What has happened to this once great country ? From conquering great swathes of the World, taming the wild and belligerent Scots, standing firm against German invasion....We are now a country where the men think it's cool to wear aprons when cooking. The country that invented the crumpet. Where scrambled egg is considered acceptable as a meal. Truly a weak and wishy-washy nation, reflected in the performance of the football team.
Iceland. Plundering and pillaging is in their blood. They live on the sides of volcanoes and eat fermented shark. They can listen to Bjork without wincing. Didn't really stand a chance, did we ? 
With Eileen driving, we fell foul of the authorities not once, but twice. Firstly as we tried to escape from Andorra, Eileen looked dodgy enough to get pulled over by a customs officer. 
As we sat there answering his questions and showing him my ferocious mother-in-law in the back, all manner of far dodgier vehicles were able to sneek through without being stopped.
Further on we can to some sort of accident. Police had coned off one lane. Two vehicles had stopped in a queue. Eileen crossed the solid white line to jump to the front of the queue. This earned him a severe verbal spanking from the grumpy Spanish police officer. We apologised profusely and narrowly escaped a fine.
We had opted for the longer, less windy route. Partly to spare the gearbox and partly because the sat nav wasn't in an adventurous mood today. I'm led to believe the mountain road was truly spectacular, as was Ainsa, the suggested lunchtime destination. A picturesque mediaeval Spanish town with stunning views of the river. We settled for a squalid bar in an uninspiring town instead.
Oto, our home for the night is a tiny little place. In fact, the campsite is probably bigger. The pool was large and inviting, not just to weary travellers but also to thousands of suicidal flies.
With not one, but two football matches lined up, we settled down with some cheap, cold beers to watch Spain go out of the competition.
With England up next, we watched on with rising uncertainty as Spanish TV continued to dissect the Spanish loss. With rising panic as 9pm came and went we appealed to the bar staff, who flicked through a couple of channels and shrugged his shoulders. No football !
We surveyed the technology to hand and came up with a mobile phone to watch it on. 
Surely some sort of fault, it was suggesting the score was already 1-1. It got worse. The small screen failed to show a single England shot on goal all match. I think we had gone to more effort to get the game on than that bunch of spineless gits in the white shirts.
Bed was calling.
No comments:
Post a Comment