He always wanted to be Captain Galaxy

As David Beckham goes to Los Angeles hooking up with LA Galaxy, to spend the twilight of his career in the summer, it seems apt to imagine a scene two years from now, when an excitable young football fan meets a gnarled Becks, and so to paraphrase the film Sunset Boulevard (that street of broken LA youth and dreams):
"You're David Beckham. You used to be big."
Beckham - "I am still big. It's the pitches that got smaller."

When Beckham was going through the contract negotiations with LA Galaxy, I can see him raising his little pinkie to the corner of his lips and telling Galaxy's representatives
"I will move to your team for one million dollars! Mwha, ha ha, ha!"
His eye-patched adviser (Pina Zahavi?) whispers into Beckham's ear. Beckham looks puzzled, a quizzical aspect sagging his face. Then he turns back to Galaxy's reps.
"Ah yes, one million dollars a week!"
To recoup the £128 million they are paying him over five years, Anschutz Entertainment Group - the people who patronised John Prescott (it's so easy) at a ranch - are going to have milk every last shirt sale.


Today, I disposed of my David Suchet cinematic collection. Executive Decision and A Perfect Murder were among those videos surplus to requirements. It is odd that while in Britain we think of Suchet as Belgian, portraying the 'leetle grey cells' of Hercule Poirot or the bumbling Belgian police chief in the earlier Poirot series, in the USA they primarily see him as an Arab - the fanatical terrorist who won't even listen to his boss or as a sympathetic Arab-American police lieutenant. It is such cultural differences that underline our separateness from those across the pond.