Today Just Football

Hello, poppets, I am back from Rome. But as you can see I cannot think about Single stuff at the moment because there is international football. International football is very bad for Auntie, and prevents her from thinking straight.

Now this will come as a perhaps unwelcome shock to Polish readers, but actually my team is the DFB. This is because I didn't care about football until the 2006 World Cup, when I happened to be in Germany, and it is against the laws of football just to change your team because you have changed your language of instruction. However, I am happy to make Poland my second team. As a Canadian I am free to pick any European team I want, and frankly it has been awhile since Scotland qualified.

Actually, I do have one football anecdote that involves the caffeine in the cappuccino of life. A few days ago I was in a fake Irish pub in an Italian town anxiously watching the first half of Germany v Portugal. I was really very, very tired, but that didn't stop me from getting entirely invested in the game. Nobody in the fake pub except B.A. and I really cared about this game, by the way, as I discovered when I shrieked with dismay and the entire pub fell quiet.

Germany got so many shots on goal without scoring any goals in the first half, that I shrieked more than once, and buried my head under my arms a lot, especially when Portugal was in possession. By half-time I was completely exhausted and had to go home, so I missed Gomez's goal. Fortunately, I got to read all about it in the Italian papers the next morning.

Anyway, when I got up, I looked behind me and saw a party of young Italian men smiling at me as if I were 16 and incredibly cute. Being neither 16 nor incredibly cute, I did a double take. But sure enough, there they were still smiling at me in their dark-eyed, inimitable, Italian, woman-loving way. And frankly I think this must have had something to do with my serious emotional involvement with the football game.

But tonight is the Poland v Russia game, and I don't think I'll be able to watch it because Russia took the Czechs apart and Polish and Russian fans have been beating up on each other in the street and oh dear, oh dear.

I am reminding myself of that wonderful line in Don Camillo about God not caring about football.

Update: Ooo. Poland 1: Russia 1 That was some game. Whew! It's too bad Poland didn't win, but on the other hand, Poland didn't lose. Meanwhile, the way to watch football from home is to watch it on TV with live commentary on your laptop at your elbow. The Guardian commentary was hilarious. Sometimes I think the only news reports worth reading--and the only reports likely to be completely accurate--are the sports reports.