A Most Confusing Evening

There was supposed to be nothing happening in the EuroCopa yesterday and the day before. So MamaDuck and I decided that we would go to the Writerz Groop last night after she finished work. As it turned out, she had an almost total no-show and so her last class was cancelled. I was mooching around town, and had just bought the DVD of 'The Golden Compass'. We tried to see this film around Christmas time, but it was only on at one V.O. cinema, and only for about 2 showings. When we turned up for the second one they'd changed the timing and we'd bloody missed it. Ah well.

Anyhoo, we had some time to kill before the Writerz Groop, so we went into a bar. To our astonishment, there was football on one of the tellies. It was Spain versus Russia, and Spain were winning. But the sound was off, and nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention. We were totally baffled: I was sure this game was supposed to happen on Thursday. We decided to leave at half-time, jump into a taxi and go home to watch the rest of it with the sound turned up.

So, we got home, I set up the telly on the terrace, and furiously zapped the zapper to find the match. Couldn't find it - surely it's not just on satellite channels? And then we checked the Internet. There were no games scheduled for Tuesday night. Spain play Russia on Thursday. Eventually we realised - what we'd seen was a repeat of the group stage match between Russia and Spain - I'd already forgotten that match (very easy to do when you reach my age), and had assumed that only a dimwit would organise a tournament in such a way that the same two teams could play each other twice. Bummer.

Having got the telly all set up, I decided that I would watch The Golden Compass, which is based on the first part of Philip Pullman's brilliant 'His Dark Materials' trilogy. I re-read the trilogy a month ago, and I think this probably spoilt the film for me because the story was fresh in my mind, and so the mangling and omissions in the movie were quite apparent. I'll be generous and say the film was 'a huge disappointment'.