#oneaday, Day 161: Shouting and Screaming

So England went out of the World Cup today. I’m not going to gloat about that, my feelings on football are well-known and well-documented. What I did want to speak about was how the whole experience made me feel as an outsider who wasn’t watching it and could only hear things.

I was terrified. There is nothing else that you hear in relatively “everyday” life that matches the ferocity of someone shouting at football. When it’s the World Cup or even a European tournament and England are involved, you know who’s watching it, because you can hear something which sounds remarkably like a Spartan army blaring out of their living room. Combine that with those stupid vuvuzelas which everyone claims to be playing ironically and you’ve got a not-terribly pleasant noise for a mild-mannered gent such as myself.

Couple this with the sheer rage shown by people over a disallowed England goal (fair enough, from what I could see from reports after the fact) and you have a large proportion of a nation already fond of binge drinking and casual violence set to explode.

All credit, though, after the match happened, I didn’t hear much in the way of shouting, screaming or violence. I didn’t even hear that many police cars go past. That said, the vast majority of the fans would have been further into the town centre, which is a little further away from me. You could not have paid me to walk into town after the match had finished. Maybe I wouldn’t have been assaulted, shouted at or anything. But it’s a risk that I wasn’t willing to take.

Several thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean, anarchists are rioting in Toronto. Canadians don’t riot. They certainly don’t set fire to police cars and smash shit up. I can’t even begin to imagine how frightening the experience must be for them if I don’t want to leave my house while a bloody football match is going on. I’ll confess to not having paid much attention to the news for the last few days as I’ve had a huge amount of other things on my mind, so I’m not even entirely sure what the riots are about. I could look it up but it’s terribly late. Whatever they’re about, they’re still fucking riots. Those are never good, right?

It’s been a funny day all round really. It’s kind of passed me by, almost. I wrote my articles from my trip earlier, so those should be popping up online very soon all being well. Suffice to say they will be all over Twitter, Digg, N4G and the Squadron of Shame Squawkbox when they are up.

And then tomorrow? Who knows. Each new day is a mystery right now, a face-down card waiting to reveal whatever Fate is going to throw me next. Technically it’s after midnight now, so I should be able to look at the card. But I tend not to find out what it is until the most inconvenient moment.

God-dammit.