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The Passenger

I have more to say about t his song . It's meaningful to me because I ride the bus all the time, and I can confirm that you see things from under glass when you look through your window at the bright and hollow sky. Bristol may not have a winding ocean drive as such but it's a city with ripped backsides a-plenty, as anyone who's ever taken the 45 to Cherry Gardens can confirm. And yet what's this?  In the third verse. Get into the car, we'll be the -  sorry, what? Get into the what? Oh no no no. No no no no no. This is all wrong. In desperation I googled American meaning for car  in the hope that it might turn out to mean the passenger bit on a bus. It can mean a train carriage, but that doesn't help at all. It can even be the passenger compartment in a lift, but lifts move through entirely the wrong dimension, both spatially and metaphorically. This is hideously wrong. And yes I'm a big fan of public transport, but that isn't the issue here. The issue i...
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The continental imbalance

This World Cup will be the first with 48 countries. The number has slowly grown, from an inauspicious 13 in 1930 to 16, 24 then finally 32 in France in 1998. I say finally, and most of us probably thought 32 was peak bloat, but like Mister Creosote they've found room for another 16 wafer thin mints. Whether we can expect a similar outcome remains to be seen. The 48 will be made up of 16 countries from Europe, 10 from Africa, 6 from South America, 6 from the rest of America (that's North America, Central America and the Caribbean), 9 from Asia and 1 from Oceania. Oceania used to have a play off against a South American team, but FIFA have now given them an automatic place. This means in future New Zealand will always qualify, unless they manage to lose to Vanuatu or one of the other volcanoes. The continental balance might strike you as not in fact that well balanced. Europe may be the centre of our world, but the centre of the actual physical world is a superheated mass of iron...
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What can you expect from me?

I expect I'll do something about the actual football quite soon now, but first it seems only polite to let you know what you' can expect. First off, I wouldn't expect promptness. The way I write is I knock some paragraphs together like I'm making a marinade, then they have to sit in the fridge for a bit before they can take shape. Taking shape starts with a vigorous purge. That last metaphor about the marinade, for instance. Landed with an awful clunk, didn't it? Away it goes. As I was saying. First off, I wouldn't expect promptness. The way I write is I knock some paragraphs together, then they have to sit for a while before they can take shape. That's still some way off, but it's going in the right direction. As Samuel Beckett said, Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. That's what makes writing fun, and I'm not being paid so you'd better hope I'm enjoying myself. As I was saying. First off, I wouldn...
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Let's take a ride and see what's mine

I haven't done one of these for years, but apparently they're considered quite old-fashioned now so it feels like it's my time again. Here then is my fourth World Cup blog. I often used to take my blog titles from songs, and so it was for all the World Cup ones. In 2006 the World Cup was in Germany so I chose  First We Take Manhattan because the next line in the song is T hen we take Berlin . In the event England did not in fact take Berlin, which taught me a valuable lesson about hostages to fortune. In 2010 it was in South Africa so I went for Hope Joanna , the Joanna in the Eddie Grant song being Johannesburg. It was recorded when apartheid was still in place, and was about the hope that it could be defeated. Obviously by 2010 it had been, and the Iron Curtain was a thing of the past as well, but equally obviously a whole new crock of shit had sprung up to replace the old crock of shit that we'd grown up with and thought would last for ever. Looking back, I seem to r...
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