Falling out of love

Something rather alarming and depressing has happened to me over the past couple of months - I've fallen out of love with the beautiful game. I first realised this when I sat down last Saturday and tried to remember when the last time was that I'd settled down in front of the telly and watched Match of the Day on the Beeb.

It certainly wasn't last week, it definitely wasn't the week before, and I'm pretty confident it wasn't the two or three weeks before them either. This was a pretty shocking revelation, but then I thought about some other supposed facts about my love of football.

I rarely read about it in the papers anymore, instead making a beeline for the rugby, cricket and motorsport sections instead. I only check Football365 as a cursory measure, and really can't be bothered with the 'famous mailbox' anymore. And I've stopped checking the scores on a Saturday or even Sunday evening to see how teams including my own are getting on.

So it's official, I've fallen out of love with football, and I'm pretty sure I know why - it's stopped being a sport and become nothing more than a tradeable commodity. The players salaries to be certain, are obscene, but it's not that which really grates at me.

My big turn-off is that football clubs are no longer football clubs - they're assets, investment vehicles, billionaires playthings, ruled by 'leveraging', 'refinancing' and now today, 'administration'. As if that wasn't enough, my aforementioned own team now devote their entire front page of their website to advertising an 'exclusive' club credit card.

I'm not saying other sports are necessarily better - F1 has been operating on silly money for years, but at least it's trying to address this and make the sport more affordable for teams to enter by slashing budgets.

And then there's the final nail in the coffin for me - football has just become so utterly, utterly predictable and boring. Much has been made this season about the 'fight for fourth place' in the Premier League and how this has reinvigorated the competition and created fresh interest.

The race for fourth place has made it interesting?

Enough said.

The Tube

When I moved to London, I spent the first 3 months or so resembling every tourist that ever visits Britain's capital - I was fascinated by the Tube.

I couldn't quite get my head round the idea that here was a fully fledged railway, underground, in the dark, with long-closed stations, mysterious sidings and an army of workers who dedicated their late nights and weekends to keeping it running.

Gradually though, I became a Londoner like everyone else. I stopped staring at the tube map in awe, I stopped enjoying looking out of the train windows at the mile upon mile of cables running in dark, tight tunnels and I stopped being curious about how it could all ever really work.

Instead, I started to become annoyed by the delays, frustrated at having to bend my body in any number of ways to fit on the carriage and tired of playing flank forward in a game of rugby every time I wanted to get on or off at rush hour.

In short, I forgot how wondrous and marvellous and unique the Tube actually is.

But then, last week, something rekindled my intrigue and love of the tube - I got on a brand new train on the Victoria line. Not only was it incredibly well lit, bright, welcoming and (most important of all) spacious, but it was smooth and there was no shrieking noise as it went round corners.

This prompted me to crack out the trusty Wikipedia and do a bit of research. Apparently, we've had the same trains on the Victoria line ever since it first opened. In 1967. That means they've been pounding the line between Brixton and Walthamstow for 43 years. That's almost twice my age, which frankly is frightening and yet marvellous at the same time.

Now though, they're finally about to enjoy their retirement. And good luck to them, because they've earnt it.

Other blogs - part two

As I mentioned previously, I'm determined, though hamstrung, in my effort to find other blogs to read. So it was with great delight today that I read a colleague's first entry on the subject of all things cricket.

Fingers crossed he keeps writing, because the first post is a good read, and as he said to me shortly after my reading it, "I'm well into this blogging lark, it's great fun!"

So here it is:

Brussels

I went to Brussels for the first time ever last week. In fact it was a journey of firsts - first time in Brussels, first time in Belgium and first time on Eurostar. For someone who's done quite a lot of America and the Caribbean, I'm suprisingly poorly travelled on my home continent, so this was quite a big deal for me.

In one way, I could sum up the 24 hour trip as thus: tube, train, taxi, hotel, sister office, client office, taxi, train, tube, bus, home. That's actually a pretty accurate description, which meant the only bits of Brussels I really got to see were a long straight road with offices on it, a couple of motorways, and a fairly average train station and hotel.

So yes, that's one way to describe it, but it doesn't really include the real story - the fun and interesting bits from my perspective, of which there were three.

Firstly, Eurostar. Despite the fact that it has a habit of breaking down whenever the temperature gets a tad nippy, it's always held an aura of mystique for me. What I was particularly excited about was the idea of travelling at 186mph - the fact I've been on a plane going three times as fast didn't really compare with the idea of watching the countryside whizzing by at unbelievable speed.

In the end, I was actually a bit disappointed, only because 186mph didn't look that different from 125mph that Britain's best trains trundle along at. But even then I got a suprise out of the journey - the Channel Tunnel freaked me out. I'm not normally claustrophobic, but the idea of being under the sea for 30-odd minutes in a tunnel had a strangely unnerving effect on me. I definitely want to do it again though.

The second thing was the hotel bar. I've never quite worked out the economics of these places - they get 10 customers a night at best, employ a couple of staff and don't charge overly outrageous price, but still exist. What they do do fantastically well is bring people together. And so it was that I spent a great evening with one colleague I vaguely knew, one I'd never met, and one I'd spoken to for the first time on the phone barely two days previously (the Hoegaarden may or may not have helped with this).

And thirdly was meeting the prospective client we'd come several hundred miles at 186mph to see. The best thing about my job is having to learn a hell of a lot about something in a wonderfully short time - it's a bit like cramming for an exam that you've missed all the lectures for and have a week to shove as much information down your throat as possible.

The other thing I love about this is that when you meet these prospective clients, you're struck by just how much they know about their company, and how much they care about it all. It's brilliant just to sit in the room observing and interacting with this and I don't think I'll ever get bored of it.

So perhaps instead of summing up the trip as I have done above, I should instead do it like this:

Super fast train, scray tunnel, social bliss aided by alcohol and neverending awe at knowledge and the passion behind it - now that's what I call a trip.