a blog about a lot of things

Rome is a cliché. Usually that isn’t a good thing but when the cliché is that a city is cool, full of life and gorgeous, the clichés can stay. Rome is possibly the only European capital that can claim to rival Paris in the popular imagination in terms of having an expectation around it. Even Paris is now succumbing to parallel narratives due to the sheer size of the city (much like London), with the immigrant experience less of an unknown story (to non-immigrants anyway. Immigrants always knew it wasn’t cities paved with gold they’d find). Some combination of smaller population, less immigration and the weight of centuries of civilization being still visible across the city has allowed Rome to actually deserve the tag of “The Eternal City”.   My idea of Rome comes to me primarily from Italian films of the 1960s. Rome is black and white in my mind just as it is on Fellini’s film reel. I had low expectations. Months in London had allowed cynicism to set in...

I like World Cup, quite a lot, and think it's the best of all the tournaments that exist in football and very possibly in all of sport (at least for any tournament focused on one sport since the Olympics is amazing because of the variety). So I'll be trying to figure out how likely each team is to get out of the group stages and how far they'll probably go if they do. All the odds are from  www.bet365.com  which is the site I use most for trend spotting in sport (it's like my sport-Bloomberg). Group C Colombia - The injury of Falcao has reduced Colombia from being able to potentially match any team in the world (by outscoring them while conceding a lot of goals probably. The defence isn't the best) to being another team teams would rather avoid but no longer fear. Even though he's expected to go to the World Cup, he's not fully fit and well short of any match experience. Many of Colombia's players are playing in Europe and should have exp...