the funniest things I have ever read in my life. It's a glossary of slang terms to help non-British doctors determine what their patients are trying to tell them. Among other things, it gives "melons" as a term for "breasts". When would you go to the doctor and explain you had a lump in one of your melons? And, not to put too fine a point on it, can it really be the case that vaginal discharge is such a hot topic of conversations in the pubs and hairdressing salons of Doncaster that it's been necessary to develop a (quite bizarre) slang term for it?

I'm still trying hard with the Futureheads. They are still averagely good.