World Cup Ramblings #4

I got a text from a friend of mine yesterday. Apparently the sun was shining. That must have been nice for him, though I couldn’t help but wonder why, like me, he wasn’t sitting in a darkened room watching the World Cup. Perhaps he didn’t know it was on, I thought, so I dashed off a quick text by way of reply. “U do know de World Cup is on??” His reply?

“It’s Summer, you spanner”.

That set me thinking. Perhaps there was more to life than lying on a sofa all day watching football. I was on the morning shift watching Portugal v North Korea, twenty minutes had elapsed, no-one had scored and it was all rather dull. Two more games lay ahead and I knew that for the entire day nothing was going to happen in my life except what flickered by on the television screen.

“There are people out there climbing mountains”, I thought as I watched Ronaldo fall over. My friend was right, eleven days had passed, eleven days of outdoors weather, eleven days that I could have spent ‘living’. I watched as Ronaldo fell over again and thought of the twenty nine games I had watched up to that point. A lot of people had fallen over in that time. I knew that if I sat there for the next two hours I would simply be two hours older with nothing to show for it.

I peeled myself off the sofa and, looking back at the indentation that I had left behind, wondered if it was a moment such as this that led to the invention of memory foam.

I passed the mounting pile of unopened post in the hall and went into the kitchen where I stood staring around blankly. Why did I come in here again? Oh yes, It was time to step outside my comfort zone, time to rejoin society and partake of this thing called Summer.

I opened the back door and recoiled in horror. What the hell was that? “It burns!”, I cried before steadying myself. So that was the sun, eh? I texted my friend, “I’m looking at ‘outdoors’”, I said. “I don’t like it. It’s quiet... too quiet”. I took a deep breath before adding, “I’m doing it. I’m going out!”.

“Good for you”, he replied.

I got in my car and drove. I couldn’t think what else to do. I drove to Fountainstown for no other reason than that was where the road led. I pulled up at the beach and watched as children ran about, splashing in the water and squealing happily. A large woman in a small bikini watched me through massive oval sunglasses. I began to feel uneasy. I no longer knew the rules of this ‘outdoors’ place.

I wandered over towards an ice-cream van and ordered a ninety-nine. “That’ll be two fifty”, said the man. Money! I hadn’t spent anything for nearly two weeks. I explained that I had been watching the World Cup and didn’t have any money. The man was rude. I left.

The sun burnt the sand and, separated from the oxygen of football, I began to hallucinate. Was that Pedro Mendes building a sandcastle over by the rocks? And that looked suspiciously like Pak Chol-jin and Hong Yong-Jo scratching out the lines of a beach tennis court. When I thought I saw Carlos Queiroz trying to substitute me for a young kid in a rubber ring I knew it was time to go.

I drove home in a panic. My pale skin was turning a vicious pink and the absence of vuvezelas was giving me a headache.

I stepped into the soft, fluffy darkness of the house, sucked in some cool air and ran to towards the sofa. I snatched up the remote and flicked it over my right shoulder as I spun in mid air, landing perfectly in the outline of my sofa groove. I felt human again. I felt safe. I felt alive. And then I saw the screen.

The whistle had just blown and the Portuguese and Korean teams were leaving the field. It was the first game in the 2010 World Cup that I hadn’t seen. My phone beeped. “How did it go?”, asked my friend.

I replied, “Portugal beat North Korea 7-0, YOU SPANNER.”