Football, Football, Football

There's way too much of it on TV at the moment. Tonight's a night off, because the BBC could only splash out on the rights to three of this week's four midweek games, but it's still definitely enough to get in the way of all the useful things I could be doing with my time. Or the useless things I do to avoid doing the useful things, anyway.

It's a funny kind of situation, really. Absolutely nobody wants the FA Cup quarter finals to be held midweek, on consecutive days, which forces a few clubs to play two games in three days. But it's part of the squeezing of the football season's fixtures so as to give the England squad four weeks off before the world cup starts. And for TV reasons they can't play all the quarter finals at the same time, and for obvious reasons they can't play them during office hours, so everyone just has to lump it. Spectators aren't happy, managers and players are extremely not happy, and we'll only lose the world cup in an embarrassing kind of way anyway, same as usual.

You might have gathered that I haven't got anything interesting or unusual to talk about tonight. I've got a sore throat and cold, thanks to the germs that have been stampeding around our office for the last week or so, and I'm short of imagination just at the moment.