Beautiful

We start today with a fact; Dindos is Greek for Latin and also Latin for Greek. How's about that? I had literally no idea. I learnt that from a repeat of Yes, Minister on UK Gold. It's amazing what you pick up. I have also realised that if I write my posts out in shorthand before I begin to type they generally make more sense. Can you guess which method I used today? There will be a small* prize if you guess correctly.

So onto my main topic, which today is change. Basically, as I have said before, the British are ambivalent towards the internet. It's a bit like CB radio was in the 70's - you have to learn how it works, so it's automatically for poofs and lasses. Sad-acts who can't talk to girls and spend all their waking hours masturbating over pictures of buxom axe-carrying elves in leather combat gear and playing Warhammer 40,000 with other withdrawn losers in South Korea. Real people are too busy drinking delicious lager and fighting. The internet is for four things -

a) Tesco Direct,
b) hard core pornography,
c) child molesters, and
d) complaining about.

I may have touched on these themes before. Nowadays I am worrying less but still keeping my blog notebook well out of sight in public. Prejudices linger in all sorts of places. And I know, get to the point, Burgess, but stick with me, this does all come together eventually.

So anyway, Land of War or whatever it's called. It seems that one day in some fantasy MORPG somewhere, a person was talking to another person in battle-clad guise. The conversation, after the obligatory "I am Skra-gorn, son of Arathorn, my personality is seventy-six" stuff, they both discovered that they were British women and began to talk like normal people instead. Even in virtual space, we Brits can get very self-conscious if caught playing about with fancy dress. And so the conversation turned, as the Human League said, until the sun went down. A new friend had been made.

After a while the subject of men came up. And in her turn Warrior A said to Warrior B,
"Actually, I'm gay".
"Oh," said Warrior B and thought no more of it until about ten minutes later a message arrived from the moderator of this fantasy place saying:
"Talking about being gay is inappropriate for this game, cease and desist".
"But I am," said Warrior A.
"Nonetheless, keep it to yourself," came the reply, "we'll have none of that kind of thing here. Go back to casting spells and battling orcs."
"So I can't be gay on here?" asked A
"No," said the moderator.

A thought about this for a while, and using the magic of email organised a reply to this edict that would get her point across in a way that could not be ignored. And so, one day, from all five corners of this virtual magical kingdom came eleves, knights, warriros, trolls and warlocks to the first annual Fantasy Land Gay Pride Parade. Rainbow flags were draped on the walls of the city and thousands marched through the streets for equality and self-determination. Now there is a gay bar and several alternative bookshops, plus support groups for gay wizards and closeted necromancers.

See? Things change. World Of Goblins is now the main RPG for the world gay community. Society moves on in many ways, some subtle, some less so. I think the wholehearted acceptance by the public at large of James Blunt is a sign that we are less macho now than we once were during the Go-Go Eighties when Europe and Bon Jovi ruled the airwaves. Whereas then we would have called them a bunch of bleeding-heart nancy boys, now we take these sensitive balladeers to our hearts and nurture their bruised sensibilites with love, affection and a room full of money.

James Blunt, is of course, a trained killer. I saw him and Damien Rice fighting in the car park of Morrison's in Leicester over who was the most lovelorn and James made mincemeat of him. The last I saw as I ran away was James garotting Damien with a cello string having pulled out his eyeballs with the sharp edge of a slim volume of Keats's Odes. Nasty. He didn't stand a chance against a Sandhurst graduate, and all that was left when I came back was a scarred acoustic guitar fretboard and a human heart with a knitting needle stuck through it.

I have opinions now on all sorts of things I never used to think about at all. Traffic. The police. The need for team games to be played in school and the quality of said teaching. That last one is a big surprise. I used to fulminate endlessly about the unfairness of forcing us kids out into the cold to play rugby on Wednesday afternoons, and I still feel as sharply now what I felt about it at the time. But I also now realise, that it was in fact down to the sheer awfulness of most PE teachers, not to the activity itself. If you were to ask me now I'd say that it was vitally important that kids learn how to operate in teams and get into the habit of doing at least some exercise between bouts of Death Kille 3 on the X-Box 360. This leads me neatly (or not so neatly, don't split hairs) to last night's draw with Sweden, a team we haven't beaten since 1968, and hey, surprise surprise, that's a record that still stands today.

I've said it before, I'll say it again - we are a society of highly competitive yet deeply lazy hypocritical bastards. Perfidious Albion indeed, especially when it comes to the life or death subject of Professional Football. Therefore I don't see how our placing of our vicarious sense of keep fit and competition in the persons of the eleven men of the England football team is wise. They can only disappoint us, and yesterday they did just that.

I don't see how they can't see it. Is it just me or do Joe "Twinkle Toes" Cole's displays of his silky dribbling skills generally come when he's stood by a corner flag with four defenders surrounding him? Perhaps he could have passed the ball on when he had the opportunity earlier, although that wouldn't have been infront of a camera. But there he is, dancing expertly away where he is doing no good whatsoever except to Sweden who then take the ball away and menace the England end largely unchallenged. Here we find Rio "King of the Strollers" Ferdinand, who has been known to set up a deckchair on the 18 yard line and take a nap during matches.

This is not to criticse Joe Cole (although I will go on record as taking a pop at Rio, the stupid haired lion-faced berk). I have no skill with a football whatsoever, but looking at last night's game with a dispassionate organisational eye, it strikes me that it's all very well celebrating a goal, but when you spend so much time shouting, waving, hugging Peter Crouch and kissing the Three Lions adorning the shirt as England did last night, you are likely to be forgetting that the whole Swedish team are now running towards the England goal with the ball. Similarly, a game lasts 90 minutes and not just until England score. With that in mind, perhaps remembering to be paying attention for that whole period might be in order should we hope to see the team progress beyond the next round.

But that's an aside. Things, as the Bluetones sang back in the heady days of '95, Change. I read on the BBC website that the German police have been extremely impressed with the behaviour of England fans at the World Cup so far. The dreadful reputation of the past seems to be just that. They did, admittedly, confiscate 3000 people's passports to stop them travelling to Germany and they did send 500 uniformed bobbies to patrol the venues alongside their colleagues from the Polizei so perhaps it's more down to the huge policing operation, but still, there have been no baton charges yet, and so, for now, we can be pleased with ourselves. Nowadays we are happier for people like the Germans or Spanish to be foreign at us when we go abroad. Wait till we meet the Germans in the next round and lose, though.

Closer to home, I never used to get hayfever. I grew up on the coast where the sand meets the sea. The bracing sea breezes meant any pollen was muscularly diverted from the area and I could breathe easily throughout my childhood years, as though Tunes were no more than the fevered imaginings of a madman. Now I am a wreck, rattling with pills and my nose red from blowing. Damn immune system. But that's not all. It is a far deeper change than the acquisition of a mere immune disorder.

Nowadays I find myself saying things like "It's expensive, but it'll last longer than a cheap one" and "I'm busy in August, how about October?" and "I'd love to come out, but I've got to be in Nottingham for work by ten," and so on. I am turning into my parents, and the really scary thing is that I don't really mind. I long for domesticity. Perhaps this is because I am sick of the single batchelor life. That, by the way, is a myth. I do not have a WKD side, nor do I subscribe to the Lynx Effect. I am too busy to go out and shark about in some gloomy hangout full of people a decade younger than me. I can't go to work with a hangover, partly because I have stuff to do that needs me to be functioning properly and partly because if I do drink I am ill for the best part of a week. And if you do drink WKD and are over fifteen, you are a lost cause and I will trouble to think of you no more.

Well, maybe I have always been like this, especially the bit about drink. I make no claims of a wild youth. I was a child of the 90's and as such feel guilt for just walking past a MacDonalds. But I know one thing. James Blunt is a vicious bugger when he's cornered. Look out, kids.

Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal

*There is no prize in fact. You may have guessed this.