Finally the biggest debate in soccer was about to be settled, who is best at football Algeria or Slovenia? The world was waiting on tenterhooks to find out. And it turned out one of them was better. I canât remember which one. I tuned out a bit to be honest. But one of these useless sides had a green kit and I wondered if maybe England might be able to win some games if they had a kit that was exactly the colour of the grass, so they were camouflaged and invisible. This would have the slight drawback that they might not be able to pass to each other, but they arenât very good at that anyway. And also that would only camouflage them from the cameras, so theyâd have to paint their skin green and crawl on the floor and encourage groundsmen to let the grass grow very high. But it might work. We need all the help we can get, let's face it. I mentioned the idea on Twitter and all kinds of people came up with ways to improve and refine the plan. @simonjenkin said "Make them paint their faces like footballs. Then they'll be REALLY invisible. And it would confuse the other team." Which might also lead to some nice facial injuries and if we did it in the next game we might find a lot of the England players using it as an excuse to kick Robert Green in the face until it is all broken and bloodied and he is dead.
It was fun avoiding work (which as per was progressing slowly - I was ever so tired) and gave me at least one idea for the show, though there was not much more than this in the script even though I sat in the attic all day trying to think of stuff. Having done the writing on a Monday last week my brain was now playing chicken with me and trying to leave it all later still.
More prevarication came when I ended up inadvertently becoming engaged to comedian Josie Long who was encouraging women to keep their maiden names (though she didn't use that wonderfully archaic term) when they got married. I said that married people should combine surnames which would make us Mr and Mrs LongHerr or Herrong and somehow this ended up as a proposal, which was casually accepted and even though I believe we are both very happy with our current partners we are going to have to go through with the thing. It's even on my wikipedia page. And you can't fight that.
I ended the day hoping that tomorrow would not be the day that AIOTM became an embarrassing failure. But to be honest that has been true of every Sunday before every show.
Fingers crossed.
