Apropos le weekend et tout le monde

Well, it was three goals from the Three Lions against Zion. Fairly routine really but it released one pressure valve. I was also pleased by the limited and muted booing of the Israeli national anthem by some of the boneheads that call themselves England fans. If only we could make general xenophobia as unacceptable as anti-semitism, since the crowd response to the Israeli's patriotic tune explodes the myth that the mocking is 'just a bit of fun', since if that were the case it would have got the same treatment as all the other foreign anthems. Can't we take pride in our own anthem and leave it at that. What could have legitimately piqued the Israel team though, is by adopting that Blake hymn adopted by rugby fans - "And we will build Jerusalem/ On England's green and pleasant land."

Continuing with sport, I was listening to the full line-out of the Italian F1 Grand Prix, being read from bottom to top (just before going to church) and experienced a dissonance. Jenson Button was being read out as ninth in the grid, the first time he has broken into the top ten all season. I was thinking, no, he isn't or hasn't. He's broken into the top one or two in qualifying throughout and anyway, he's second on the grid for this race. But then it dawned on me. I was merging yesterday's bright new hope with today's. For while Lewis Hamilton is the toast of the town and "could become the best racing driving ever," it was only last season that Button was the British hope, his first ever Formula One victory (after three seasons) being lauded as the start of a new dawn, where he would be "the next Nigel Mansell or Damon Hill." How's Button's star has dramatically faded and been eclipsed. I do hope that Hamilton wins the World Championship not merely because he's British but also because no rookie has ever done that before and so it carries and underdog spirit to root for. The car helps but Hamilton does have raw talent that one hopes he can innovate on as the years go by.

As for weekend TV, I watched The Dinner Party on BBC1, largely because I knew it was going to be reviewed in the next day papers and I wanted to see if it was worth the fuss. By the end, it was clearly why this was a one-off programme. I wished I'd seen Abigail's Party for a comparison, since this was obviously an update, almost a remake. The Dinner Party certainly satisfied the current public need to be gratified by watching people shout at each other. Maybe the director thought if the characters were loud enough it would distract from the manipulation which was a little too obvious. The four middle-aged codgers all vote Tory - gasp, how bad they must be - and two even criticise the other two for voting Labour, just the once, in 1997 - double gasp. When the host's racism is exposed at the end, it only feels tacked on, as if the writers were pondering 'how can we make this guy as throroughly reprehensible as possible' and drew up a checklist to help them. As the great film critic Pauline Kael wrote, when drawn out of retirement to comment on the hype surrounding the movie American Beauty, it punches all the liberal buttons i.e matters that liberals can relate to by their abhorrence of them. That was a fine film though, far more nuanced than this show. The acting made a good fist out of the material, but the clumsy characterisation always made one feel like a spectator instead of being drawn into it.

Anita Roddick RIP. God bless her soul. The same for Luciano Pavarotti, an even larger than life figure, who in his twenties weighed not much more than I do.

Finally, Ive just finished Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith, where Arkady Renko, his rough-bitten Russian detective, returns. Renko had most fame in the Cruz Smith novel (subsequently film) Gorky Park. That was in the 1980s. Now, Wolves East Dogs (pub. 2005)finds Senior Investigator Renko in Chernobyl's Zone of Exclusion, after stirring up trouble in Moscow simply by doing his job. The radiation poisoning murders with caesium chloride (which looks like salt) carries eery advance echoes of the Litvinenko killing with polonium-210. The fleshing out of so many different people and plot strands all means the whodunnit is by the by, but the extras serve to add to the appeal of the book. It all leads to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the almost equally distrastous initial cover-up by the Soviet authorities so as not to be embarrassed at disrupting the May Day celebrations. People still live in the Zone, though from what the highly-informed book says, I may steer clear of the game option on the menus of restaurants in Kiev and Minsk, as well trying to avoid contact with Ukranian tap water (water becomes more irradiated than earth, objects or animals). Still, the bizarre atmosphere around Chernobyl (or apparently Chornobyl in the local dialect) including the ghost towns that were eventually evacauated and the bizarre vegetation in places, makes me hanker to visit it, at least for a day trip or two. It's the same reason why Michael Palin is exploring East-Central Europe in his upcoming television series and why I will be watching it.