choose your distraction

Well, reports of my recov­ery were sad­ly pre­ma­ture: it’s tak­ing me longer to get over this tum­my trou­ble than I would like. The down­side of this is that the fridge is basi­cal­ly emp­ty (I’m not up to drag­ging home heavy bags), and I’m a very bor­ing phone con­ver­sa­tion­al­ist for poor John who’s in New York, because absolute­ly noth­ing is hap­pen­ing to me, flat on my back. The upside of the sit­u­a­tion is that I have learned lots of inter­est­ing things by being stuck watch­ing tele­vi­sion and lis­ten­ing to Avery prat­tle about her life (much more event­ful than mine).

Let’s see: I could nat­ter on about the World Cup! Excite­ment is at a fever pitch in this coun­try, which is just insane for foot­ball. Being an avid read­er of Hel­lo! mag­a­zine all these years you’d think I’d be inter­est­ed in David Beck­ham, but I nev­er have been until see­ing him play. Amaz­ing! So Eng­land had its first game on Sat­ur­day, and imme­di­ate­ly after­ward the nation’s atten­tion turned to tomor­row’s game with… Trinidad and Toba­go. Now how many of you knew that was ONE coun­try? I did­n’t. In the mean­time I have, believe it or not, mar­tyred myself to the Brazil-Croa­t­ia match and the Korea-Togo match. Who knew Togo was a coun­try, and not just Nan­cy Drew’s dog? Since the mot­to of King’s Col­lege Prepara­to­ry school is some­thing along the lines of “Com­pete or Die,” the head­mistress has thought of a way to get the gulls involved with the World Cup. The school is divid­ed, for var­i­ous com­pet­i­tive pur­pos­es, into four “hous­es,” as those of you famil­iar with Har­ry Pot­ter will know. In fact one house is “Pot­ter,” and then there are “Franklin,” for Ros­alind, and “Nightin­gale,” for obvi­ous rea­sons, and then Avery’s house, “Curie.” Nor­mal­ly they com­pete for things like spelling words, speed in pack­ing up the ruck­sack neat­ly, net­ball suc­cess­es, that sort of thing. But to encom­pass the World Cup, which you’d think could not touch a nine-year-old girl, they’ve ran­dom­ly assigned 8 coun­tries to each house, and there is a Dra­con­ian and very amus­ing set of rules that gov­erns what earns house points for which house. I think if a coun­try in Curie’s house gets to the quar­ter-finals there is some point thingy assigned. So all is at a fever pitch.

Then, as you can see from the pho­to above, I have become quite con­cerned about the plight of the grey squir­rel, vic­tim of the much maligned red squir­rel. There is a pub­lic debate about offer­ing a boun­ty on the pelts of red squir­rels in Scot­land (I am not mak­ing this up), so as to pro­tect the grey squir­rels from their fur­ry lit­tle clutch­es. I can just see your aver­age Eng­lish­man, dressed to the teeth in tweeds and armed with a nice Purdey rifle, stalk­ing a red squir­rel in Edin­burgh town cen­tre, for the 2 pound boun­ty that some sci­en­tist has deemed “rea­son­able for an indi­vid­ual pelt.” Then, of course, there is the oppo­si­tion. They claim that it’s a virus or some­thing that’s killing off the grey squir­rels. My favorite line from the whole debate is this, from one of the boun­ty-seek­ers: “To blame this sit­u­a­tion on a virus is mere­ly PLAY­ING INTO THE HANDS of the red squir­rels.” Indeed!

If nei­ther of these top­ics is of inter­est to you, there’s always… Joseph. And his inter­minable, all-con­sum­ing, obses­sive Amaz­ing Tech­ni­col­or Dream­coat. What I do not know about the Hairy Ish­maelites and Joseph’s nasty slav­ery-lov­ing broth­ers, not to men­tion the hot-to-trot Potiphar’s Wife and her unap­pre­cia­tive but clingy hus­band, is not worth know­ing. The rehearsals are tak­ing the place of many school activ­i­ties like any­thing that involves actu­al learn­ing, and Avery’s crush on Edwina, the Form Six girl who plays one of the leads, is tak­ing up a lot of the fam­i­ly ener­gy. The actu­al per­for­mance is on Sat­ur­day, after which I think we will all col­lapse in a Lloyd-Web­ber-induced cata­ton­ic state. But they are very proud of what they’re about to per­form, and it will be won­der­ful to see it all come to a head, after such devot­ed preparation.

Well, I’m sor­ry to say that I’m ail­ing, so I shall go put my feet up with a nice iced green tea with a shot of pep­per­mint (go, Star­bucks!), and reach for… the click­er. I’ll let you know if there’s any news on the squirrels.