RESPECT WHO?

Many, many apologies for leaving you blog-less for so many days. I was away on a short break and then had to catch up with what I hadn’t done while I was away and there’s only 24 hours in every day and I was really, really tired and the politicians aren’t doing anything to inspire me and … well, you know what I mean.

Bottom-line, I didn’t write.

And then on Wednesday, I was all geared up to fire off a few well-chosen words, having put my Saturday column to bed and watched Chelsea get past that most formidable of opponents, Barca.

Buzz, wrong answer.

I suppose I should have seen it coming. After that ludicrous sending-off of Fletcher in the Man U game (who I would be supporting in the final were it not for the smug triumphalism demonstrated by a few of their fans after Chelsea got eliminated) it was clear that very few referees are intellectually and physically capable of keeping up with some of the best teams in Europe, and therefore the world.

When you have teams of the calibre of the four semi-finalists on show, you don’t put on officials from third-world backwaters like Norway expect them not to make a spheres-up of their job. I mean, four clear penalties denied by that morally challenged unter-mensch is enough to make one wonder whether UEFA deliberately tries to do things that irritate people (to put it mildly)

How can you respect someone who hardly seems to know which orifice produces the exhalation needed to blow a whistle?

And it’s not only Chelsea that suffered at this idiot’s hands, of course. Barca’s player should never have been sent off.

But what the heck, it’s only a game.

Equally a silly game seems to be this swine-flu thing. I’m not of a scientific bent, by any means, but for the life of me (and that could be blackly prophetic, when you think about it) I can’t see what all the fuss is about.

OK, fine (or not, if you see what I mean) a number of people died in Mexico and that’s obviously very serious and all that, but everywhere else, at least at the time of writing this blog, people seem to get slightly poorly and then get well again.

So what’s the big fuss? People get the flu all the time, they almost die (if they’re men) or shrug and get on with it if they are super-beings (i.e. women) and then they get better.

Is this a case of the various jobsworths concerned doing their best to avoid anyone having even the slightest of excuses to point fingers? Or is it another case of the media having nothing better to do than churn up a story, in order to sell the news.

Just as they did when that sad chav, Jade Goody, kicked the bucket. The death of a young mother is sad always, and I’m full of admiration for the woman in the way she milked her celebrity for all it was worth in order to provide for her young sons, but for the sake of all that’s beautiful, which she was not, what made her a celebrity?

She was, not to put too fine a point on it (I’m using that phrase way too much) quite a number of Big Macs short of a Happy Meal in the IQ department. In itself, this is no crime (half the population would be banged up if it were) but this woman, Lord love us, was elevated to Princess Dianahood by a media that seems to have taken leave of its senses.

A role model? Jane Goody? Get outta here, that’s like saying that the moron Ovrebo is a fine upstanding example of the refereeing fraternity, rather than a prime candidate for committal to the outer darkness.