It’s one thing to think about it, another to write about it and quite another to try to execute it.
In fact I very nearly executed myself with my latest escapade into the sporting world of Peru.
Yesterday was not a great day all round.
Salvador got a bash on the head while I was in charge in the morning.
That sort of thing never goes down well.
In the afternoon I scored one good goal with my head and drifted off into a wonderland where I had the lungs of an elephant and the muscles of a bodybuilder.
Two minutes of that and I was hacking and wheezing like I’d just smoked sixty Senior Service.I’d also forgotten the unpleasant taste of blood that is your saliva’s reward for playing at altitude.
Esther and Salvador had made the trip up the mountain with us and managed about and hour and a half before Esther decided they should go home.
How did I know Esther didn’t take the door-keys?
I soldiered on oblivious and without my moral support with energy continuing to seep from my system.I missed chance after chance, my only enjoyment coming from a donkey which brayed in the field above us, his eeyore’s echoing around the natural bowl we were playing in.
Perhaps it was an informed comment on my fading ability or maybe he just didn’t want to end up dismembered and marched around Cusco.
By the time my self imposed torture was over we had been playing for three hours.
Unknown to me, for half of that time, Esther had been pacing up and down in Cabracancha and visiting Jane in the hope that I was about to turn up.
As soon as I felt the keys in my pocket on the way back I knew that trouble was brewing.
On arrival at the café Esther let me have it with both barrels.
Why had I let her go without the keys etc.
By this time my body and bones had truly given up and I wasn’t in the mood to argue.
I had a bath, went to bed and pondered my retirement from the not-so beautiful game.
I woke up this morning feeling like I had slept on a bench at Paddington Station (just like in 1982).
Somehow I got myself into a vertical position and staggered to the bathroom.
I am told they play every Saturday, temptation is not knocking very hard at the moment.
The weather has been terrible all day, relentless rain.
This climate meant the Sunday papers didn’t make it from Lima because Cusco airport was closed.
In Swindon the only way the papers wouldn’t turn up would be the paper boy falling off his bike or in Sunningdale Road if the paper ‘boy’ was reading his telegram from the Queen again.
I had to use the internet instead and wished I hadn’t as I saw in the opinion polls that ‘Nationalist’ candidate Ollanta Humala is heading the field.
Humala’s ‘make it up as you go along’ policies have the potential to send Peru back to the 1980’s where the queues for sugar went round the block.
One other thing I did enjoy was watching the video of the ‘News of the World’s’ sting on Sven.
His attitude just about sums up everything that is wrong with football and the shaggers club at the FA are just as bad for giving him that daft contract.
Even if he wins the World Cup, his seedy route to glory will still be remembered.