Walls come tumbling down

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June 2002

June 2002

World Cup fever abounds. The symptoms are serious. The house looks like a small thermo-nuclear explosion has occurred and outstanding chores are clogging up my already limited brain job-buffer capacity.

At this moment in time, the dogs, Zoe and Natzoid are all asleep; some at my feet (guess which). It's 9:45 on Saturday morning and I've just finished watching England beat Denmark. The adrenalin is subsiding. The analysis phase of the viewing process is now descending on me. I watched the game on Univision so the commentary was in Spanish, and thus I'm not biased by the ignorance of sports reporters (not that the US ones know too much anyway).

Watching the game in Spanish was fantastic. In addition to what was a great game to any England supporter, the commentators were phenomenal. They can speak at 50Hz and 8 syllables per second, with the exception of the apoplexy that follows a goal. My whoops of delight and Univision's "Goooooooaaaaaaaalllllllll" resonated through the house to the extent I was sure I would wake someone or something.

The remarkable thing about all of this is that the viewing, screaming and analysis are all repeated every day. Not always to the extent of the England games, but in varying degrees. Ireland and the US create some more modest evocations and others are watched objectively.

The usual morning ritual of tea and emails has been suspended for June, replaced by tea and football followed by the reading of many web-sites reporting on the games and then the updating of the World Cup spreadsheet. Oh, and then I'll see if there any ultra-urgent emails to read.

The rest of the house is now awake and poor Natzoid has been subjected to a blow by blow account of the match. And worse still, she knows she's going to have to watch it with me again in an hour or so.

The grass needs cutting, the basement is a tip, the kitchen looks like the dogs and Beanie have been cooking for a week, the living room is covered in laundry and half-done jobs that were started with good intentions but were abandoned due to some football allusion. It's a good job we don't get any visitors. But it can all wait - there's more to life than cleaning. Most of it rests in the hand of El Grande Capitan, David Beckham.

It's not like I'm obsessive...

The Bean slept in our bed last night and fell asleep singing "'tummin' home, 'tummin' home, 'tummin', football's 'tummin' home". And we don't even have that song on any CD or tape. Where on earth did she learn it???

In other news, the weather has been perfect for plants; 70 or 80 degrees with plenty of those Midwest storms. So everything is thriving. Even the marigolds that I had written off have been resurrected.

For some reason, Natzoid hates Marigolds. I think she inherited it from her mother; Natzoid's dad had planted marigolds at the side of their house and her mum had ripped them up and thrown them on to the compost heap, replacing them with something else. Natzoid's dad noticed and promptly dug the replacements up and put in some new marigolds. What happened next? Well the cycle continued, and still continues...we are now on the fourth or fifth iteration.

OK, so the World Cup ended up being a wash-out. At least we can say that we went out to the winners.

This week (the week beginning July 1st) is a factory shutdown so I'm off work. It's in the mid-90s at the moment (above 30 degrees C) and our air-conditioning ist gebrochen (read buggered). Noone can get out to fix it until early next week so we are all being boiled. Even the dogs are grumpy.

Last week heralded the latest round of cuts at Cyber - 20% of the workforce. This round decimated the UK office. I lost my second manager this year (to lose one is unfortunate, to lose two is careless). Again, some good people went. But what can you do when business conditions are so bad? After Enron, Worldcom and now Xerox, it will be an awfully long time before we see any real recovery - sealed envelope prediction is Q2 2003.

That's all for this month! Tune in at the same time next month to find out the fascinating (sic) things I do and the glamorous places I visit.