First We Take Manhattan

OK.

Let's see if it'll pick it up now.

Just to see if it turns up in my RSS feed

I've left it a bit late, but thanks Dave for this.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/13/zidane_headbutt_outrage/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/13/zidane_headbutt_outrage/page2.html

I got these from a piece in today's paper. It was in the Independent on Sunday, but they didn't put it on their website, so now you've missed it for ever.

Unless otherwise mentioned, they're Arabic. They've come to us through that route because the Arabs got the knowledge and skills passed down from Greeks and Romans (through the Byzantines), Persians, Egyptians and Indians.

sukkar = sugar
qandi = candi
laymun = lemon
naranj = orange
albirquq = apricot (thus Albuquerque)
sharab = syrup
alqili = alkali (lit saltwort ashes)
al anbiq = still (alembic)
al kuhl = alcohol (used in a still to make kohl, a cosmetic)
champna = shampoo (lit. to knead, from the Hindi)
qutn = cotton
pay jamah = pyjamas (foot garment, from the Persian, whose pyjamas originally included slippers)
suffah = sofa
al qubbah = alcove (lit. arch)
tulban = tulips (lit. turban, from the Turkish, tulips being considered to look a bit like a turban)
koshke = kiosk (lit. garden pavilion)

And don't get me started on mathematics. No really, you actually don't want to.

It's lovely to be back, and to celebrate I'm doing this one in imperial purple.

You couldn't make it up.

Yes, it's here at last, so you can all dry those tears and stop worrying.

http://sport.fatgeek.org/manhattan/

There will be:

Match reports
Squads, results, scorers, tables
Redundant statistical analysis of the most gratuitously pointless kind - you know you love it
Crude and unnecessary gossip and commentary
A short history of (some of) the countries taking part

At the moment, there's not much in place, as none of it's happened yet. There are the histories, as history can be defined as the set of things which have happened, and can therefore be written about.

Watch the fatgeek space too, as it will one day contain Simon's geeky guide to weight loss.

Enjoy

Jon

Thank you Alice for this.

http://uk.sports.yahoo.com/world-cup-2006/world-cup-song/index.html

World Cup blog grand unveiling soon, I promise. I know you're all on tenterhooks.

Cheers

Jon

From the world of football, a heart-warming story.

Don't get to say that very often.

On this blog, service for the next 6 weeks or so will be intermittent and frankly a little cursory, as our spectacular new World Cup project is prepared.

Our spectacular project, you were wondering? Yes, it's too complicated for my little brain, so I've let my technogimp out of his rathole for the duration. Take a bow, lad, and get back to your housework. Yes you do have to wear that, and I don't care how cold it is. Oooh, goosebumps.

There will be a wonderful new website with a blog section for games and news updates, a history section full of fascinating stories about the countries taking part, and a statistical section full of squads, results, tables and the kind of aimless data parsing I love and you've learned to endure. You're all invited, obviously, it really wouldn't be the same without you.

Here's a little titbit to get you going - in all the world, which two club teams have the most representatives in the 32 World Cup squads? Chelsea and Arsenal, with a whopping 17 and 15 players respectively. That is of course an average of exactly 1 Arsenal or Chelsea player for every country in the competition. Let's hope they don't all travel on the same plane at any time. On the other hand, if they did, and if the worst did happen, it could make a new reality TV series - a mixture of Lost, Match of the Day and Celebrity Love Island. Sol Campbell, at least, would be much happier, and would make a lovely Juliet to John Terry's Romeo.

Although scoring in last night's Champions League Final will hopefully have perked him up a bit, even if it didn't go their way in the end. Cue the usual verbal dyspepsia from Wenger, this time backed up by Henry, who one might traditionally associate with rather better digestion. I thought Barcelona were the better team, and their first goal was (marginally) not offside.

And the Bristol team with the most players at the World Cup? That would be well-known worldshakers Bristol City, with 1 player (Luke Wilkshire for Australia). Not a huge roster, but it is an infinite number of times more than Rovers have.

I'll let you know when the new site is ready to be seen by the great unwashed, but until then you'll just have to be patient. Watch this space.

Well, that was quite a good game, wasn't it?

Gerrard's goal was the memorable moment, of course. Firstly because it took the game to extra time, secondly because it was such a great goal, but mainly because it meant he wasn't that badly hurt, and would be able to play in the World Cup.

And for those of you who think the FA Cup is all about the little teams, here's a statistic. The top 5 FA Cup teams of the last 30 years are: Man Utd, Arsenal, Liverpool, Spurs and Chelsea, and during that time at least one of those teams has been in the Final every year except one.

Yes, that's right, Everton v Watford, 1984. 2-0 to Everton, goals by Sharp and Gray. I knew you'd remembered.

Now, Doctor Who, then the pub. Oh tis bliss to be alive, but to be young would presumably be very heaven.

It couldn't really have been much worse for Spurs. Needing a win against West Ham to guarantee a Champions League place, they lost half their team to food poisoning. Losing 2-1 to West Ham was bad enough, losing that qualifying spot probably stung, but losing it to Arsenal must have really rather smarted.

Spurs agony and Arsenal joy must have fed off each other that day. It was Arsenal's last competitive fixture at Highbury, before they move to the brand new Emirates stadium (yes, I know), and they couldn't have wished for a better sendoff.

Tests are now being carried out to find out where Spurs got poisoned. If it does turn out that it was in the Marriott hotel, where they had lunch, then the court case could be interesting. In failing to qualify, Tottenham may have lost as much as £15m in revenue, and could conceivably sue for a percentage of it.

You may recall the Arsenal Spurs game recently, when Arsene Wenger accused Spurs of cheating. Fanciful conspiracy theories about revenge poisoning are already emerging, so watch this space.

Both managers, being European and therefore at least vaguely literate, must surely have a working knowledge of the Greek myths. How long before Jol feeds Wenger his own children, baked in a pie?

Eriksson has announced the squad, and there's some surprises.

No Defoe, and no Bent, but he has gone for untried newcomer Theo Walcott.

Walcott has just come to Arsenal from Southampton, but he's yet to play any Premiership games. Also, he's just seventeen. Ah, do you remember what it was like? Were you a dancing queen, young and sweet, only seventeen ... Personally, I was more like one of those with ravaged faces, lacking in the social graces, but Walcott clearly hails from the ranks of the jeunesse dore, and is immune to such gaucherie.

It's real Roy of the Rovers stuff, isn't it? I can see what's coming. England lose their best eleven players in training, in a bizarre multiple metatarsal pile-up, and Walcott is in. Outclassed for the first two games, he finds his feet, knocks in a hat-trick to beat Brazil and scores the winning penalty against Germany in the final.

He'd better, anyway. No pressure, son, but we're all counting on you.

Not much recently, I'm afraid.

I've been busy, though. For the World Cup, something new.

That's all you get - there's a reason why they call these things teasers ...

Shortly after two o'clock on Tuesday, it will be less time to the World Cup than the World Cup will last. Celebrate with some kind of sugar-based treat, is my advice. We'll all be needing our strength, and sugar does give you extra energy, before eventually giving you extra mass.

Wayne Rooney was described today on the BBC website as being "philosophical" about his prospects for the World Cup. I hadn't ever thought of him as being especially Stoical, and there's certainly little of the Epicurean about him, so his inspiration must be coming from one of the more modern schools. Apparently they've got him in an oxygen chamber, so maybe the richer atmosphere is getting to him. Or maybe they're giving him smart pills - I just hope they've left a few for the rest of us.

Meanwhile, we're waiting to hear that Steve McClaren has got the nod for manager. I'm sure he'll be fine, really I am.

After such a bumbling fiasco, it's nice to know that at least one of our domestic clubs knows how to get what they want.

Greetings on this glorious day. May the fourth be with you.

(Tee hee)

The old ones are the best.

So, farewell Luiz Felipe Scolari. It turns out our robust Anglo-Saxon media played a little too hard for you. I hope it was nothing I said.

I seem to recall folks getting themselves in a tizzy about media intrusion when one of the minor royals got spread all over a Paris subway on a drunken joyride. It seemed like a lot of fuss over nothing at the time, but now it's happened over something important I can understand the nation's pain.

If anyone wants to come and join the tearful throng laying flowers outside the Brazilian Embassy, I'll be going up by hearse on Monday. How thoughtful of them to arrange a national tragedy for a Bank Holiday weekend. Perhaps a quiet, dignified procession, with Rooney and Owen in the role of the little princes.

For some reason, many of today's papers have been slagging off the FA, as if they themselves were entirely innocent. The Sun, apparently without irony, has revealed this weekend that Middlesbrough manager and England hopeful Steve McClaren had an affair with his secretary, while he and his wife were having a trial separation.

I wasn't exactly gobsmacked that McClaren had had an affair while he wasn't with anybody else, but it was a bit of shock to learn that the guy is only 44 years old. What ever the opposite of virgin's blood is, that what he bathes in.

Did you see?

DID YOU SEE?

DID YOU SEE?

The England manager's job has now been offered to Luiz Scolari. Just in case he isn't familiar to you, he's Brazilian, and was manager when Brazil won the last World Cup. He then went to manage Portugal, and led them to the European Cup final in 2004, when they lost to Greece.

Eriksson, as even you will probably know, is leaving after the World Cup. He's not done badly on the field, but unfortunately he's been a bit of a butterfingers off it. He got away with all the silver tongued lounge lizard stuff, if only because serial monogamist football managers are as rare as heterosexual priests, but what really did for him was the News of the World sting.

Reporter Mazher Mahmood, dressed as a Sheikh and pretending to be interested in hiring Eriksson as a sports consultant, got him to say what he really thought on a number of topics, whilst secretly recording their conversation. Among many things, Eriksson said there was a lot of corruption in football (surely not), Michael Owen didn't really want to be at Newcastle (again, surely not) and he wanted to manage Aston Villa (surely NOT). The FA, shocked that anyone would want to manage Villa, released him from his contract so they could get rid of him.

You may have heard of Mahmood. Among his other stings, he caught out the Countess of Wessex, whoever she is, and BBC presenter Richard Bacon.

So, just in case you sell cocaine, sporting knowhow or royal influence, watch out for a man who looks like this.

Opposition to Scolari's appointment has mainly come from people who think the England manager should be English, but it's hard to see who that might be. People have been talking about Sam Allardyce of Bolton and Steve McLaren of Middlesbrough, but their European experience is all in the UEFA Cup. Alan Curbishley, of Charlton, has also been mentioned, but he has no European experience at all. All three have done well with their clubs, but there's just no plausible English England manager out there.

If you look at the Premiership, the highest placed English manager will probably come in sixth. Meanwhile, the most successful teams are dominated by foreign players. This is just a fact.

Howard Wilkinson, commenting on Scolari's appointment, said "I don't think it's in the best interests of English coaches and that is what the FA is primarily there to do - to foster the best interests of English players and English coaches." Umm, no. The FA is primarily there to foster the best interests of English football. Frankly, we ought to be glad a manager of Scolari's standing thinks England is his best option.

It's probably about time I let you know what's going on in the endlessly diverting world of football. I know how much it means to you, but as you're all functionally innumerate it wouldn't really fair to expect you to work it out for yourself from the league tables. I was told off earlier for explaining that you convert kilometres to miles by dividing by eight and timesing by five, because apparently that's too hard to do in your tiny little heads, so when it comes to something this important I'm taking no chances.

Let's start with the news the nation is all agog for, Bristol City's late run at the play offs. After their mid-season brush with motor neurone disease, they needed to win all their last zillion games and hope the other teams slipped up. Well, with two games to go, it's still just about on. City's last 10 games have yielded 25 points out of a possible 30, and their last two games of the season are against Swindon, virtually relegated, and Southend, who by then will be promoted and won't care.

Unfortunately, if Barnsley, Notts Forest and Swansea manage two wins between them goal difference will see City just miss out, but things are looking good for next season.

In the more obvious divisions, Arsenal and Tottenham are currently battling it out for fourth place, and a place in the Champions League next season. As a result, their 1-1 draw yesterday, almost uniquely for that fixture, actually carried some weight outside the pubs of north London.

Given the continental flavour of the modern Premiership, it was a pleasant surprise to get a game with the kind of ill humour that wouldn't seem out of place in a seaside town on a Bank Holiday. It all stemmed from Tottenham's goal, which was scored after two Arsenal players tripped each other up.

Wenger thought Spurs should have put the ball out to allow his players to get treatment, and him and Jol squared up to each other like they were pretending to be English. No-one was fooled, of course, you could see they were actually impugning the quality of each other's onions, but well done for trying. I was particularly impressed with Wenger's assertion that Jol shouldn't pretend he hadn't seen the incident, an evasion Wenger has occasionally been known to stoop to himself.

In the end Henry scored one of his memorable goals, and after the game demonstrated an equal dexterity in his diplomacy, steering an even handed course between the two managers verbally happy-slapping each other, with us in the role of mobile phone.

In the FA Cup, Chelsea and Liverpool's semi-final was on the BBC. Liverpool's first goal came from a free kick that should never have been given, but on the other hand Chelsea are a bunch of sordid mercenaries sucking their blood money from the oily teats of the Russian Mafia, so it was quite fair overall.

And Liverpool won, which means that only Middlesbrough or West Ham stand between them and the FA Cup. It should be a walkover, but then again that's what they said about the Somme. Don't just go charging into the barbed wire, guys, most of you are needed for the World Cup. Which incidentally is now a paltry 47 days away. It's getting harder to get to sleep every night.

And as a tasty little mint with your next post-coital coffee, thanks to Jeff for this from popbitch:

Sheringham scores! Veteran striker's secret: eat own spunk

Anonymous lady writes: "I recently had sex with veteran premiership striker Teddy Sheringham. It was a little impersonal but what do you expect? Great stamina for a 40 year-old though. There were two odd things - he told me he didn't like girls in their thirties. Oh, and he enthusiastically licked his own sperm off my abs."

So, Teddy Sheringham is a spunklicker. Allegedly. I wonder if he ever tried Gary Lineker's.

A happy St George's Day to one and all, and hands up everyone who knows who he was, and what he's supposed to have done. And no there wasn't a dragon involved. Oh, just watch those hands going down.

Looks like it's debunking time again, then. According to Christian accounts, St George was born in modern-day Turkey, the son of a Roman army officer. His family were Christians, and during the persecution by the Emperor Diocletian he was tortured and beheaded at the city of Nicomedia (modern day Izmit, about 60 miles east of Istanbul), on April 23, 303. Yes, that's 1703 years ago today. Well done. Now don't get me started on Eastern and Western calendars.

Twenty years after his death, the intermittently God-bothering Emperor Constantine added the eastern half of the Roman Empire to his domains (he'd ruled the western half since 306). A church was built to George's memory at Lydda in Palestine, where his mother was from. Nearly 200 years later, he was made a saint, although the Pope responsible, Gelasius, stated at the time that very little was reliably known about his life. There is no solid evidence that he ever even existed.

The whole dragon thing is a common myth across Europe and central Asia. St George has been put in as a symbol of Christianity conquering paganism, the role played by the dragon. Georgieboy has a price for slaughtering the dragon and freeing the maiden, which is that the city has to convert to Christianity. The origins of the myth probably lie in pre-Christian times, like most of the Church's favourite stories.

And incidentally, April 23 isn't Shakespeare's birthday, or at least not definitely. He was baptised on April 26 1564, but his birth date is uncertain. Baptisms were normally done a few days after birth, so after he became our favourite dead white poet everyone agreed to just pretend it was the 23rd for neatness, as he died on April 23rd 1616. Why everyone wanted the poor sod to have died on his birthday, God knows. It does seem a poor return for writing at least some of his plays.

While we're at it, many of his best-known works were written during the reign of James I, not Queen Elizabeth. This includes Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and The Tempest. Hamlet squeaked into Elizabeth's reign by a few months, but wasn't published until after her death.

Bracing, this whole mythbusting thing, isn't it? No-one is ever quite what you'd expect. Next time, Dennis Wise's groundbreaking work on Fermi's paradox.

I was watching one of NASA's modern identikit astronauts on the telly the other day, and someone asked her why she did it. She seemed to be under the illusion that she was following "humanity's basic urge to explore new frontiers".

The question I wanted to ask was, if humanity has such a basic need to explore, how come most of us are consuming your trip through the medium of television?

But hang on, I hear you say, how about humanity's journey from Africa across the whole world? Surely that must show a desire to explore?

Let's look at that, shall we? Archaeological evidence, based on fossil finds and prehistoric artefacts, suggests that humanity spread from Africa along the world's coastlines, and headed inland relatively recently. This process took place at about a mile a year.

A powerful urge to explore? That lasts for one morning's brisk walk every five years? Bollocks, I say.

Why would those prehistoric humans want to go exploring? They were already at the seaside. There was plenty of food, from the sea, the coastline and the immediately available forests, giving three distinct ecologies to plunder. What would be the point?

A more plausible explanation is population pressure. Human coastal existence was so successful, and people had so many children, that they had to keep moving along the margins to find new resources. This process was slow, which was why it moved at a mile a year. Compared with continental drift it's like lightning.

So no strong evidence there, then. And in fact it's very hard to deduce basic urges of any kind. We might for instance argue that Sol Campbell, by having a nervous breakdown and then getting his nose broken in his first game back, was expressing some deep human need to avoid Germany in the summertime, but then again maybe not.

None of which matters a fuck, you might say, and if it was just some bishop or rabbi or something no-one would think twice. This woman is supposed to be a scientist, though, and really ought to know better than to come out with Trekkie crap like this.

There's enough guff on earth, without taking it out into space with us. Unfortunately, though, guff, being lighter than air, obviously tends to rise.

And with one bound they were free. Short of changes to the laws of mathematics, Bristol City cannot now be relegated. They could even be promoted, although it would take one hell of a combination of results.

Sunderland, on the other hand, were finally put out of their tragicomedy this weekend, which must have come as a great relief to everyone who cares about them. You can imagine grieving friends and family at the wake, saying how at least they were at peace now, and wasn't it a shame someone couldn't have given them something weeks ago, to end their pain. Unfortunately, the law insists that nature be allowed to take its course, no matter how much suffering is involved.

Elsewhere, proof that football isn't scripted is offered by the Championship, where all the major issues are effectively settled three games from the end. Reading (yes, Reading) and Sheffield Utd are promoted, Leeds, Watford, Preston and Crystal Palace are in the playoffs, and short of a miracle Brighton, Crewe and Millwall are relegated.

And promoted from the Conference, meanwhile, guess who? Accrington Stanley, that's who. Now, now, no need to come over all slushy like that. You'll have to excuse me, I've got something in my eye ...

Suppose when you woke up tomorrow, you found yourself, for no good reason, in Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztecs.

You'd be bedazzled at first. The island in a lagoon would remind you of Venice, and there'd be the astronomy, the arts, the advanced education system. Eventually, though, their habit of sacrificing prisoners of war to the gods would get you down.

They didn't do it for entertainment, you understand. They did it because they though the gods needed sacrifice, and if they didn't get enough they'd bring the world to an end out of sheer pique.

An important part of the process was to take the bleached bones from the sacrifices, and stick them around your property. All upstanding citizens did this, as it showed a proper respect for the gods.

So you'd have nothing to do with it, obviously. There wouldn't be much you could do about it, though. The gods needed sacrifices, and there wouldn't be much tolerance of bleeding heart liberals refusing to face up to their responsibilities.

And in the end it wouldn't seem so strange. You'd be living there, after all, and you'd have to adapt. You might never actually stab anyone, or even collect the blood, but you'd probably join the party, and maybe you'd get a second hand thighbone for when you had friends round.

It's a handy metaphor, human sacrifice. By using something which everyone finds abhorrent, you can describe the feeling of living in a society you yourself are out of step with to someone who doesn't feel that way.

But there's another advantage. If you'd asked at the time, people would probably have thought human sacrifice was an inevitable part of human life. Yet today, apart from fundamentalist fantasies about Satanists, it's disappeared from the face of the world. If human sacrifice can disappear from the world, so can racism, sexism and opening hours. Oh yeah, one of them already has. It's just a question of making it happen.

Well, I've given in, and given them some money to shut up about religious artefacts and Arsenal credit cards. It was only £25 for the year, and I couldn't be bothered to relocate, with all the hassle involved.

Also, I'm now a Pro, which makes me sound serious, with just a hint of sordid.

Excuse me madam, I wish to make a complaint. Why does your cheese with bits in it always let me down?

It really didn't ought to. For one thing, most of it is cheese. The rest of it is made of something nice enough that someone thought it would actually be better than more cheese. Surely the whole thing ought to be more ennobling than enervating.

Well, that's not the way it turns out. Time and again, I end up walking away from the supermarket with cheese with bits in, urgently seeking a frantic half hour alone with a bag of bread rolls, and every time it leaves me as unrelieved as Celia Johnson after a close encounter at a train station. I've learnt not to be conned by fruit in cheese, despite its sordid come-ons, but I really thought cheddar with sundried tomatoes could be the one. They're nice enough when you get them separately, for Christ's sake. But no, it's rubbish.

Cheese with huge great veins running through it all manky and rotted, though, that's the bee's knees. I just don't understand it.

The official England World Cup song will of course be by well known band Embrace, who are "a British guitar band, coming from the Brighouse area in the north of England", as we all knew.

The official song for us jaded old farts is this one, and click here for some golden balls.

You didn't bother, did you? Well, the next World Cup final will be played with a gold coloured ball, and the winners get to use the same design in all their games for the next four years. As I recall, cyclists do something similar with jerseys.

That's all it was. What did you expect, news? Insight? Give over.

After banging on about religion ad nauseam it seemed my adverts policy was set, and no matter how disrespectful I was the software would continue to classify my blog as a great place to try and move some church supplies, and get those lonely Muslim singles married off. Any distaste I might feel for the competing banalities of cross, crescent and candle stick clearly counted for nothing.

Not any more. One piece about the wonders of Arsenal, and suddenly they're all hot under the jockstrap for credit cards and away strips. Talk about fickle. It's a good thing God is dead, or he'd be mortified.

I should have been out today, really. I was going to go on Jackie's birthday walk, but after last night I wasn't really up to it. I might have managed a birthday stand, or a birthday speak, but a birthday stand-and-speak would have been a step too far, and a walk would have taxed me beyond endurance.

Before all the shenannigans last night, we really tried to have some kind of a cultural day, but Kingswood Museum was closed. No, we didn't know either, and now we still don't. We did manage to have a poke around the Catholic cathedral in Clifton, though, which was nice. I like Catholics better, on balance, despite transsubstantiation and no condoms. They'd just had a service, and the air was heavy with incense. You have to warm to men who wear frocks and stink like hippies.

I will write more soon, I promise, I know how empty you all feel inside when I don't, but today I'm just too clouded over.

Joke of the weekend, courtesy of Dylan Moran, talking about those scandals where politicians or celebrities are caught in hotel rooms with prostitutes and cocaine. "And everyone carries on like it's all so shocking, but I ask you, if you're in a hotel room with some prostitutes, what else are you supposed to give them?" Genius.

I love Saturdays so much, Sunday is almost an anticlimax, coming as it does without a 24 hour buffer against Monday. Saturday is the day when my childless, fancy free lifestyle choices pay off.

It starts with the folk dance of the modern metrophile, the one where we hold the Guardian over the recycle bin and shake vigorously, carries on through crosswords, Sudoku and obsessively-checking-how-City-are-doing-on-the-Teletext, and climaxes (metaphorically, you understand) with Match of the Day. Which is where Arsenal come in.

Football teams often remind me oddly of the kids we knew at school. Man Utd are the athletic types, uncouth and illiterate anywhere but the sports field, and Chelsea are the rich kids with no social graces but a sycophantic coterie culled from the ranks of the venal and the easily impressed.

Arsenal are the cool guys you envied but still liked. You remember, the boys that were handsome and knew how to dance, but read Kerouak and Hesse as well.

They beat Juventus in the week, setting themselves up for a probable Champions League semifinal, and yesterday demolished Aston Villa 5-0 with the kind of imperious elan you'd associate with a regiment of Hussars romping across a Metteleuropean field towards the cannons. In the lead, sabre in hand as the sweat collects around his pommel, it could only be Thierry Henry.

Incidentally, if any of you are looking for a project, reread Dharma Bums and The Glass Bead Game and tell me if they're actually any good. I'm guessing not, to be honest, but you never know.

Elsewhere, Sunderland striker Jon Stead managed to score his first goal for Sunderland after 23 hours and 19 minutes of football played. Well done, lad, now no-one can say you couldn't score if you played all day.

There really isn't enough sport on television, is there? No there isn't. Similarly, I've always felt there just aren't enough conspiracy theories in the world. Here's my modest attempt to fill the gap.

The current standard version of Windows is called XP. Try reading that as Greek letters. You'll get Chi, and Rho, which in English would be rendered as Chr. This was an early Christian abbreviation for Christ.

So, when they call it Windows XP they're really calling it Windows for Jesus. By the standards of the religious, I have just proved this.

When you consider the history of the early Christian church, this makes perfect sense. An initial hubbub of contrary voices, which was turned into one unified, Catholic church under the aegis of the emperor Constantine, followed by the persecution of all the other leading brand names.

What better strategy for Microsoft? Watch out for Bill Gates and the Pope on the Vatican balcony any day now, announcing the merger of Microsoft and the Catholic Church, and the excommunication of anyone associated with Linux or Macintosh. Can witch burnings really be far behind?

Of course, you might say this post was a conspiracy to rope in anyone googling on these tags, but surely you'd trust me to rise above that sort of thing.

The other day, someone accused me of being "far too trusting". Dunno 'bout that, but it stimulated me to think of all the subtle clues to untrustworthiness I've learned to recognise.

Sharwood's. If you're in someone's house, have a look at their kitchen shelves. If the labels say Sharwood's more often than they say Patak's, you know they don't really get it, and definitely can't be trusted.

Energy. This is a property of the physical universe, and should typically be associated with words like kinetic, potential or electrical. If you ever hear anyone describing personal interactions with phrases like "I didn't like the energy they created", then unless they're describing some kind of fission or fusion they are almost certainly manipulative drama queens, and should be watched like hawks. This is always true.

Politically correct. The thing to remember with people who use this phrase is, this is how they talk when they know there's someone like you around. How do they talk when there isn't?

TV covers. Have you ever been in someone's house, and they've covered their TV with some kind of chiffon? Honestly, run a mile, and only then pause for breath.

Thieves, on the other hand, you can trust, because you can trust them to steal your things. They are at least predictable.

There you go, folk wisdom. Don't say I never tell you anything useful.

Incidentally, my Viagra experiment (see 3 posts below) was a miserable failure in terms of adverts, but I did get a lot more hits for a while.

There was something mildly irritating in the paper at the weekend. Nothing unusual about that, even since they got rid of Julie Birchill, but it's needled me enough to move me off all the way from the couch to the keyboard, which in these moribund days is an achievement in itself.

It was by Karen Armstrong, who writes about religious issues from a liberal feminist point of view, and it was about the gap between Muslims and the secular West. It was a positive piece in general, trying to pour balm on troubled waters, but it was full of stuff like this.

The sacred symbolises that which is inviolable, non-negotiable, and so central to our identity that, when it is injured in any way, it seems to vitiate the deepest self. For the Muslim protesters, the figure of the prophet is sacred in this way; for the supporters of the cartoons, free speech is the sacred value.

No no no no no. Honestly, I do find this kind of thing a little trying. Let me try and explain something about secularists.

No we don't think free speech is something inviolable, non-negotiable, blah fucking God-bothering blah. We think it's generally not a bad idea. There are times when we might compromise on it (there's an old saying that there's no right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre), but the tedious bickering of primitive desert gods just isn't a good enough reason.

I don't want to rain on Ms Armstrong's parade. I enjoyed her book on Gnosticism, and she is doing her damnedest to make religion less annoying, in particular by undermining the competing bigotries of cross, crescent and candlestick in favour of something a little more generous.

But I do weary of people who seem unable to conceive of life as anything other than an endless game of Dungeons and Dragons, with everyone off on some deep spiritual quest. You do kind of wish they'd all find the Ring of Asgar, vanquish the forces of Skeletor, move on to the next level and leave the rest of us in peace.

There is no sacred quest. You get up, you throw something on and your meat brain hauls you through breakfast and off to work, where little sugar and caffeine based treats keep your serotonin levels adequate. There are highs and lows, and it is possible to have a life of the mind. If you want to chase shadow puppets in your head that's your business, but it's a personal private matter and nothing to do with the rest of us.

Off work yesterday and today with the dreaded lurgi. After exhaustive research (which as usual just means the Wikipedia search engine), I can now reveal that the word lurgi was first used in the Goon Show in 1954, in the episode called Lurgi Strikes Britain.

"As it turns out", it says, "the disease is merely a convoluted ruse perpetrated by the arch-criminals Count Moriarty and Hercules Grytpype-Thynne in order to sell large numbers of brass band instruments. In the show, the symptoms of lurgi manifested as an uncontrollable urge to shout "EEEE-YACKABOO!!" without realising."

I certainly haven't been doing that, and there is clearly no such thing as the dreaded lurgi, which is presumably why I was once told off for using it on a sickness self-declaration form. This time I shall stick with the ever-acceptable flu-like symptoms.

If anyone from work is reading this, I should be back in the morning. Did you miss me?

It's weird the way they pick the advertising for our blogs. After all my anti-religious rants and Egyptian history, I must show up as someone who writes about Islamic issues, and now I constantly get adverts offering Muslim marriage services. When I did the thing about science and bridges, all they offered for about a fortnight was engineering companies.

Let's see if I can get them to advertise Viagra. Viagra, Viagra, Viagra.

By the way (Viagra), apologies if you've been bumped off my friends list. I didn't do this, they did. I'm looking into reversing it. I'm sorry if as a result of this you've experienced any difficulties maintaining an erection, and I can only recommend that you buy some Viagra.

First off, a plug. The Flickl exhibition is finally on at the Create Centre, starting on March 20th, and running until March 31st. The times are 9-5 weekdays except 9-4.30 Fridays. It doesn't say, but I guess the Create centre is shut at weekends.

Say hi to Sean while you're there if you see him, as he works there half the week. He was on the national news last week talking about Bristol Wireless, so he'll probably be surrounded by his adoring fans. It should have been me. I should have been the first one of us to be famous. You've all let me down terribly, and I'm never speaking to any of you again, not if you beg me.

Oh, yes, other people's aspirations. I was forgetting. There's a website about the exhibition here. It has dates and times, some sample images, and how to get there etc. If you're cycling from this side of town, it's best to go down the towpath by the river until you get to Cumberland basin.

I'm really looking forward to it. See you there.

This is taking longer than I'd expected, as Egypt turns out to be even more interesting than I'd thought.

Saladin was a Kurd, born in Tikrit, where Saddam Hussein comes from. He came to Egypt as a general, but ended up taking it over, not an uncommon career path.

In this role, he declared Egypt to be independent from the Turks, but actually spent most of his reign fighting the Crusaders. His most famous battle was fought at a place called Hattin, where he won a great victory by luring the Crusaders into the desert and placing his army between them and the only source of water. Some of the Crusaders weren't quite as bright as they might have been. Raynald, for instance, having forced this campaign on Saladin by attacking Muslim pilgrims and murdering them, managed to get himself captured at this battle. Saladin chopped his head off himself (by which I mean that he chopped Raynald's head off, not that he committed a bizarre auto-decapitation.

Following the battle, he managed to take Jerusalem, which prompted the Third Crusade. This was the one with Richard the Lionheart in. You know, three lions, all that. Actually Richard spoke French, ruled from Normandy and hated England. He once said that to fund his Crusades he would sell London if he could find a buyer. The three lions were the symbol not of England but of Aquitaine, where his mother Eleanor came from.

I'll do something on this nearer the World Cup, so you can all use it to annoy people in pubs.

This was also the period of the Assassins. As usual, it's debunking time. The assassins weren't a gang of crazed dope smoking nutters, tricked into dying by being drugged, given an orgy and told they'd had a glimpse of the Gardens of Paradise. All that stuff was made up by Christian writers who didn't approve of such things, and adopted by hippies who did.

Actually, they were an Ismaili Shi'ite sect. They were indeed led by Hassan-i Sabbah for some of their existence, they did maintain their independence by threatening to assassinate heads of state that moved against them, and they did place trained assassins in courts years in advance. In the end, they were destroyed by the Mongols, who came from outside the Assassins' sphere of influence, and so were protected from assassination tactics. An army led by Hulagu Khan destroyed their main fortress at Alamut, and most of their smaller ones.

In 1250 Egypt was seized by the Mameluks. This is the kind of sentence Kenneth Williams could have done a lot with, but actually the Mameluks were a military caste.

They had been created by Muslim rulers in Baghdad from slave boys who were forcibly converted to Islam, and raised in a harsh environment to be soldiers. Rulers liked them because they had no local loyalties, as they were usually from Russia or the Caucasus.

The problem was that they tended to be a lot tougher than the people around them, and ...

actually, I'm a bit bored with Egypt now. You probably get the general idea.

As Egypt went and won the African Nations Cup, it seems only fair to finish off their history as promised, so here is the Muslim era.

First, some context. In about 610 AD Mohammed, the Prophet not the boxer, had some visions in which the Angel Gabriel appeared to him, in the mood for some dictation. In the absence of a National Health Service he had no alternative but to conquer Saudi Arabia.

Having read the Koran, I can reveal to you that it's less unpleasant than the New Testament, but not by much. I know this is true, because an angel told me. I don't have to prove it, and if you caricature me for it I'll behead you.

Honestly, I'm still livid about that whole thing.

After his death the Arabs, now converted to Islam, spread out through most of what we now know as the Muslim world in a remarkably short time, taking teritories mainly from the Byzantine and Persian empires.

Egypt was conquered by the Arabs during this expansionist phase. The Byzantines spent fifteen years trying to hang on to it, then gave up. Interestingly, the Egyptian Copts allied themselves with the invading Muslims, as they were far more tolerant of their religion than the Byzantine Christians.

This pattern of religious tolerance was very common, although not by any means absolute, throughout the period of Muslim domination of the Mediterranean. Under the Ottomans, for instance, Salonika in Greece (now Thessaloniki) was roughly divided into three between Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians and Jews who had escaped the persecution in Spain. Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, was born there. When the Greeks conquered the city in 1912 the Muslims were ethnically cleansed, and then the Nazis murdered nearly all the Jews thirty years later.

The approach taken by most Muslim rulers to other religions was this. You were allowed to follow your own beliefs, but if you weren't in the Muslim ummah (the community of believers), then you had to pay a poll tax on top of the usual taxes. Also, you weren't allowed to try to convert Muslims, say anything derogatory about Islam or fight with other religions in the street.

By the standards of the time this was remarkably reasonable, especially the bit about not annoying people in the street, and it explains why most Christians in Arab lands were so reluctant to have Crusaders come along and liberate them.

Yes, I do a bit sometimes, don't I? I write in character, and unfortunately none of my characters is an editor.

Any-way, the Ummayad Arab dynasty ruled Egypt until 750, when they were replaced by the Abbasids, who ruled the eastern Muslim world from Baghdad. This era was marked by occasional Coptic revolts, mostly about taxation.

In 969 Egypt was conquered by the western Muslims, the Fatimids, who built Cairo to rule from. They were Ismaili Shi'ites. The split between Shi'ite and Sunni derives from disputes about the succession following Mohammed's death.

During the Fatimid era there was some persecution of Christians in their territories, culminating in the burning of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which gave the Christians an excuse to launch the Crusades. The Caliph at the time, Al-Hakim, was known as the mad Caliph, and at the end of his life proclaimed his own divinity, not a well known survival strategy in the Muslim world. Within a year he had disappeared. The Druze still maintain that he had been hidden away by God.

Or so it is believed, because the key doctrines of the Druze faith have always been a secret. The practitioners of the religion are divided into two groups, the uqqal, a fifth of the population, who know what the religion preaches, and the juhhal, who do not. Uqqal means knowledgeable, juhhal means ignorant.

You can only imagine the conversations that result in the Lebanon. "What religion are you?" "I'm a Druze." "What's that?" "I dunno. I'm ignorant you know". Of course, it could be argued that any religion who set an upward limit on ignorance of 80% was doing quite well.

In 1068 Cairo was plundered by the Seljuk Turks, who by this time had conquered Baghdad. The Fatimids then lost much of their territory to the Crusaders, including Jerusalem. As a result of their failure to stand up to the Crusaders, the Fatimids were usurped by a Kurdish dynasty, the Ayyubids, whose most famous son was Saladin. See, I told you there'd be people you've heard of.

I think I'm going to do him next time, though, as this is twice as long as my previous posts on the subject already. So, next time Saladin, the Crusades, the Assassins and the Mameluks. You'll like the Mameluks.

This post got posted before it was quite ready, so be warned it only makes partial sense.

Well, we've had a wonderful weekend of football on TV, so if you've been wondering where I've been now you know.

Wince moment of the week was Alan Smith's broken leg. Graceless hoodlum, mercenary and known racist though he is, we all have to rise above such things in the face of human tragedy, so let's all join together in wishing him some kind of partial recovery in the end.

Pick of the weekend's games was Liverpool v Man Utd, which Liverpool of course won. Gary Neville, famous for his bizarre rants about the evils of Liverpool - not just the team, but the place and the people as well - was roundly booed, and it was hard to disagree.

Unfortunately for Man Utd, they happen to have been at the top of the game during the period when it was taken over by the money men and turned into a branch of the corporate hospitality industry, and are now indelibly associated with that process.

Liverpool, on the other hand, appear to be more connected with the game's roots and traditional virtues of solidarity and working class pride. The Kop is named after a battle in the Boer War in which a regiment of East Lancashire troops was decimated due to the criminal negligence of their officers, and their song, You'll Never Walk Alone, sounds like a hymn to the trade union movement.

It's all bollocks, obviously, Liverpool are a PLC just like all the other top clubs and tickets are no cheaper. Your heart still lifts when they sing the song though, and the more crude ignorant thugs Man Utd accumulate the easier it seems to be to loathe them out of sheer habit. Hard on the real fans, of course, but football criticism is a contact sport, and not for the weak.

John Motson got to commentate, and he was soon at it with his frankly rather lascivious descriptions of the Liverpool midfield and their "athletic build". After previously having waxed lyrical over the joys of watching Wayne Rooney "coming in the opposition's box", it's a relief to know he's employed by the BBC, where he will hopefully be protected from the prejudice of the ignorant.

Performance of the weekend was little Colchester, who scored first at Stamford Bridge, and were holding Chelsea to a draw until the last quarter of an hour. The pitch there is a shocker, and I'm surprised it's considered adequate for Premiership football. If I was a dodgy Russian gangster and oil bilionaire, I would be embarrassed to send my superstar whores out on a pitch like that.

From Spurs fans, allegedly, at White Hart Lane last Saturday. To the tune of Lord of the Dance

Sol, Sol, wherever you may be
You're on the verge of lunacy
And we don't give a fuck if you're hanging from a tree
You're a Judas cunt with HIV.

Even some Spurs fans think that could be a bit much. Even I do. I'm only repeating it in defence of free speech and journalistic integrity, you know.

However, this post may well be motivated less by moral outrage than by the 954 visitors I got with the post Does Sol Campbell take it up the arse?, which I must admit is a level of traffic I wouldn't mind recreating. I posted it in early January, but got the traffic in February, when Sol Campbell suddenly became a major news focus.

So thanks to Jeff for the inspiration behind my next scholarly opinion piece, Does Ariel Sharon take it up the arse? And I've heard he likes watersports and everything.

Incidentally, apologies to my Dad, who reckons I swear too much. From now on I will be very careful to only refer to G***ge B*sh as a planetfucking icecap-melting war criminal redneck R*p*bl*c*n cunt.

Who the hell thought it was OK to take Radio 3, the sole bastion of proper culture in our Osbourne-Vordermann world, and hand part of it over to world music? They've really annoyed me, and they've offended my cultural beliefs, so I guess that means I can behead them.

Is there anyone you'd like to behead? Just post a comment, and we can swap tips on swords.

When they beheaded Queen Mary of Scots, it took several strokes to cut through the vertebrae and the spinal cord. Then, when the executioner picked the head up to display it ("behold, the head of a traitor"), he held it by the wig, and the actual head fell out of his grip and rolled around the floor, rather undermining the dramatic power of the gesture. "Behold, the wig of a traitor". It all goes to show, a beheading isn't something you can just throw together.

Beheading's quite interesting, actually, I might write something on it for you soon. I'm feeling much calmer now, and I've remembered I actually quite like world music.

What did Abu Hamza actually threaten to do that Class War didn't?

I was never actively involved, but I seem to remember a succession of hung parliaments, bleeding policemen and a dazzling variety of empty threats. The only difference is, it would never have occurred to them to do anything about it.

The main thought that struck me watching the new Cromwellians marching along with their banners offering to behead the nearest cartoonist, apart from wondering if they'd do the creator of Garfield for us, was "my God, were we that annoying?" Talk about empty vessels making the most noise.

Tell me honestly, if you ever get on a bus with people going on in a way that reminds you of the old days, which end do you go and sit on? Yes, I thought so. Me too.

But aren't we lucky? No middle-aged men ever wandered into the Talbot with a briefcase, saying "yes, you're quite right, I really admire your principles and I'd love to hear more about it, why don't you take this and leave it in MacDonald's?" In retrospect, I'm proud to say that we would definitely have taken it, pawned it and spent the money on beer.

You may recall that I left you in the Roman era, and that's where we pick up with another Egyptian plague. They'd already had the plague of frogs and the plague of boils, now they had a plague of Christians.

As Wikipedia politely puts it, "Egyptian Christians believe that the Patriarchate of Alexandria was founded by Mark the Evangelist around AD 33, but little is known about how Christianity entered Egypt." My God, the crap they make up. Why do they believe that? Because they just felt like it.

Once Constantine ended the persecution of Christians in 312, they all got started on persecuting each other instead. Orthodox, Gnostics, Manichaeans, Arians, they all had a go at each other, and the pagans.

At the end of the fourth century, the Roman Empire was divided into two. The western half fell apart, but Egypt was in the eastern half, which became what we know as the Byzantine empire, with its capital at Constantinople.

Now the religious persecutions really got started, and it was all about the Holy Trinity, which was seen in two different ways. The Orthodox view was that God was three different people in one, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, whilst the Monophysites claimed that God the Father came first, and made the other two. This fascinating debate plunged Egypt into civil war, which dragged on virtually until the Persians came back from 619 to 629.

In Constantinople itself, this division was taken up by the local chariot racing hooligans. The city was divided between the Orthodox Blue team and the Monophysite Greens, sort of like how the Chelsea Casuals would be if they were run by Abu Hamza. In the Nika riots of 531 the two gangs united, which was a good thing I guess, but unfortunately only to torch the city. Nice that they had something in common, but shame about the buildings and eveything.

On the plus side, the incident was the inspiration between the episode of The Tomorrow People called The Blue and the Green. If anyone has a copy of this I would love to see it.

After the Byzantine restoration of 629 they carried on with the usual squabbles until the arrival of the Arabs in 641. This was the beginning of the Islamic phase, which continues to this day.

In the interests of community harmony, I'm not going to do the Islamic phase until I've calmed down about recent events. Honestly, guys, they were cartoons, like Tom and Jerry. Are you sure about the beheading?

No I haven't got bored, I've just been working on a piece about Flickr for Venue. I've just sent it off, but today I'm going to visit my Dad for a few days, so I'll do something new for you all at the weekend. That's unless somebody offers me money to do something else, in which case I'll drop you like I was a dentist and you were an NHS patient.

Not a lot to celebrate at this time of year, but 355 years ago today they cut Charles the First's head off.

Charles' Big Idea was the divine right of kings, that kings were appointed by God to rule, that the people ought to do as they were told, or God would be cross. Not an original idea, but most monarchs kind of understood that actually political power was a little bit more complicated than that. Not Charles, who even after losing two civil wars still refused to share power with Parliament.

The thing that really rather grated with people at the time was that during those wars something like ten per cent of the population had died, mostly of famine or disease. In Colchester, for instance, which was besieged in 1648, several thousand died before the Royalists surrendered. It just seemed like a bit of a heavy body count for one man's vainglory.

Colchester, by the way, has had something of a rough history. As well as the Civil War siege, it was burnt by Boadicea, it's had to put up with garrisons since the Romans, it had Britain's worst earthquake in 1884, and was bombed during the war. And that was before Bum Gravy.

Anyway, they chopped his head off on account of all the misery he'd caused, and good riddance to bad rubbish if you ask me. Eleven years later they blew it spectacularly by inviting his son back to be Charles the Second. Well, quite, what kind of twat gives his son his own name?

Charles II actually turned out to be a bit better balanced than his old dad, but he was succeeded by his brother James (II), who tried to make England Catholic again, with predictably unpleasant results - the Battle of Sedgemoor, Hanging Judge Jeffries, and then in the next century Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Highland clearances.

When you think about it, it's just too dreary to be borne, and it only serves to highlight the dangers of not chopping enough king's heads off. So bollocks to Guy Fawkes night, and let's all celebrate January the 30th, as a damn good start.

The African Cup of Nations is in Egypt this year, so you may have been expecting this.

In the beginning hawk-headed gods stalked the land, endlessly masturbating, while Pharaohs strewed pyramids liberally about the desert to amuse the aliens. Let's skip straight to the interesting stuff though, beginning with the Persians.

In 525 BC, after two millennia of Pharaonic vainglorious grandstanding and pointless arsing about, the Emperor Cambyses came down and settled their metempsychotic hash for them, adding Egypt to the Persian Empire and stopping state funding of the Egyptian religion. However, the next Emperor, Darius, restored it, having presumably realised how much easier it is to run a religion than to ban it. There followed a turbulent period of revolt and retribution, before the whole area was swallowed up in the Greek Empire of Alexander the Great.

While Alexander was in Egypt, he visited the oracle at Siwa, where he was told he was the son of the God Amun, and destined to rule the world. In retrospect, this may have been what he wanted to hear rather than what he needed to hear, but by then it was probably a bit late anyway. Sons of Gods have often left trails of corpses in their wake, and Alexander proceeded to do just that. Of course, from the point of view of the oracular priests, none of those corpses were in Siwa, which must have come as a relief.

After Alexander's death in Babylon in 323, his Empire was divided between his generals. Egypt fell to Ptolemy, who founded his own dynasty. The kings that followed him were all called Ptolemy, and most of the queens were called Cleopatra. The Cleopatra you know, the one with the carpet and the asp and the asses' milk, came seventh. I'm not going to tell the story here because I know some of you want to watch Rome Series Two without knowing the score in advance, so let's just say that from 30 BC Egypt was a province in the Roman Empire.

Alexandria, founded by Amun's little tearaway, became one of the main centres of Jewish life, especially after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. There were much ethnic tension between Jews and Greeks - for a fascinating account of the time read this, the best history book ever, by the world's worst human being.

That'll do you for a bit. Watch this space for the Christian and Muslim eras, coming soon. Just a bit more interesting than the dreary old Sphinx, though, eh??

Nothing this week, as Venue have asked me to do them 650 words on spec and I'm concentrating on that. Exciting opportunity, isn't it? Nothing definite yet, though.

Nothing at the weekend either, I'm afraid, as I'm off to Brecon. It'll be walking and hostelling, and no blogging window at all.

Now don't start moaning, I'll do you something nice to make it up to you when I get the chance. I promise. Yes I still love you. Now stop it, or it'll be "It's not you, it's me" before you know it.

Yesterday Robben scored for Chelsea against Sunderland, ran into the crowd to celebrate and got a yellow card for it. Because he'd already had one yellow, he was sent off.

You might think Chelsea celebrating scoring against a team like Sunderland was just rubbing it in, like trawlermen celebrating their victory over the cod, but actually it was a closer game than expected, and it does raise the question of what constitutes a reasonable celebration.

Especially so when you consider Stuart Pierce on Saturday, charging into the crowd and having barely consensual frottage with most of them after City's second goal against United.

It was a Derby game, and we all like to see United crawling wretchedly in the dust like the game was scripted by Sergio Leone, but something about the inconsistency must surely give us pause.

And why aren't celebrating players allowed to take their shirts off? Do the game's administrators imagine there is no sex in football? Do they want to sell the game to women and gay men or not?

So I say, after a goal, let them frolic as they will. If not, good luck telling Stuart Pierce he can't go round rubbing himself up against people any more.

Carrying on with things you didn’t know about countries England are going to play at football (my God it’s tenuous when you think about it), here’s a short history of Sweden, drawn (again) in England’s group.

Rock carvings have been found in Sweden going back to about 9000 BC, soon after the end of the last Ice Age. Early carvings depict elk and the like, later carvings mainly depict war and sex, thus setting the Swedish tone.

Incidentally, the technical term for a rock carving is petroglyph (from the Greek petro = rock, glyph = carving). A hieroglyph is a sacred carving, to petrify is to turn to stone. I decided the post would be too long if I included the Norse sagas, but this I managed to squeeze in.

Tacitus, writing in about 98AD, describes a people called the Suiones, with sailing ships with two prows, one at each end. They'd have to be at both ends really, wouldn't they, Tacitus, otherwise you’d have some twisted Moebius nightmare of a ship, fit only for sailing round whirlpools. The grand old man of Roman history, but he didn't half love the bleeding obvious.

The point for modern historians is that that's a description reminiscent of Viking longships, which leads us neatly on. I don't just throw these things together you know.

The Viking Age is traditionally dated from the Viking attack on Lindisfarne in 973. Vikings came not just from Norway, but also from Sweden and Denmark. As well as raiding Britain, they also established an empire along the waterways of Russia (Rus is reputed to be the local word for Vikings), and on several occasions besieged Constantinople. It's amazing, the sheer variety of people that did.

Much of Britain was settled by Vikings, especially in the North. You can often tell by the place names. For instance, Kirby or Kirkby in a place name indicates that it was a Viking village with a church (Kirk = church, by = a Viking place). If you look for places on the map with Kirk or by in the name, you can see where the Vikings were. Right across the north of England (eg Selby, Kirby Stephen - the Viking village with the Church of St Stephen) and Pembrokeshire (eg Tenby).

In medieval times Sweden and Denmark became separate countries, and Sweden emerged as a powerful Protestant Empire around the Baltic. During the seventeenth century they fought wars against Russia, the Holy Roman Emperor (see the Thirty Years War elsewhere), Denmark, Poland and Lithuania. As you can see, that whole neutrality thing hasn't been around for ever.

Denmark, Russia, England and various German provinces, tiring of this sort of thing, formed a league to deal with Sweden, and by the 1720s had largely pushed them back across the Baltic.

From this time on, Sweden was mainly governed by parliament. During their last monarchy, during the Napoleonic wars, Russia took Finland, but Sweden took Norway.

In 1905, Norway gained its independence peacefully. Sweden was neutral in both world wars, and democratic, morphing into the land of Abba and Saab that we know today. I bet you never know they'd had such a chequered past though.

To quote from their leaflet:

Zaytoun is a non-profit organisation established to purchase olive oil from Palestinian farmers at Fair Trade prices.

Now on sale from Essential, and I believe in Harvest. Details here. Hopefully, as well as generating an income foreign trade deals will make it harder for the army to bulldoze the trees.

It's a bit pricier than usual. As the man who told me about it said, "it's hard to harvest and dodge Israeli bullets at the same time". He's just off to be a human shield, so the least we can do is drizzle some Palestinian oil on our Waldorf salads.

From their links page, Palestinian beer, which is good for two reasons.

That was the question on Spurs fans' lips during their brief happy interlude in the game against Leicester yesterday.

Persistent rumours surround Campbell, so as your roving investigative journalist I googled on Sol Campbell gay rumours, and found nothing new. Lots of stuff on Sol Campbell, and lots of gay rumours (which might for instance be the early version of Tony's band that he doesn't want us to know about), but no fresh or compelling rumours about Sol specifically.

If you ask me, some fans are just relentless in their curiosity about exactly who might be persuaded to take it up the arse. I'm not unsympathetic to their needs, but really they could use the personals rather than declaiming their longing to the world en masse, when the rest of us are really just trying to concentrate on the game. No wonder they had to introduce all seater stadiums - they must have been buggering each other senseless on the terraces.

It's from zombizi, he of the photos, and it's called zombizi zero-six.

You'll find exactly the voracious appetite for the needlessly obscure you'd expect from someone I know, but with a deliciously different twist, as Zombizi embraces the modern world with a warm-hearted enthusiasm which can only refresh after a taste of my snide distaste for it.

And it gives you a lovely bubbly feeling in your tummy. Oh no, that's the gin. Or maybe not - let the reader decide.

People are always on about how chimpanzee DNA is 99% the same as ours, as if it's some kind of hugely significant fact.

First off, it’s not even true. Recent research suggests the figure is more like 96%. And even if it was, does that prove that chimps are like us?

People often think of DNA as a blueprint, but that’s a false analogy. DNA is much more like a recipe.

This analogy is actually seriously flawed as well – possibly the most useful analogy is to a computer program, with most genes corresponding to subroutines. Most DNA is made up of subroutines, and the set of available subroutines varies much less between species than you would think – in fact human DNA is something like 33% the same as lichen. The crucial DNA is in the controlling genes, which determines which order these subroutines are called in.

However, as I'm not a programmer I’m going to stick to the recipe metaphor. Here’s a recipe for risotto, courtesy of Jamie Oliver, which I’ve altered just a little bit, rather less than 1%. I’ve also purged it of all cheeky chappy references – the cookery equivalent of junk DNA.

Basic Risotto - serves 4

Remove from the heat and add the batter and the Parmesan.

So how have I changed the recipe? That’s right, Jamie Oliver never put in the bit about washing your hands, obviously. Also, I’ve replaced the butter with batter, and I’ve made you cook it in a can rather than a pan. If we were making hummus, I might have had you add some melon juice, and mash the chick peas into Tahiti.

The point is, by fiddling just a little bit with a recipe, whether it’s for risotto, hummus or great ape, you can massively change the results. It's called sensitive dependence on initial conditions, popularised as the butterfly effect (and don't get me started on that).

Not only are chimpanzees completely different from us, the two chimp species, common and bonobo, are completely different from each other. Common chimps are aggressive and territorial, whereas bonobos are sexual obsessives who try to resolve all their differences with shagging. I may now be undermining my argument about how different they are, so I'll stop first. More whining about other people's pathetic drivel the next time I get a little indigestion.

As I'm sure you're aware, England have drawn Trinidad and Tobago in World Cup Group B, along with Paraguay and Sweden. Not one of the famous footballing giants, they have a world ranking of 51 and a combined population of 1.3 million, and qualified by seeing off the Dominican Republic in their group, then Bahrain in the playoffs. Their star names are Dwight and Yorke. Oh, and Brian Lara.

Trinidad is an island just off the coast of Venezuela. Humans first settled there about 5000BC, so far as is known, but two thousand years ago the area was taken over by the Saladoid people, famous for their pottery, which they presumably kept their lettuce in, and the disappointingly pun-free Barrancoids and Araquinoids. In 1300 or so they were all supplanted by the Mayoids, just in time to meet Christopher Columbus, which must have been a thrill.

I'm sure you've guessed what comes next. Enslavement by the Spanish, conquest, disease, bloody murder, and religion. In 1699, in one of history's more warming episodes, the surviving native Americans rose against the Church, who were running the plantations and keeping them in serfdom, killed the priests in charge and desecrated the church. They then ambushed and killed the governor of the colony.

Back came the Church, of course, torturing and executing the rebels. The bodies were then decapitated, dismembered and strewn on the roadside to serve as an example. The women and children were given as "body servants" to Spanish residents. Even today, the Church commemorates the priests who died in the uprising as martyrs.

In 1797 the island was conquered by the British. The slaves carried on being slaves until the abolition of slavery in 1838, which was happened on Trinidad before it happened in any other British colony. Not that being free agricultural labourers instead was a barrel of laughs either.

Thousands of indentured Indian workers were brought over from Calcutta in this period, adding another ethnic group to the African, Amerindian, Spanish and English mixture already there. Just over half the population are now Indian in origin (by which I mean actually Indian, not Amerindian).

Tobago, a smaller island out to sea from Trinidad, has a slightly different history. It was never Spanish, but was fought over by the British, French, Dutch and Latvians. Yes, I was surprised to learn of Latvia's imperialist past as well. It was finally conquered by the British in 1814, and amalgamated with Trinidad in 1888. The two islands, together with 21 smaller islands, became an independent country in 1962.

In July 1990 the Jamaat al Muslimeen, a Black Muslim group, tried to overthrow the government, holding the prime minister and MPs hostage for 5 days. They were offered an amnesty, surrendered, and were then imprisoned while the courts debated whether the amnesty offer was legally valid. After two years, they decided it was after all and the 114 rebels were released, which must have come as a relief.

As far as football is concerned, you have to say they don't have a prayer. Still, that's what we said about Wigan, so fingers crossed they might take a point off Sweden or Paraguay and do us a favour. Of course, in Sweden and Paraguay they're saying the same about us.

I don't get much excited by the New Year, myself. They come round so often, for one thing. I'm referring not to my advanced years, but to the number of different yearly cycles my life marches to. Quite apart from the calendar year, there's the academic year, the tax year and all the various sporting seasons, and of all those the calendar year seems to have the least impact on my actual life. I mean, it's only the Earth going round the sun, for Christ's sake.

Still, everything's closed and there's nothing on the telly, so here's my round up of the season so far, with special emphasis on the bits I can vaguely remember.

A dire year all round for City, missing the playoffs last season and looking set to miss it by about fifteen places this time, despite something of a revival recently with 14 points from the last 18. The Danny Wilson era of two third place finishes and a cup win in the LD Vans, much derided at the time, begins to seem like a golden age. It seems to be a feature of golden ages generally that no-one notices them until they're over.

A great year for Wigan, who despite losing their last two games have now amassed 34 points. This is exactly as many as West Bromwich Albion needed to survive relegation last year. Be honest, now, did you think they'd make it at all, never mind by Christmas? One up for the minnows.

And despite what you'd think, not such a great year for the millionaire's plaything clubs (leaving Wigan's ownership aside for the moment, obviously). Chelsea, of course, are coasting to a second championship with Roman Sopranovitch and his greasily gotten gains, but Sullivan's Birmingham City and al Fayed's Fulham are both settling down where they belong, with all the other bottom feeders.

And Spurs are going well, which will cheer Sean up. I love Spurs fans, their endless futile optimism is a shining example to the rest of us, and the way they hoard up Arsenal's every slight embarrassment for recycling at a later date is a paragon of ecological efficiency. Waste not, want not, I say.

So much more virtuous than Arsenal fans, casually squandering their embarrassment of riches. Just look at Nick Hornby going into a manic depressive sulk whenever Arsenal finish with league positions Spurs would be positively cheered by.

After so many years of slings and arrows, Sean must be absolutely baffled by the way football is suddenly being nice to him, with his home town of Reading 10 points clear at the top of the Championship, and mathematically guaranteed to be promoted if they can only maintain their current form for the rest of the season. All mockery aside, I'm genuinely pleased for you, mate. Who will you support when Spurs play Reading next year?

Back in the mundane just briefly, this year's Alan Partridge moment was George Bush walking into a locked door. I've been trying to work out who he reminds me of, and then I realised - it's Neil Hamilton. They've both got the same revolting combination of Partridge mannerisms and actually being real.

And the way he just didn't know how to get off the stage, it was the classic celebrity car crash moment. If it's just Judy's tits falling out or something then some kind of fellow feeling takes over and you can laugh, but when it's a planetfucking icecap-melting war criminal redneck cunt then it's just plain unpleasant.

From the Guardian yesterday, quotes from an interview by Stephen Armstrong, with paleoclimatologist Jane Francis.

"If we look back beyond 40 million years - which, for a geologist, is a very small amount of time - we reach a greenhouse world: it is warm with high atmospheric CO2. As a result, there is no evidence of ice at either of the poles. Indeed, Francis has fossils from Antarctica which show that, even after the continent drifted to its current polar position, it used to boast a lush, green sub-tropical forest." (Armstrong)

"There's an awful lot of water about to be let loose once it all melts. So I hope you don't live near the Thames. We're OK in the north. It's a bit more hilly. But I wouldn't want to live in large parts of the south of England". (Francis)

I'm still moving to Cornwall, but I shall definitely live at the top of a hill.

Still, it's a relief to know that the pubs will be open when it happens. Plus, Sainsbury's can still supply us by gondola.

First off, the pubs. My satori moment for 2005 happened a few weeks ago, when a friend got up to go to the bar, and I checked my watch. "You've just missed it", said I, but no, absolute Time had gone all relative on us, and with one bound we were free. It was the best pint of Guinness I've ever had.

Some of my friends, incomprehensibly, seem to see this as a mixed blessing, so let me just clarify matters. This change in the law means that the pubs are open later. I hope that's clarified things for you. I'm sorry, but any further miscomprehension is just wilful awkwardness.

Not that the expected Europeanisation of British drinking culture shows any signs of setting in, but the point is, those of us who were that way in the first place are no longer restricted by everyone else. It isn't freedom from having to go home, it's freedom from night clubs and the Plough.

Next, Internet shopping. Whilst browsing in town this Christmas, you may have noticed less people. That's because we were all at home doing it online, suckers. They do vouchers, they deliver reliably, they add personal messages, they're really quite good.

On my one visit to town in December, I definitely noticed a demographic change around me. It confused me for a while, until I realised what it was. I was shopping with all the people who were too stupid to use the Internet. There's another bonus - for one month in every year, we know where all those people are, and we don't have to go there.

The gods despise hubris, especially mine, so in retrospect it was no surprise when I went to order Christmas food supplies online the weekend before Christmas, and Tesco's and Sainsbury's websites both laughed in my face. Off to Sainbury's on physical roads through physical space, then (thanks, Simon), and the second bonus of Internet shopping became clear. More people ordering online means less people actually in the shops, which in Sainsbury's at Christmas is a boon not to be despised.

These things come in threes, they say, and I was wondering what the third thing would be until it turned up on my doorstep, in the form of my Christmas present to myself. It is (trumpets, drum roll) the Goodmans DVD hard disk recorder. As its name implies, it's a DVD player/recorder with a hard disk, so you can save programs onto the disk from TV, and watch them without having to rewind or fast forward. Then you can burn them onto DVD if you want to, which is obviously a feature with financial implications for the movie business, and all the better for that.

You can also watch programs from the beginning while you're still recording them. Never ever again in my entire life will I have to wait until a football game ends before I can start watching it. I can't express my ineffable joy at this, partly because that's what ineffable means but mainly due to the sheer joy of it, which has stunned me into repetition.

None of these things amount to the tiniest step towards revolution or world peace, I know. I'm so sorry, really I am, but I can only work with the material I'm given.

Most of you have heard of Burgundy. You'll know it as a colour, and a wine, and a part of France.

You may not know that it used to be German. After the western Roman Empire collapsed, it was settled by German tribes, and after a century of independence was conquered by the Franks. When the Frankish Empire dissolved, Burgundy split into 3 parts - the kingdoms of Upper Burgundy (around Lake Geneva) and Lower Burgundy (Provence), eventually absorbed into the Holy Roman Empire in 1032, and the Duchy of Burgundy, which was conquered by the French in 1004, and roughly covered the area of France now known as Bourgogne.

It should be noted that the Holy Roman Empire, also known at this time as the Kingdom of Germany, covered all of modern Germany except parts of the east, plus the Low Countries, Switzerland, Austria and most of northern and central Italy, with the exception of Rome and Venice, which were independent.

The French dukes managed to acquire territories in Holland and Belgium and old Burgundy, mainly by marriage, and their court in Dijon was famous for its culture. It then served as a power base for the Hapsburgs, who ruled the Holy Roman Empire, and Austria after the Empire's collapse. After the end of the age of European empires and the rise of the nation state, the lands formerly known as Burgundy were all absorbed into the territories of France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

This one's not very funny, I'm afraid (I blame the material), but I did promise I'd do it, and it does serve to address two of my historical themes. Firstly, things about Germany you didn't know, and secondly the lunacy of nationalism. I mean, imagine you come from Dijon, who are you supposed to be patriotic for?

I quite often find myself defending the merits of science against throwbacks of all kinds, but it's only recently occurred to me how much we all really agree.

The way to test whether or not you actually trust science is to ask yourself this - have you ever driven a car over a bridge?

If you have, you trust science. Oh you may have superficial intellectual, moral or spiritual doubts, but deep in your heart of hearts you know where your loyalties lie, and you're quite prepared to offer up your life for your pro-scientific beliefs.

To test this, let's imagine a series of bridges, all lined up next to the Clifton Suspension bridge, and all offering to carry you safely across the Gorge.

First up, we have the Astrological Bridge. None of the builders really knew much about load-bearing cables and boring stuff like that, but the founding stone was laid when Aries was in Neptune, and all the planetary oppositions are looking good.

Next along, the Homeopathic Bridge. You know this will stand up because sub-microscopic particles of an old bridge that fell over before have been mixed into the concrete.

Then we have the Derrida Bridge. Avoiding all the old patriarchal Newtonian hegemonies about force and mass, this is a bridge which endlessly defers closure, despite its known tendency to deconstruct itself.

I could go on, and I'm quite surprised I haven't. The real question is, which bridge are you going to cross on? If you're crossing on the real bridge, then perhaps you might care to adjust your world view accordingly. If you're using any of the others, I can only salute your faith in your beliefs, and urge you to make the crossing as soon as possible.

The legend of Santa Claus can be traced back hundreds of years to a monk named St. Nicholas. It is believed that Nicholas was born sometime around 280 A.D. in Patara, near Myra in modern-day Turkey. This is during the later period of the Roman Empire, but before the Empire split into East and West. He was venerated in early Christian legend for saving sailors from storms, protecting children, and giving generous gifts to the poor. The Christian figure of Saint Nicholas replaced or incorporated various pagan gift-giving gods from Rome or central Europe.

They did the incorporating thing a lot. The halo, for instance, comes from Syrian sun worship, as does the date of Christmas, which was only given to Jesus as a birthday in 354 AD - before that it was January 6th. No, they didn't tell us that in school, did they? Tell your children, though, won't you?

Some of you may be surprised to see that Santa Claus originated in what is today a Muslim country, but Turkey was actually Christian for longer than it's been Muslim. The more provisional, less adjusted wing of the Greek Orthodox church still believe that God wants them to reclaim Istanbul in his name and call it Constantinople again. Ah, those cheeky nationalists and their wacky ideas.

In Holland and Germany Nicholas was sometimes said to ride through the sky on a horse. He was accompanied by Black Peter, an elf whose job was to whip the naughty children. I don't recall that from the Disney version. The feast day of Nicholas, when presents were received, was on December 6.

After the Reformation, German Protestants encouraged the worship of Jesus as a gift giver on his own feast day, December 25. The Nicholas tradition then became attached to Christmas itself. Pope Paul VI dropped the feast of Saint Nicholas on December 6th from the official Roman Catholic calendar in 1969.

Santa Claus came from the Dutch legend of Sinter Klaas, brought to America by Dutch settlers in New York in the 17th century (New York was originally called New Amsterdam, and Harlem was originally Haarlem, a Dutch name). The story arrived bit by bit, gaining all the familiar elements as time passed. The first time Santa appeared in a form recognisable to us, rather than looking like an elf, was in Coca-Cola's advertising campaign in 1931. Rudolph and his drinker's nose were invented in 1939.

So the next time someone mentions the true spirit of Christmas, tell them it's raki, washed down with Coke.

More here and here.

As a special Christmas treat, it's been Bach week on Radio 3 this week, which means they're playing Bach, the whole of Bach and nothing but Bach. I've spent the whole week drifting on a tide of mathematical perfection and Enlightenment optimism - honestly, it's been like Foucault never lived. Thank you so much Verity for telling me it was happening, you've made my week.

So you can see how I might have wanted to spread some festive cheer by putting it on in the computer room. No chance. "What the hell is that squawking noise?" That, dearest colleagues and service users, is the sound of humanity crawling out of the mudpits and singing sweet songs of joy to itself. "It's horrible".

Later on, there was beer and mince pies. Someone put on a Christmas tape, and Jingle Bells Rocked. No-one complained about the squawking noise.

So, in another futile hoorah for everything that's good and noble and pure in this world, here are some facts about Bach, mainly nicked from here on the BBC website, which is good and noble and pure as well, except for the bits it doesn't want to do but has to. Also, see here for more detail.

Bach was born in Eisenach in central Germany in 1685, the same year as the battle of Sedgemoor in England. He first went to the same school as Martin Luther had, then continued his studies at the Gymnasium in Ohrdruf. This sounds like fun until you realise that Gymnasium at the time just meant grammar school.

Actually, the word gymnasium originally comes from the Greek word for naked, as that was how Greek athletes performed and trained in the olden days. This gives us the wonderful word gymnosophist, meaning a philosopher with no clothes on. I've met a few of those. I don't think Bach's school would have been anything like that, although he must have had a few organ masters.

In 1700 he joined the Matins choir in Luneburg. There followed a series of short musical appointments, falling out with some of his employers for his musical unorthodoxy, his religious beliefs (Protestantism at the time was locked in a deeply tedious tussle between the Lutherans, who were very Protestant, and the Calvinists, who were worse) and his habit of inviting women back to the church to "listen to him play". During this time he wrote over a hundred pieces, including 2 of the 6 Brandenburg Concertos (they were written over a 12 year period), and the St Matthew's Passion. Throughout his life he was a prolific composer, writing mainly for choir, organ or both.

In 1713 he ended up in Leipzig, where he lived the rest of his life. He carried on writing stuff, met Frederick the Great and died in 1750 (I said he was prolific, I didn't say I was).

Very limited posting at the minute, due to the onset of the festive season and a certain sense of anomie.

All things pass, even Christmas, and Boethius' wheel keeps on turning. Expect a creative renaissance at some point.

More history soon, I think. I promised you the story of Burgundy ages ago, and like Santa Claus I always deliver in the end. That's an idea, actually, I will also do a history of Santa Claus.

I thought anomie meant a mixture of apathy and alienation, but having just checked Ask Oxford it actually means a lack of the usual social or moral standards, which will do just fine.

So now we know. Sweden, Trinidad and Paraguay.

The full draw is here. Sven said he was happy, and so am I.

I was going to comment, but unfortunately I've had a little drink. More to follow soon. Did I mention that you were my very best friend?

Johnny Vaughan wakes up in a small room with bars on the windows. The camera catches his fear and bafflement. Outside, he hears rough voices and the unlocking of doors. "Slop out!"

Suddenly he realises he's back in prison again. Zoom in on his vacant oleaginous face for this moment of personal crisis. Then he realises it's time for the showers.

As the daily routine begins, everyone around him carries on as if his entire celebrity career was only a dream, and actually he's just started his 4 year sentence for coke dealing.

Leave him there for as long as it's amusing, and then spill the beans. Make sure he realises he's been selected by a series of pscychological tests which ruled out all the more intelligent celebrities, and that his nearest and dearest were all party to the betrayal. Zoom in on his vacant oleaginous face once more, as he realises he will now have to leave prison and make some more sordid and moronic TV programmes.

Then give him some money, because as everyone knows that makes it all OK.

After all that bickering a while back, England have finally been seeded in the top 8. This is important for the draw, as it means England can't be screwed quite so royally as we were last time. If you remember, I explained the technicalities in my other place

So, a FIFA decision in our favour then. I hesitate to say that it woz the Manhattan wot won it, but I did kick up a fuss, and upwards of 9 of you read me doing so, so you never know.

More on Friday, the day of the draw.

All the best to Dave, who went into hospital today for an operation on his foot. If you see this, Dave, hope everything is OK, and give me a call if you're bored.

People have been giving me some constructive advice, and two themes have emerged. Firstly, it's all very well in the blog but I'm not to think I can pull this kind of crap in the pub, and secondly can I please stop going on about my life and concentrate on the football.

So, the football then. Yesterday's FA Cup 2nd round was notable mainly for the violence in the Stevenage - Northampton game, when Stevenage's goalkeeping coach Lionel Perez stuck two fingers in the eyes of his opposite number from Northampton, Dave Watson.

You have to say the quality of violence declines in football's lower levels. In the Premiership you get Cantona and his stylish karate kicks, but down in the Conference you might as well be watching a drunken melee outside a nightclub.

It was an appalling moment and a terrible example to any young fans watching, and none of us were the least bit entertained. The police and the FA have both said they'll be looking into it, which is more than Watson will be.

Like a picture restorer uncovering the real Vermeer beneath the dirt of the ages, I've brought some of the old blog back to its former glory.

It's here.

Unfortunately, due to the ravages of time original dates have been lost, as have comments. Historians will just have to bicker as to what they may have been.

As promised, I'm back, and what a lovely holiday I've had!

I wasn't quite so sure last Saturday, when I turned on the TV just before leaving to see the headline "Cornwall in Chaos: Army on alert", and a picture of some snow. Fortunately, St Ives is virtually snow free, being a long way south and out in the Gulf Stream. I wouldn't have fancied going by car, but the train sailed straight through the dodgy bits in Devon and East Cornwall, and by Redruth the snow was gone.

I cannot adequately convey the joys of the snow-covered West Country landscape, as sampled from a lovely warm train with piping hot coffee and a pasty. No wonder the Orient Express always sounds so glamorous.

I had 2 days in St Ives, at my favourite B&B, White Waves. Cheap, friendly and efficient, if you're looking for somewhere.

Highlight of St Ives, as usual, was the Tate. This time there was a lot of video work, plus the usual St Ives artists from the Fifties when it was cool. Rather confusingly, the explanatory card for Paul Feiler's Morvah Grey contained the text In the late 1950s the solid structures of the Cornish landscape began to dissolve into broken forms, without adding the useful rider in the work of the artist. If you spent the Eighties how I spent the Eighties, that in itself is enough to leave you tripping all day.

Then I went on my own personal coast to coast from St Ives to St Just. Very similar to the famous walk from the Yorkshire coast to the Lake District, except it's only about 10 miles, and along the coast all the way. Plus, I took the bus. Via Penzance, though, which actually makes it a coast to coast to coast.

Incidentally, how is the Cornwall coastline divided up between the Irish Sea, the Bristol Channel, the Atlantic and the English Channel? I think we should be told. Or more accurately, I think someone else should look it up for me.

I actually stayed at a cottage a mile from St Just, right on Cape Cornwall. Glenn and Dawn had it for a week but couldn't do the last 2 days, so they very kindly passed it on to me.

The cottage was a thing of wonder. The first thing I thought when I saw it was my God, this is so much better than our actual lives. There was a seat by a window, from which you could watch the sea twenty feet away, at a 45 degree angle between south west and straight down. It very rapidly became clear that that was how I was going to be spending my time, and that in essence is what I did until it was time to come home.

I don't usually swear much in the blog, as swearing is usually too straightforward for my convoluted prose, but I would just like to state that fucking Barton Hill is the ugliest fucking place in the whole fucking world. And now I'm fucking back in it, for fuck knows how long. Oh bum.

Sorry, not much recently, been busy.

More action when I get back from Cornwall next weekend.

This is blog writing as catharsis, purging the memory of a spectacle that would have driven any Roman audience to beg for the light relief of gladitorial combat.

People with an interest with politics will know the link between Bristol and Chesterfield - Tony Benn became MP for Chesterfield after he lost his seat here.

That's just Chesterfield, notice, not Chesterfield South or anything like that - surely an indication of Chesterfield's importance in the scheme of things, and something of a pointer to the level of challenge represented by their football team, you might have thought. Of course, that's not how it turned out.

It was a game of two halves, the first one going to City and the second to Chesterfield. Unfortunately, the first one lasted 15 minutes, the second one the rest of the match.

It all seemed so hopeful at first. I went with my friend Toby, who'd come up from Cheddar for his first taste of live football since childhood. I'd primed him in advance with dire warnings of City's current form, and after 10 minutes in I was all ready to eat my words. City went ahead after 5 minutes, hit the post and were stringing passing moves together in a way that was almost skilful.

It couldn't last, and it didn't. An equaliser against the run of play, and City just lost it. 15 minutes later Chesterfield were 3-1 up, and you just knew that was that.

From then on, City were dire. Toby said it was like watching the blind leading the lame, but frankly that would imply some kind of teamwork. My best theory is, one of the Chesterfield players told City the offside rule had changed, and all players were offside in any position and should on no account attempt to interfere with play.

In the second half, we got to watch the City back line in glorious close-up, and it was just comical. In fact, I'm going to give up trying to entertain you with words, and just put in a link to a video of this game.

City did score near the end, but no-one cared. The one thing that cheered the core fan base was when they found out Rovers had lost as well. All in all, it's hard to imagine a more pathetic act of capitulation on a football pitch.

So let's all be grateful to Sunderland, who judging by Match of the Day clearly went out today to save us the trouble of visualising one.

Currently the top comedy team in the Premiership, they excelled themselves today. At point their keeper, having caught the ball under the crossbar, stepped back over the goal line. He kept the ball at arms length until he'd stopped moving, but then, brilliantly, clutched the ball to his chest before stepping forward, thus bringing it back over the goal line.

It turned out to be an inspired surreal double bluff. No-one, not the referee, the linesman, the players or even the Villa fans, could quite believe he'd done it, and the game carried on as if nothing had happened. After the game, Mick McCarthy said he'd been their best player, and he was really disappointed with all the other ones.

City were knocked out of the FA Cup in the first round (obviously), so they won't be playing Sunderland this year, which is a shame for comedy fans anywhere.

As some of you may remember, one of this blog’s ongoing themes is German history you didn’t know about, so here’s something about the Thirty Years War(1618-1648).

Now I know you’re in the habit of thinking of Germans as fighting their wars in other people’s countries, but this was a time when everyone else went to fight their wars in theirs. The war started in Prague, and spread through Austria and up the Rhine to most areas of Germany.

It was, at least nominally, a religious war. The Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand, was faced with an Empire which was increasingly Protestant. In 1618 the Bohemian Protestants rose in revolt (the Czech Protestants that is, not the Protestants with berets and bean bags), and threw two of the Emperor's men out of some high windows (an event rather wonderfully known as the Defenestration of Prague).

Fortunately, they both bounced and neither of them died, although one was injured. The Catholics re-established control and had some executions, but by then the trouble had spread.

Spain, France, Denmark and Sweden all had a go, and England sent money. The Catholics took an early lead, but the Protestants equalised late on, mainly due to the help of Catholic France (it was that kind of war). The main losers were the people of Germany, who were stuck with thirty years of armies roaming around, all needing to be fed.

Spare a thought too for poor Vienna, besieged during this period by the Turks, the Swedes, the Turks again and on one occasion, believe it or not, the Transylvanians. How many of them were sweet transsexuals history fails to record. Honestly, history can be such a prude sometimes.

How could I possibly begin with anything else? Meaningless but wonderful, a tiramisu of a game.

And just as we were resigning ourselves to "Oh well, it's only a friendly, we played well and that's all that counts", the payoff. Two headed goals, and you could admit that it mattered.

Not for the usual bone-headed reasons, but because Argentina are the second best team in the world, and both sides wanted it, so it actually means something to win.

I love the BBC commentary team, with their perpetual air of wounded decency. "And that Argentinian player deliberately fell over to try and win a free kick", said Motson. Such a relief to know you'd never see that here. "Wayne Bridge is furious with him - that's ungentlemanly conduct, that is".

Quite right, too. I happen to know that Bridge is a stickler for traditional gentlemanly values, and once challenged a braggart to a duel for being offhand about a lady.

Back home, City were being beaten yet again, this time by local rivals Swindon. "Bristol City manager Gary Johnson says his side can build on their performance in the loss against Bristol City.", said the BBC website. It's hard to say who emerges from that as the most deluded.

I'm back!

Squarespace were very nice, but they did make some rookie mistakes. Firstly, they asked for money (on the Internet! Can you imagine?), then they turned out to be American. Now this isn't a bad thing in itself, obviously, but they weren't taking any of my English pounds. I emailed them to ask if they would take payment through PayPal, and they very politely emailed me back to say no.

So, hello blog.co.uk, who ask me for no money, and no English money at that. Also, in the backstage post creation bit that you can't see, the formattting toolbar, instead of saying B I U S, says F U K D, which tickled me.

Having saved some of my original postings, I did consider trying to reconstruct some of my previous efforts, but then I thought why bother, you've all read it anyway if you cared, and if you haven't you clearly didn't, so let's let it rot down into the cybermulch covering the e-forest floor.

More soon - after a week off, I'm raring to go.