Monday
Five years ago, I set up an online betting account. I was motivated as much by therapeutic need as by the prospect of financial gain. Watching Spurs had become so stressful that the only way I could mitigate the pain was placing bets against them winning. If a game ended in a draw or a loss, I at least had the consolation of being a few quid to the good. And if I lost the bet, then all was well with the world anyway. It was a win-win situation.
Then two things happened that put paid to my plan. The first was that Spurs started winning regularly and the second was that I found myself having sneaky bets on teams I knew nothing about playing in the Mexican league. The losses began to mount, so I called time on my gambling. But I’m beginning to wonder if I might have to revisit my original plan as watching Spurs play at Wembley is proving to be a living hell. They have already dropped more points in their first two games at their temporary home than they did at White Hart Lane in the whole of last season. After conceding an idiotic injury time equaliser to Burnley on Sunday, my friend Matthew said: “Ah well. At least there’s only 17 home games left”. It wasn’t even the end of August and already we were looking forward to the season ending.
Tuesday
The summer break appears to have done little to improve David Davis’s powers of logic. As the Brexit negotiations resumed in Brussels, the Brexit secretary dismissed suggestions that the government’s position papers were a bit on the thin side by pointing out that the EU hadn’t even bothered to put anything in writing in relation to finding a solution to the Irish border problem.
Before Davis embarrasses himself still further, perhaps someone would like to remind him that it is the UK that is leaving the EU and not the EU leaving the UK. There is no need for the EU to have a position paper on Ireland because as far as it is concerned there is already a workable solution. It’s the UK that wants to change the rules, so it’s incumbent on us to come up with a mutually acceptable answer. I can only imagine Davis is used to going in to restaurants and demanding the chef come up with something he wants to eat when there is nothing he likes on the menu.
Wednesday
The set-up for the recent BBC drama Trust Me asked a lot of its viewers. First they had to accept that a hospital wouldn’t bother to check the references of someone applying to work in A&E and would take on a nurse pretending to be a doctor who had in fact gone to live in New Zealand. Then, that the nurse would turn out to be rather more competent than all the doctors in complex trauma cases. Then, that a doctor who was having an affair – keep up – with the nurse wouldn’t bother to tell anyone when he found out that she wasn’t really a doctor after all and let her continue treating patients.
But if you could ignore these unlikelihoods, the programme was surprisingly tense and watchable and everything seemed set up for a second series with the real doctor having possibly killed the ex-husband of the woman who wasn’t really a doctor – keep up – and the woman who wasn’t really a doctor not being too bothered about it after a brief wobble. Except for one thing. The star of the show was Jodie Whittaker, who has since been announced as the new star of Doctor Who. Even with a Tardis it will be hard for her to be in two big shows at the same time.
Thursday
Congratulations to Rob Wilkins, who manages Terry Pratchett’s estate, for having the integrity to follow the author’s instructions and destroy the hard drive containing various works in progress. If only more literary executors were as honourable. Harper Lee’s lawyer did her client no favours in publishing Go Set a Watchman – a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird that the author had insisted remain unpublished for more than 50 years – a year before she died when she was ill and suffering from memory loss. Likewise, Vladimir Nabokov’s estate did nothing for the memory of the long-dead author of Lolita by publishing a series of his incoherent fragments as The Original of Laura in 2009. In both cases, a desire to cash in won out over literary merit. There may be rare cases when an author dies unexpectedly mid-masterpiece, but there’s generally a very good reason why a manuscript has been lying around in a bottom drawer. It’s because it isn’t very good.
Friday
In the latest issue of GQ, the six-time Olympic gold medalist Chris Hoy has got himself into a bit of bother by saying that Lycra looks ridiculous on anyone over eight stone. After getting a pasting from thousands of middle-aged male cyclists, Hoy has backtracked a little and said he was only talking in jest and that people should be free to wear whatever they want. I reckon Lycra isn’t a great look on anyone. It may have a place in professional cycling but everyone else should steer well clear of it. I learned my lesson in the early 90s when I was doing a lot of road running. In the hope of knocking a few seconds off my best 10k time, I treated myself to a pair of Lycra shorts, which were becoming fashionable among a few regular readers of Runner’s World. The shorts never made it past the front door because, when I put them on, my wife fell about laughing. In hindsight, she did me a massive favour.
Digested week, digested: The Tamagotchi PM