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Saturday, June 10th, 2006
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4:03p - World Cup Memories
I spent Thursday wandering 10 miles around Virginia Water. I spent yesterday with Holly travelling around London, despairing at the North London Line, and loving Canary Wharf and the DLR. These, however, can wait until my next entry.
It's the World Cup. I've always had a strange relationship with the World Cup. I couldn't care less about most football: cups, leagues, transfers, it's all bland for me. Yet I still watch WC matches if I can. I've been wondering quite why. I suspect part of it is how the WC is country-based, whilst the usual teams barely represent their home. Which Chelsea players grew up in Chelsea? It might also be through the fervour which grips the world, and I'm looking to see what the fuss is about. Maybe, however, it is to do with the past.
I don't remember the 1990 world cup, nor the 1994 world cup. That of 1998, however, began in a memorable way: it was nearing the end of Year 6, and I was two or three weeks off leaving primary school and going to the scary big school of the Becket. Yet, as England kicked their first ball of the tournament, we were hurtling across Lancashire in a coach bound for the Lake District, in the week-long visit I would remember for years after as the climax of the mid-late 90s. Some of the boys near the back of the coach had it on a small radio, and the driver had it on the radio nearer me, but I found it difficult to hear much. Occassionally, the boys near the back would shout in unision when something happened, as the landscape gradually grew increasingly spectacular. The goal came as we were rounding a cliff entering the Lakelands, and I found the juxtapositon of the football game in France with the Cumbrian scenery outside the windows very strange...
Four years later, and they're at it again, kicking balls all around Asia-Pacific. Owing to the games being screened early in the mornings, I grew into the habit of waking up early, turning the small TV at the end of my bed to the game, and then lying back again, waking up as the game progressed. I found it oddly relaxing, in a similar way to how Formula One can often send me off to sleep. However, school kicked in: four years after primary school, I was now only a few weeks away from moving from the 1960's brick of the main school to the maze of riverside buildings which would host my GCSEs, AS levels and A levels. It was to be another big change, but, still being at the lesser site, I joined a hoarde of screaing pupils to watch the England games projected onto a large screen in the main hall. As I got there early, I never had seating problems, and so could relax...to some extent. The emotion in the hall verged on the extreme, especially when England lost. Oddly enough, the first game of the tournament I watched whilst in Yorkshire, up in the North York Moors with Church youth people (my first trip with them).
So, was I somewhere beautiful when this year's tournament got underway? Oddly enough, I was, although it was the opposite of wide rolling moorland. Below One Canada Square, in London's ultramodern Canary Wharf district, I glanced at the games projected on the screen opposite the restuarant Holly and I were eating at. Outside, business people lay on the lawn to watch the game on the big screen provided by the BBC, as the sun set amongst the mirrored walls of the skyscrapers. This afternoon, I listened to part of the England game on my radio in my room (after waking up terribley late), and watched the rest on the computer in the Queen's Annexe. In a weeks time, I shall have to leave Williamson along with everyone else, and will return home for a while. We move into our new house in Englefield Green on the 10th: the day of the final, no less.
Quite apart from the football, away from the debate over campaigns and referees, the World Cup has become a symbol of the moment for me. Akin to New Years and other ceremonies, the tournament provides a change for me to record a snapshot of my life at the moment, which would invariabley be about to undergo change. The 1994 World Cup came just before I moved to Junior school, and my brother was born only a few months after the 1990 cup. I look forward to 2010, and wonder what the snapshot will record then, as I complete my Masters. Where will I be, who will I be, what will life be like?
Ideal things to muse upon as I watch the ball soar across a field of green for the twentieth time this match.
current mood:  hot
current music: Doctor Who Theme Remixes (5 comments |comment on this)
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