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Superbowl and Nose Cake

Monday, 08 February 2010 14:52

Been a while since I wrote a blog entry. I deliberately avoided the whole new year thing. Most January blogs are all commentary on a holiday season I don’t care about and wishful thinking about the year ahead. This is 2010, it is already happening, and I’m doing it.

 Watched the Superbowl last night. “So what?” I hear you say. So did millions of people. Yeah, but here in England I am in a minority. The Superbowl is the only American football game that is shown on British television in its entirety and it gets the unenviable slot of midnight till 4am. Okay, so the timing is more to do with our time zone than punitive scheduling. Still, it hasn’t helped the popularity of the sport in Britain, and the fact remains I belong to a very small number of fans.

 Now, anyone that knows me well might find it surprising that I go to such great sleep-evading lengths to watch a sporting event when 364 days a year I couldn’t care less about overpaid men kicking a bag of wind around a field. It all started when my American friend Corey and my all-sport-obsessed friend John suggested I join their Superbowl party, if not to actually appreciate the game, just to make up the current number of attendees (two) to a number which could at a stretch be rightly called a “party”. This led to an unlikely interest and appreciation of the game.

 British people on the whole find American sports ridiculously elaborate and overly concerned with statistics. We try to generate the same kind of interest in sporting statistics in our own games, but they aren’t quite the same......

 American Football

“The New Orleans Quarterback - the oldest player in NFL history – scored a record breaking 38 yard field goal equalising with the previous record 21 years ago. This is only the second time the team have reached the Superbowl, the last being 9 years ago.”

 British Football

“The overpaid chav kicked the ball into the net. The last time an overpaid chav kicked the ball into a net was 10 minutes ago.”

 The other great thing about the Superbowl is the famous half-time show. Typically a has-been classic rock act, this year the NFL broke no moulds by booking ageing British mod band The Who. The two surviving members of the band played a 12 minute medley of hits with a backing band a third of their ages. Not really The Who reformed at all – more like one ageing singer-turned-actor hanging round with a paedophile and covering their own songs to supplement their pensions.

 Anyway, I stayed up until 3am watching the game and gorging on specially imported American snacks, and inevitably getting up this morning was not easy or enjoyable. I suspect that I will fall asleep on the sofa later and dream of touchdowns.

 The other, slightly less eventful thing that happened to me today was that I got a piece of cake stuck up my nose. Whilst eating some of aforementioned cake I had one of those awful misfired sneezes. You know the ones, where something goes wrong in the whole sneezing process and you end up with an itchy palette for the rest of the day. Yeah, one of those. Anyway, I guess some of the cake found its way into my nasal cavity during the debacle, only to be discovered later. I must admit I thought something was wrong with me when I found a soft, doughy lump in my nostril. Hey, stop thinking what you’re thinking. I warned you in advance that it wasn’t as interesting as the Superbowl. Perhaps some statistics would make it a little more exciting?

 The cake, a jam filled sponge with a sweet pastry base, was the second of its kind to be consumed by Darrell today; and stayed in his right nostril for a record breaking 21 minutes before discovery and the inevitable touchdown.

The bit inbetween

Wednesday, 30 December 2009 14:43

Hello and welcome to that nondescript bit of the year inbetween Christmas and New Year. Is there a name for this? Does it really happen at all? Are we awake or dreaming?

So what have I been doing over the past few days? Well, December 25th is just a normal day for me, except it isn’t normal because everywhere is closed and I don’t have to work. I had a lazy start to the day which combined lying around on the sofa in my PJs with disbelief over the amount of rubbish on TV. If video killed the radio star, then DVD killed the Christmas television schedule.

After a lazy start to the day I went out for a walk by the sea with my family, my friend Russ and his family. After discovering there was snow on the beach (!) we instead took to the nearby sand hill with a sledge for some high speed fun. Russ was considerably better at sledging than me, if being good at sledging involves smashing into a wall at high speed. I never made it to the wall, but I did fall off the sledge and land with my face an inch away from a massive dog’s egg. In terms of danger, I think I won. Seeing two children sledging nearby on a car booster seat and a milk crate was proof, if you ever needed it, that money spent on Christmas presents is wasted.

So the holiday is over in a heartbeat as usual, and now begins the sales. My wife was straight down to the sales on Boxing Day to spend time rifling through all the slightly discounted rubbish that nobody wanted two days ago.

I hate shopping at most times, but sales make the experience even worse. Hordes of women fighting to the death over a wispy bit of material that has been tugged out of shape by all the fighting and has probably been soiled by twenty people who tried it on before it ended up on the sale rack. This year I managed to avoid the Boxing Day sales, but it all went wrong for me the next day when I had to go along with my wife to return some jeans that she had bought the day before and were too big. I had to kick and punch my way into the shop only to find that they wouldn't exchange anything until 2 days after the sale began. The following day she tried again to return them while I stayed out of the shop, but I was eventually forced to enter the battle zone when we found she had lost her keys in the foray.

Things to avoid in 2010:

* Sales

* Walls

* Dog mess

Salad Days

Tuesday, 15 December 2009 15:42

I always thought that becoming a parent would make me more active, physically. In a way it does. I was never one for playing much sport, but some of the headlong dives I have made in order to prevent various material posessions from damage at the hands of a curious toddler have been nothing short of spectacular. I'm sure the experience gained would make me a formidable goalkeeper. Then there is the weight training I have received from continually picking up my aforementioned bundle of joy; although during the 2 brief periods of my life where I found time to actually go to a gym and work out, not once did the weights I was lifting manage to punch me in the face on the way up and then kick me in the sweetbreads on the way down.

Despite all this extra-curricular physical work, being a parent also involves a lot more lying down in dim lighting with a glass of merlot once your child has gone to bed, and I suspect it is for this reason that I piled on a few extra pounds since she arrived. So when my wife and two of our friends decided to diet together I happily agreed to join the pact. What I agreed to was a strict 11-day 'calorie shifting' diet.

To ensure that I am not irresponsibly promoting "extreme" dieting, I should point out that I followed a detailed diet plan that included all the major food groups. I ate a variety of foods and I ate enough of them. I had no problem with any of the foods that were on the menu. My issue was the combinations I was expected to eat. Normally when you put 2 or more food types together you create "a meal". If there is a name for any of the combos on this diet, I wouldn't want the word in my vocabulary. For example, one meal was hard boiled eggs and milk. That particularly offensive combination came up twice. Another was fish and scrambled eggs. You know something isn't right when you are eating your dinner in front of the TV and wishing you could swap for the cockroaches on "I'm A Celebrity".

Anyway, the good news is that I lost a considerable amount of weight - 11lbs in just over a week (9lbs of which stayed off, the other 2lb reappeared when I walked past some bread). So instead of being a lot heavier than I want to be, it looks like I will be proudly starting the new year just slightly heavier than I want to be.

the end of the beginning

Friday, 04 December 2009 19:01

Starting an old fashioned paper diary was so much easier than a modern internet blog. You wrote your name inside the front cover; filled in all the random personal information that diaries had space for (taking a wild guess at your blood group) and then perused the pages of useless pre-printed information such as metric conversion tables and wine readiness charts, before finally concluding you didn't have anything interesting to write that day and putting the diary back on the shelf for the remainder of the year.