I popped out to the Royal Standard yesterday. Hardly a surprise I will grant you, but I stayed longer than I had intended because they were showing the Wales Poland game. "Wales suffer Nations League relegation after Karol Swiderski pounces for Poland." Boo! Cries of "shame."
The devil, as ever, is in the details. The pub was showing S4C's coverage in Welsh. The Standard, for all that it is in the 'Wood, is so Irish it is more like Oirish, and my Oirish DNA thrilled and trilled. What could be more Irish than an expat pub in England showing the footie in Cymraeg?
In a not unrelated development, when I heard the news on Radio 4 this morning their pronunciation of "Giorgia Meloni" sounded more like "Georgia Maloney" to me. I spent several fruitless but imaginatively rewarding minutes wondering how an Irish lady had managed to be elected as the head of the most right-wing Italian government since Mussolini. "We might disagree politically," I remember thinking, "but praise where it is due, the colleen must have something about her to be sure."
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