World Cup Woe.

I only watch one TV programme as a matter of routine, and tonight it was displaced to make way for the football World Cup draw. Why? Why does the BBC do this when the full draw results are available on the BBC Sport website within minutes of it being made? I expect there will be complaints, and I expect they will be ignored because the prospect of vicarious success has long been one of the greatest narcotics to which the human animal is ensnared.

But this is just the start. The competition will begin in November, at which point the thoroughfares of Britain – both vehicular and pedestrian – will become heavily laden with drunken, noisy, brain dead idiots resembling rampaging howler monkeys on speed. And if you decline to join them because you regard football as merely one of life’s moderately interesting diversions and nothing more, you will be treated with suspicion at best. In some people’s eyes, declining to drug the dog, lock the baby in a sound proof room, and send the wife to her mother’s for a month so you can settle in an armchair surrounded by large bags of salt-and-fat laden comestibles and at least ten cans of cheap lager makes you no less than a traitor to your country.

Previous World Cups have been relatively untroubled where I live in the countryside. Here’s hoping.