At the risk of alluding to some of the more unsavoury elements of the beautiful game, Euro 2016 has well and truly kicked off in France. Hundreds of thousands of pairs of eyes will be glued to screens, large and small and I suppose that I too will get caught up in the clamour and emotion of it all. I am actually not a massive football fan. I support West Ham but my indifference serves me well. We are used to dreaming big and watching bubbles burst. It sort of goes with the territory.
But hey, England seem to be in with a chance this time around. Harry Kane, Jamie Vardy, Marcus Rashford and that other one, all seem to have the skill, drive and minerals to propel us towards a semi-final at least. Which really would be cause for celebration. Otherwise, I may be faced once again with the prospect of consoling my neighbour, who is footie mad and was very upset when England got dumped out of Euro 2012 on penalties, by Italy. I still remember spotting him over the fence on his patio, slumped in a chair, with the faintest trail of a tear on his cheek. I tried to offer him a mini pork pie to cheer him up, but it didn’t work. To be fair, it wasn’t really that nice. It had been a hot day, if I recall rightly, and the pie had been lounging on a platter in the front room for far too long whilst the game was on. The pie was, how to describe it, moist and fairly mushy.