Hotel Hypocrisy

Sorry I didn't post anything last night like I promised - the planned moving of the servers down to Burton has been postponed, so we're staying in Cheadle for another week. What's more, I might miss tomorrow night too, since I'm staying over in Cambridge after the othello, so as to meet up with Jenny on the Sunday. Although I might find an internet cafe and bring you all up to date on the othello world, devoted readers.

Or you can just wait a year or so and see the movie - Nick will be filming me there, probably (we haven't actually arranged to meet anywhere, but I'm sure we'll manage to get together somehow - I object on principle to phoning the guy up to make sure he's going to make a film about me, it just sounds a bit desperate for the fame and glory...)

Anyway, this last-minute-ish change of plans (well, actually I'd been thinking of staying overnight anyway, to avoid the football fans who always share the trains from Cambridge to Derby at that time of night - there's invariably a match somewhere in the country with away fans who use that route) meant finding a hotel in Cambridge, and annoyingly enough my first choice is fully booked.

Sleeperz, while I'm on the subject, is the best hotel in Cambridge by far. It's literally right next door to the train station, it's staggeringly cheap, and much much nicer than any hotel that charges so little has any right to be. I discovered it one night many years ago, when my train was delayed by something like three hours due to a fatality on the line (this happens to me surprisingly often) and I couldn't face looking for the B&B I'd booked on a cold late night. And I've been a big fan ever since.

But seeing as it was full up this time round, I had to find another, and so I decided to splash out on an expensive one in the city centre. Then I remembered that the last time I booked a hotel and wrote about it here, I decided to splash out on a relatively expensive one for once too. Obviously, despite my mental image of myself, I'm not the kind of person who stays in cheap hotels after all. I'm the kind of fat cat who squanders his hard-earned cash on posh hotels and extravagant luxuries when it could be used to better the human condition. I mean, £80 for a night, it's disgraceful. Daylight robbery of the kind that happens at night, and I'm giving it my enthusiastic endorsement. Ah well.

It has robbed me of the wee bit of sense I had

So as I was saying last night, football. I do like watching football, and while you might say to that 'so what', I think that's something that's still worthy of comment. For all that it's the most popular sport in the world, I think a clear majority of the people I like to hang out with don't like the game. It's a matter of principle for a lot of people, a way of emphasising how they're different from the masses, but I think they're missing a treat. It does make me wonder, though - I'm a self-confessed nerd, and proud of it, and in theory I should go on at length to anyone who'll listen to me about how I have more intellectual things to do with my time than watch stupid games like football. I could say that whole speech off by heart, actually, having heard it so many times from my nerdy friends.

The nerds who do like football generally like it in a nerdy way - they memorise the winners and runners-up of every FA Cup in history, can tell you how many consecutive seasons Arsenal have spent in the top division and who came third in the fourth division in 1977. And then they fall asleep if they ever find themselves having to sit through an actual game.

But I'm quite prepared to make a stand on this point - footy is great. If I ever have to miss Match of the Day on a Saturday night, I get all grumpy about it. I'd go to live games every other weekend if there was one within cycling distance that didn't charge as much as Derby County do. There are very few things in this country as exciting as watching a good game of football, and anyone who refuses to watch a game on the grounds that they're too clever gets the same withering stare from me that I normally reserve for people who refuse to read the Harry Potter books because they're so popular.

Obviously the moral is that I should stop hanging out with nerds and start associating with different social circles, but football fans scare me.