Three!

picture,Guardian newspaper

The astute amongst you have already understood the significance of the decreasing numerical blog-post titles that have been heading these entries since June the first and which today reads three!

It has been difficult for me to contain my building excitement, which almost exploded last Friday when I picked up the free TV magazine from the supermarket and found listed for this Friday, for the first time in four years, the words Football World Cup Opening Ceremony.

A lot of people say – “I hate football, there’s too much money in it.”

Very few people say “I hate cinema, there’s too much money in it (there is) or I hate retail supermarkets, there’s too much money in them (there is) or I hate banks… actually people are beginning to say that – but you get my point, we should be consistent in our hatred.

There is too much money in most things these days.

So with 72 hours to the start of the competition there is just time for three personal world cup memories.

My first memory is distant and confused in grainy black and white television images. But it started there somewhere with names like Mexico, Chile, Argentina, China, Russia – distant and exotic places that I knew very little about.

When I later, almost an adult, travelled in Mexico I was surprised to find a lot of people’s geography was similarly informed.

“Where are you from?”
“England”
“Ah Princess Margaret, Bobby Charlton!”

The fact that my late father–in-law was morphing slowly into a Bobby Charlton lookalike only added to the affection that I had towards Sir Bobby who is, and remains, a faithful ambassador for his country and his club.

The one English victory in 1966 was obviously part of the initial interest -I was an impressionable 11 years old at the time – but probably the single most important moment was Edison Arantes do Nascimento.

The name was exotic, his country Brazil unbelievably so and he looked nothing like anyone who lived around Tower Close.

And the fact that he was so brilliant confirmed that things were going on the other side of the globe and that Orpington was not the centre of the world as many had lead me to believe.

The desire to travel to Brazil has neither been fulfilled nor diminished, yet.

So on Friday afternoon I will try to find a way to wriggle out of work commitments and sit down to watch South Africa open the proceedings against Mexico.

What an intoxicating prospect –Zulu warriors against small, dark swarthy men called Sanchez – though in all probability it will be nothing like that.

Can you name the colours of the South African flag without looking?

I can’t.

But by Friday evening I’ll know all about it.