I May Be Some Time

Well, we've returned intact from our weekend's camping. It was a fairly uneventful trip. There was a real ale festival at the pub on the site. (For non-British readers, real ale is traditional form of British beer. It's delicious, but it does tend to attract joyless, bearded obsessive types. They're usually harmless unless you get talking to one about hop varieties, in which case you're likely to experience a virtual stroke due to boredom.)

However, I'd forgotten how cold it gets in England at night. The days were nice enough, but as soon as the sun went down, it got seriously chilly. I went to bed each night wearing all my belongings, and I was still frozen solid. And it was a real battle of wills to overcome the urge to urinate in the small hours. I had to lay it on the line to my bladder and central nervous system: we're going nowhere until daylight, so roll over and get some sleep. Also, some of our neighbours thought it might aid the sleeping process if they sat up all night inexpertly playing a shrill banjo. It's a testament to how much beer I'd stuck away that I was able to zone out the extraneous noise and get ten hours solid dreamless a night. I'm not by nature a deep sleeper. At home, the sound of dust settling is usually enough to disturb me.

In the news today I see serial offender Joey Barton has got it all over his shoes again. He was sent-off yesterday for confusing football with greco-roman wrestling. When his manager, Alan Shearer, questioned the wisdom of his commitment to the game, he got the right royal hump. Anyways, the upshot is he's been suspended by the club (again).
Now I don't believe I'm betraying any great confidence when I say that Barton's got history in this department. Everyone outside the game appears to realise that he has (ahem) issues with authority, and that he'll fly off the handle as inevitably as night follows day, and yet clubs are queueing up to buy him. They always argue that he's turned over a new leaf or at least deserves another second chance. Someone will give him a job if Newcastle sack him, and he'll be okay for about ten minutes before getting the red mists again. What does he have to do to get sacked? Take hostages or organise a drive-by? Even if he did either of these, he'd be employed again because between assaults, he's a decent footballer. This dubious logic doesn't extend to other professionals thank God or Fred West would still be in work. Yes, he murdered a few, but look at the quality of that grouting.