England are playing, and for the first time in this World Cup I'm in England and could therefore, in principle, voice something resembling support for my national team with only a marginal chance of being beaten up (as opposed to a slightly-less-marginal-than-I'd-like chance up in Glasgow). Unfortunately, I'm on a train, speeding to London.
Hence the amusing but somewhat frustrating scene of an entire carriage full of people, all waggling radios around trying to find anything like a stable signal. We have, collectively, no idea of the score at all.
It's rather delightfully like being back in the Victorian era, when communications consisted of a small boy in a uniform running the length of the country with a slip of paper. It's also rather discouragingly like the same, as we wait for somebody to board the train at Rugby and dribble us some information. If only I'd caught the GNER train to King's Cross, I could have coughed up for broadband... and then spent the journey waggling my PowerBook around and cursing the hopelessly inadequate bandwidth. Which doesn't seem much like progress.
I'm guessing that by the next time this rolls round, in 2010, things will be different. Hopefully?
