Something might happen

I will, it seems, watch just about anything.

Not content with having recently wasted significant hours of my life staring at the wet grass broadcast on ITV when England were supposed to be losing to Poland last Tuesday, it seems I am now spending my time watching stationary doors and rotating swirly patterns accompanied by undeniably-riveting phrases such as ‘Preparing Windows’ and ‘Getting your devices ready’. Indeed. Wouldn’t want to miss that.

Who else joined me last Tuesday in enduring an hour or so of Chiles and co commentating on the wetness of the grass and the openness of the roof that surely should have been closed many hours earlier? Yes, Adrian, it most certainly should have been closed – I am with you there and I would suspect most of the country were too. We were with you for the first non-bounce of the ball that indicated we should all be changing channel as soon as our fingers have finished tapping away our frustrations on Twitter. We were even with you when you sought to speculate as to when this match might actually go ahead. But why, oh why, did we stick with you for a single second more, especially when there was a good old tussle going on between Belgium and Scotland on a channel sporting far drier grass than anything Warsaw was able to offer? Especially since there was enough good old English rain to look at through the window if we began to miss the Polish variety.

And then this morning, as I sat down for a leisurely post-9.30am breakfast, I found my eyes transfixed not by the oaty goodness contained within my bowl but by the close-up shot of a rather impressive looking door. A door that, we were informed, would soon see the arrival of George Entwistle, Director-General of the BBC. This was, I’m sure you will agree, quite a privileged door.

Debate was rife:

- would he stop to speak to the press?

- would he be alone?

- would he use his left or right hand to open the door?

- would he offer a conciliatory turn, smile and ambiguous right-hand gesture that we could draw all sorts of wild conclusions from?

- would he miss the door entirely and become the first man on TV to walk through a brick wall?

I was hooked.

Then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any more exciting, I returned from a brief break to discover the ‘Breaking News’ on Sky that he was ‘looking forward’ to the meeting. This was indeed breaking news and I wondered just how many minutes of this defining moment in history I had missed when I naively chose to get changed at that exact time. If only I had heard him say those words in person rather than having to settle for second best of seeing them recorded on the yellow bar scrolling across my screen. Such experiences are sent to try us, no doubt.

Needless to say, I watched the entire duration of his questioning, nodding and shaking my head where appropriate and only pausing briefly to fuel up on coffee to get me through the remaining minutes.

In fact, that is not actually the complete picture because I succeeded in multi-tasking in my devotion to whatever is put on a screen in front of me by spending a considerable number of minutes watching my laptop inform me that Windows was ‘finalizing my settings’. Mainly, I was furious that ‘finalising’ had been spelt with a ‘z’ and found it hard to look away from such a blatant Americanism but I have to confess that it was hard to tear myself away from the screen just in case something new happened. Sure, that new thing would probably only be ‘preparing’ or ‘initializing’ (again with a rogue ‘z’) but at least it would be different and if there’s one thing that excites a man who’s spent the past 5 and a half weeks at home recovering from an operation then it’s the prospect of change.

Change did come after a surprisingly-large number of minutes and all seems to be well with the new (trial) Windows 8 software at the moment. I have torn myself away from loading screens and doors and am free to resume my refreshing of email, Twitter and Facebook. Or perhaps I’ll even go as far as to write a blog post and continue with my play this afternoon so that I can hold my head high when my wife returns from work this evening?

Well, I suppose part one of the plan is now complete. On with the play…