Fearing the score

I spent this last weekend in the Megalong Valley with friends for a Yuletide thingy. It is a bit of a tradition, involving Christmas dinner, lots of mulled wine (not that kind shroom) - in fact, about 6 litres of it, plus plenty of gin, wine women and song. Actually, nobody sang, but there were women there.

The Megalong Valley is very long, although it appears that it wasn't named by an impressed teenager. It also gets no TV reception, so one of the guys Gary (of German descent, no less) who has recently acquired a set top box, decided to record the weekend's World Cup matches and watch them when he got home last night.

Unfortunately for him, the Valley (as the locals call it - ok, I have no idea what they call it) does have patchy radio reception, so it took little time for the rest of us to know the results and scores. There were upsets, so of course a lot of conversation about the games, despite the fact that none of us actually saw them. With the scores involved, it seemed that some of the games must have been fascinating, others less so, but all fuel for discussion nonetheless.

Then there was poor Gary. The rest of the weekend involved giving him so much grief that I suspect the Geneva Convention may have been violated. Measures included drawing implications from the colours of peoples' clothing ("gosh, you are wearing a yellow t shirt with those jeans - you must have been gutted with the result last night" or "oh look, that jacket is green and red - aren't they the colours of Portugal?") right through to arranging his 1 year old son's food on his tray so that they just maybe showed F1 B0.

I guess you had to be there, as all ended in Gary spending most of the weekend running around with his hands over his ears chanting "la la la la la" - to our endless amusement. But even in the midst of fairly drunken wandering about the homestead with drink in hand and bon-bon Christmas hat in place, we didn't tell him the scores. Well, we did, along with about 45 other scores, so he happily went home and watched the games last night. The pugs and I made an executive decision to watch the replay yesterday afternoon - I think I fell asleep before they did. I did get up to play basketball though - aren't you glad I shared.

So I survived a weekend without the TV, or the X Box, but the question now is - who will take it out? Not the garbage, the Cup?