It was an exciting long weekend! Half of Cyprus was in Athalassa Park, eating tomatoes and cucumbers (which naturally made for exciting news interviews on Monday evening). And everybody else was in Limassol at the carnival party. Wow! I have to say neither option appealed to me personally. Being a Brit, I should naturally have spent the long weekend doing DIY but I didn’t. When everyone one else is out of town, it is best to stay in and catch up with the TV.
The only problem is that the TV is so rubbish. The only decent thing on any channel, ever, is football. An whenever I can’t find anything to watch, (which happens regularly), I have to suffer people in my family channel hopping and trying to find a film on TCM that I might like to watch. For some reason they just can’t understand that it is never going to happen; I have seen them all too many times and most of them were not that good the first time round.
The alternative on Monday night was watching some NBA basketball game while waiting for the weekend’s football highlights to start 45 minutes late! What is the point of watching basketball, I ask you? There is more time out than time in and the half-naked women on the sidelines jumping up and down, waving silly pom-poms is just another mindless distraction. We kept waiting for it to finish, thinking there was only 90 seconds left but after ten minutes I gave up and went to bed. I realised what a pathetic game this is, only 4 x 12 minute quarters, so many rules and it goes on and on and on….. Every time someone moves they seem to foul someone and demand a timeout so that they can go to the coach and get some support! These guys really need to grow up; they are big enough!
Football, on the other hand, is a game worth watching and films with a football theme, great! I took the opportunity over the weekend to catch up on a fab film that I had been meaning to watch for a while: Looking for Eric. An uplifting British film, directed by ken Loach, which, in itself, is something worth seeing. A sad postman called Eric (living in Manchester of course) sorts out his dysfunctional life and dysfunctional kids through his love of football and with the advice and help of his footballing hero, the talented and philosophical Eric Cantona.
It was the best thing I did all weekend. As the great Eric Cantona says: ‘When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea’. Work that one out!
