One of the great turning points in the year is the IFA Cup Final - and no, that doesn't consist of a milking competition, but a soccer match between Northern Ireland football clubs.
It's a true marvel, not because of the spectators - usually about three people, Stan, Beryl and Myrtle, who are a trifle bewildered, and who think they're in a post office collecting pensions. Nor is it because of the quality of the football: Northern Ireland club players have the locomotive skills of two drunks in a three-legged race.
The real wonder of the IFA Cup Final is its television coverage, which is conducted with the drama of Japanese bomber commanders shouting instructions to their crews approaching Pearl Harbour. Yet the only person in the world watching the broadcast is me. Since Operation Gladiator closed down all the massage parlours in Dublin, and I can no longer avail of Frau Goebbel's Personal Flogging Service at the dear old Cat O'Nine Tails Knocking Shop, I have to get my masochistic kicks somehow or other. The IFA Cup Final does the trick for me, every time.
Even the cameraman - and it is a man: camerawomen would prefer to give back the vote and reach for the apron - has taken a couple of pills and is fast asleep as the build-up to the match takes place. Build-up is the term I use for want of a better term word to describe a television commentator shouting so hard that his ears fall off. Behind him is the stadium, empty but for Stan, Beryl and Myrtle and - windblown from the last big crowd here - newspapers announcing Mr Chamberlain's triumphant return from Munich.
So the commentator (invariably called Jackie) is roaring TENSION IS MOUNTING HERE IN WILDERNESS! or whatever the the name of the ground is.Direness, Doldrum, Despair - these are the other names of Northern Irish soccer stadiums, where the local clubs, Glenglum, Glengrim, Glenfoul, Glenprod, Glentaig, play their league games. Or so it is said. Who knows? Since nobody watches the league matches, who can be sure that they actually occur? The "results" might be fictions concocted by Stan, Beryl and Myrtle as a means of whiling away their afternoons.
The, ah, build-up is followed by the Final, the footballing equivalent of a snowball fight between two men with no arms. End of one season, start of another season, namely tennis.
Why is Wimbledon the biggest tennis tournament in the world? England hasn't produced a decent tennis player since Dover was joined at the hip to Calais. Having the foremost tennis championship at Wimbledon is like having the American Football Super Bowl in Tibet. Merely because the English - and it was the English, not the British - invented the game is irrelevant: literary festivals are not held in Babylon just because writing was invented there.
But at least literary festivals are not on television; Wimbledon, mortifyingly, is, with each year the breathless BBC commentators speculating on the red-hot chances of England's latest hope. For the past 23 years (or so it seems) that has been Tim Henman. His ancestors were clearly poulterers; and it shows. He has the killer instinct of a venerable old lady fowl as she squeezes her annual egg out of her bottom.
Which is pretty much how Henman serves. Indeed, you could take one of his first serves and lightly boil for it for four minutes. His second serves arrive ready cooked, so it's advisable to put the tea on when he's about to make the second serve.
You know when that is: it's when he starts rubbing
in the lumbago liniment.
There is another English tennis player. His name is Greg Rusedski. He is as English as Manitoba, as British as the Great Lakes. As a journalist, I have the bounden duty to tell you how this Canuck can pass himself off as an Englishman, but alas - and yet again - I must let you down. Haven't a clue. Moreover, he is to tennis what the Red Cow roundabout is to traffic flow and that pretty much is it. Not very dissimilar to IFA soccer, even to the brainless, hysterical enthusiasm of the commentators: HENMANIA AGAINIA: OUR BOY CAN DO IT THIS TIME! In the studio, John McEnroe blinks back his embarrassment, and tries to explain, as gently as possible, that no one with an underarm first serve that's as deadly as Julie Andrews breaking wind has ever won at Wimbledon.
Well, as it happens, Tim gets as far as the car-park, where he's eliminated in the course of a warm-up with the attendant, a pensioner who lost his leg in the Normandy landings and both hands in the big freeze of '63. Which leaves Greg, who last won a tennis match against Helen Keller - but that was in her declining years, when she was in a wheelchair.
Which doesn't explain the fans: thousands of young females screaming with lust at a slightly doddery poulterer covered in feathers and bird-droppings, and one very large and fairly stupid roundabout. Now we know that these men are as likely to get through to a Wimbledon final as the Dalai Lama is to tog out in the number 2 shirt for Munster. Yet they are the epicentre of an knickerless tornado of screaming females, whereas their footballing equivalents in Northern Ireland have the choice of Beryl or Myrtle and very possibly even Stan, on otherwise empty terraces.
That, surely, more than the Palestine-Israel dispute, is the intractable mystery of our time.