A Humming Piano and Soccer Stadia

Since the inaugural game between South Africa and Mexico I have determined to plunge wholeheartedly into the World Cup, and so have seen I believe at least two minutes, and read the entire minute-by-minute reports on the guardian.co.uk, for every game so far. J., Ge. and I have taken to reading the reports out loud, by turns, and intoning "Gooooaaal!" in unison whenever it occurs.

I find that it is not making me much wiser as to the rules of the game, strategy, etc., or indeed about soccer in general, but it is interesting nonetheless and I like observing everything. Today I woke up toward the end of the Holland-Denmark match and saw maybe the last ten minutes, watched the Japan-Cameroon game more, and then followed the Italy-Paraguay game for the first half before being forced to desist in the second half because someone thought that an episode of Tatort was must-see television. At which point I threw a play-tantrum and stormed off to find something else to do.

For much of the remaining time the computer which I prefer for internet activities was occupied (by T., unobjectionably dispatching university coursework and being an example to us all). So I nursed a headache with much holding of cool hand to forehead (like a Victorian lady with the vapours, come to think of it), drinking of salted water and a tiny glass of port, lying down, and at long last an aspirin. On the piano I went through the Kinderszenen, other little Schumann works, one of Chopin's Etudes ("Revolutionary," for the first time) and the Raindrop Prelude, a movement or three from Bach Partitas 1 and 3, etc. Last evening I watched music clips from medici.tv's YouTube channel, and even though they were samplers of perhaps three to four minutes' length at most, they were inspiring. (Though I will not be playing a keyboard arrangement of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" any time soon, and listening to the four-piano version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons was like four tiny pneumatic drills taking up residence in my brain; you really need the varied timbre and flexibility of a chamber orchestra to render the music endearingly.)

Then I basted together more of the torn lace in the collar of a nightgown, prepared a fresh batch of homemade moth paper (letter-size printer paper left over from Canada + cloves + dried thyme leaves + considerable smashing so that spice/herb oils soak into paper, dusted off and folded in half and cut into strips to lay in between the clothing), and shook out a pair of pants which had lain in the moth-infested pile. I must find a clever way to store clothing. The best way has the disadvantage of being inelegant and musty, and I am still skeptical if it works; I have not seen a solitary moth in clothes when I bundle them into plastic shopping bags and hang them from doorknobs, our clothes-rack, etc. . . . On second thoughts, my quibbles are insane.

[Pause while I scramble off to remove some of the piled-up clothing into a bag and hang it up.]

Besides I've been going through Teach Yourself Beginner's Latin again, which was one of my projects during the year after high school graduation. I haven't made much progress yet, but most of this is mindless review; for instance the uses of the nominative, accusative, dative, genitive and ablative are still present in my mind even if my knowledge of their endings even in the first and second declensions is faltering. Either way I'm still in the "equus laborat - equi laborant" stage. But I did reach a set of quotations from Latin literature, some of which I already memorized during the gap year and have been pompously citing to Mama when they seem apposite ever since. "Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant," is one, and "O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit, consul videt," is another. But "Verberat nos et lacerat fortuna" can be used in many situations too, and then there's a long one with "Interea Eos"* or something, from Virgil, which though a pain to memorize might replace the refrain of "Cast off the shackles of yesterday" from Mary Poppins as my all-purpose quotation a propos of toil.

*[*cough* I meant "Aurora interea miseris mortalibus," etc. The other quotations are from Tacitus, Cicero, and Seneca, respectively.]

Anyway, to return to the World Cup, I did find the Germany-Australia match last evening very good, and though it irritated me greatly when the ARD channel's commentator kept bemoaning the horridness of the Japan-Cameroon match (now that was a chaotic mess, and I thought it highly unfair that it wasn't a draw because they were both tremendously lousy) especially in comparison to the German performance yesterday, I have to admit that it did set a high bar. Its specific merits: the precision of the passes, intricate set-ups for goal attempts, way in which the players would not just roll the ball to the closest teammate when they were haplessly stuck in midfield but would really look for an opening and also pass the ball far across to a teammate if he was in a good position, clever footwork, and the absence of impatient kicks in the general direction of the goal whenever a forward became tired of fending off the opposing team's defence. It was also a pretty clean game where diving and fouling were concerned. The Australian team was clearly not as good but they didn't give up hope, were fast and reasonably agile, and played in a strong aggressive spirit without committing horrid fouls. (As far as I could tell.) But the straight red card for the Australian Tim Cahill did seem disproportionate and mean.

Where the teams are concerned, I am not "rooting" for any one in particular, though it would be highly reprehensible of me not to support Germany. The three teams which have impressed me are Germany and Argentina and Paraguay, though in the latter case it was admittedly because my expectations had been low. I still dislike Italy's team from the last World Cup, and specifically have not gotten over the resentment about the Materazzi-Zidane incident; besides which I am suspicious about their ethics regarding diving and the like. But if they prove a good team I wouldn't want them to lose unfairly. Altogether I tend to find myself being "for" a team in the course of a match, only to forget all about the preference when someone from the opposite team is launching himself on a good run for the goal.

As for the vuvuzelas, I can still hear them sometimes when I'm not watching the game at all, but for some reason am heatedly in their favour. Having lived in the countryside/suburbs I've been surrounded and menaced by my fair share of buzzing flies and wasps, and have felt a visceral dislike of the noise, but these horn-thingies sound benign and are relatively easy to ignore. Perhaps it's snobbish, but I've never been fond of the mindless colosseum roar anyway. If the horns seriously bother someone, though, I'll understand if they're banned. Anyway, as many others have pointed out, the "expert" soccer commentary on TV is all too often far more irritating, boring, and mindnumbing. And tediously condescending to Africa (which is evidently still considered as a country instead of a continent).