I'm Forever Blowin' Bubbles...

Aaaand we've caught up! Hurrah...

That's probably the only thing worth cheering about, however. The new Premier League season started this weekend, so naturally I was in a breathless state of anticipation...oh, who am I kidding? I couldn't give a monkey's uncle, really, although I always check up on the scores at least, in order to celebrate the triumph of my team. Sadly for me, I'm a West Ham supporter...I'm not holding my breath for any particular glory this season; it'd be nice if we managed to stay somewhere near the middle of the table.

So, played one, lost one. Quite badly. To Aston Villa. And to top it all off, our next match is against Bolton, who have the curious knack of always being able to unsettle us and whup us when necessary. I want to be able to state, with complete and utter confidence, that we will stay up again this season; that the relegation zone is not something we need to worry about; that we will finish, at worst, mid-table...but then the cold, cruel clarity of "real life" drops in and I get the distinctly dubious feeling, a prickle at the back of my neck, that this time next year we may well be in the Championship...

Ah well, what do I care? West Ham won the World Cup in '66, and we had Bobby Moore. All the rest is just dreaming...all together now..."I'm forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air..."

Star Light, Star Bright...

**NOTE: I am playing catch-up after the sudden and inexplicable demise of my interwebz for a few days. This was written on the 12th**

So I waited up this evening to see if I could spot the Perseid meteor shower, which apparently is at its most visible between 10.30pm and 11.00pm. (I also have a sneaky suspicion that said meteor shower may be responsible for the fact that my broadband appears to have gone stupid again, but I shall reserve my judgement on this matter as it was playing silly arses a few weeks ago and then sorted itself out, so who knows what’s going on?) As it is, I have become resigned to blogging in Word until such time as my poxy internet decides to play ball…I digress. Back to the meteor shower…

Despite the fact that I am completely shattered this evening, I sat through the grim death-and-destruction reporting on the news (getting very angry and trying not to shout at the telly when some of the stories and the reporting wound me up) because I am a sucker for a shooting star, and the thought of seeing loads of the sparkly things got me all excited. There's something almost magical about shooting stars; it stems back to my childhood, I think, when I lived and died by the ancient rhyme "star light, star bright, first star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight". If you made the wish on a shooting star, it was all the more certain to come true. And I know that they’re meteors and not stars, but one lump of space rock is very much like another…There's something inexplicably beautiful about these lumps of space rock, though, and they are a timely and not altogether eerie reminder that the universe is so, so much greater than our little planet. We are not alone in this vastness of space - and I'm not talking about the possibility of finding little green men on Mars or those weird bug-eyed monsters I saw on some crap American documentary once. Space is too huge for us to be 'alone' in that sense, but one of the things we are definitely certain about, even if we find it hard to fathom, is that there are an awful lot of lumps of space rock floating around up there; some of them bigger and some of them smaller than our own lump, but all of them infinitely capable of doing us some damage.

Christ, I think I've seen Armageddon too many times...Right then, time to go and see if we can see some sparklies up there!!

******20 minutes later******

Well, that was a total let down. It’s cold, it’s wet and so cloudy that you couldn’t see so much as an aeroplane going overhead, never mind a meteor shower. And the weather forecast doesn’t look that much better for tomorrow, so it may be that I miss it again tomorrow night. No wishing on a star for me tonight...all this and Sexy Becks has been dropped from the England team…screw you, Fabio, he’s the best player we’ve got and if you can’t see that then I’m starting to wonder whether giving you a second chance as manager was such a good idea…ho hum…