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The World Cup Final was characterised by some brutal tackling, perpetrated mostly by the Dutch. Sad though that is, it does not take much imagination to work out why.

The simple fact is that the players can get away with it, the possible prize for victory more than justifying the risk of punishment.

And the punishment? A yellow card is shown to the naughty player. Whoa, this is going to make the player buckle at the knees.

True, it is a deterrant not to repeat the misdeamenor, for fear of a red card.

But 14 yellow cards clearly shows that the players were ‘playing the game’, and getting their deal of brutal tackling in before the yellow card tempered their behaviour. Well, you may say, the card did the trick.

And I say no.

First, the post yellow card behaviour should be the norm. And second, it is not because the yellow card itself is not sufficient a punishment. Of course, football is petrified of copying the sanctions of other sports. But if it adopted the well recognised ’sin bin’ concept from Rugby and Ice Hockey, then there would be a more tangible punishment to both the player and the team. And if the sin bin duration was set at no less than 10 minutes, then the Dutch would have been reduced to 10 and even 9 players during eth game yesterday.

And the normal consequences of a yellow card, with a ban for one or more games, is never going to be a deterrent in the holiest of holy, the World Cup Final. Nothing that follows matters.

Alas, Sepp Blatter is happy to keep the ‘beautiful game’ untarnished by progress such as this. His glasses must be very rose tinted indeed.

Apologies for reusing this sleight on the Virgin group of companies. But it kind of sums up my experience today with a new Virgin V+ set top TV box. The saddest thing is not so much that I had problems, but that this was a totally predictable matter.

I had a window from 7am to 7pm to wait for the new box to arrive. 3pm was not so bad, so I took the risk of installing it - just 4.5 hours before the Liverpool game was due to be shown on the ESPN channel. This was a bad move.

I spent 25 minutes uncabling all the boxes under my TV, cleaning and installing the new V+ box with the other gear. A reassuring message appeared on my TV showing that at least I had gotten somethingright when I powered up. A call to Virgin was required to activate my set V+ box. I had to give them it’s serial number. So why did the set top box not tell me that serial number on the screen when it powered up? Getting such user friendly basics right would mean many fewer calls to support.

The activation failed. It got stuck saying Ld30 on the V+ box. Presumably an error code. Not sure really because the lady on the support line knew less about the set box technology than I, the customer did. Each question I asked her only served to fluster her further. I eventually got two guys to try to let me switch back to the old box, since they declared the new one to be faulty.

I had to tell them the serial number of the old box. And this was because the new box activation had erased the old box number on their system. And this is simply because there is no mechanism to revert back to the old box. They do not allow for this extremely likely request.

So I was literally stuck with two non functioning boxes. And a need to traipse to the pub to watch my beloved Liverpool limp through another game.

The Virgin repair man will be with me between 12 and 4pm tomorrow. Another wait in. Oh joy. And an update here as to the outcome. Your guesses? Maybe he will supply another new box that will work first time. Just maybe.

I am as guilty as the next man in blaming Rafa Benitez for the rapid demise in Liverpool FCs performance this season. For good reason, I believe, not least his cold attitude to players making them fearful rather than empowered on the field. But I felt the reality of his position when I saw him interviewed by TV following the shock FA Cup defeat at the hands of Reading on Wednesday. As the interviewer questioned him about the quality of his team, you could hear Rafa’s voice start breaking up. The raw emotion underneath was strong and made me feel deeply sad for his plight. The interviewer tempered his tone as the interview progressed in respect.

How would you feel in a troubled season when your team had been 1 minute away from victory, and to suffer 3 of the 4 best players leaving the field injured. Just one Reading player had inflicted a broken rib on one Liverpool player and a torn cartilidge on another. Alas, we tend to lump such extremely unfortunate incidents into the ‘Manager is failing’ bucket. We also forget that Reading played with flair and penetration that totally belied their league position, and matched the assertive attitude that saw lower league Leeds beat Man United in the same round of the competition. No one, of course, calls for the head of Sir 7-minutes-of-injury-time-please Ferguson.

Quite what happens next is not clear to read. Benetiz would receive a £20M payment if ousted. The club is in severe debt so would struggle to accommodate such a thought. Difficult times.

Just a quick note to supply a link to the photographs I took today of my friends playing football at the nearby park :

http://www.pbase.com/moffyuk/parkfootball

Hopefully there is at least a little artistry on show.

It was only by good fortune that I happened to be informed by a TV announcement of a programme about to start on BBC4. With the dire state of affairs that sees a paucity of good programmes sprinkled across many channels, missing good programmes is easily done. Oh for a simpler life! The programme was an hour long story of childrens play in the 1940s and 1950s. It was blessed with fabulous black and white  footage of simpler times, where children as young as 2, it seems, sat and played in the streets on a daily basis. More healthy times, where this generated many bonds, grew strength, social skills and independence in the children, and was simply a delight to observe.

The programme ended on a sad note, marking the end of this golden social climate for British youngsters by the rapid intrusion of cars, killing safety and the fun.

Oh how shortsighted we are to have taken cars to our hearts. They destroyed our streets as a social linkage.

Think about it - we want a car so that we can be somewhere else. Yet our heart is where we are right now.

For the second consecutive time, I walked out of a cinema before the end of a film. In both cases, it was the result of my expectation falling way short of reality.

With “District 9″, I was expecting a Science Fiction film. You know, something supernatural or intergalactic. But instead, the futuristic context was merely a backdrop to a film focussed on edgy scenes of horror or discomfort.

But much worse, in a different way, was “Creation”. A film about Darwin and his ‘On the origin of species’ book and the controversial ideas contained therein sounded intriguing. Instead, apart from a few moments that actually bore any relation to the title of the film, it was, in essence, a desparately slow, dull story centred about the health of Darwin. It was well acted, but nonetheless, simply a period drama,with merely a passing nod at the subject of the title.

If I were to have submitted this story about Darwin’s position in the theory of Evolution vs Creation, I would have received a fail grade. The only explanation I have is that Hollywood’s excessive prioritising the making of money ahead of film quality gives them carte blanche to hijack an appealing concept regardless of whether they deliver or not. The customer will get drawn in regardless. Fundamentally, it is not a repeat product business.

Creation reminds me of the Thunderbirds license. They totally missed the whole point of the original series, distorting it into something hopelessly limp in comparison.

As a perfectionist, I am naturally saddled with a tendency to procrastinate. Knowing both of these characteristics, however, is rarely enough to bypass their more damaging consequences.

So I am particularly pleased that I am now developing a habit that addresses both of these conditions, linked as they are.

As a relatively seasoned photographer of over 50 Weddings now,  you would imagine that I would refine my job further and further as each Wedding takes place. Alas, partly as a result of a shocking memory, I tend to forget a lot of lessons learned in the past.

But there is no excuse, in hindsight, for failing to address a major difficulty on the Wedding day.

Big group photos.

Lots of people to organise - and people are worse than sheep when it comes to a harmonious group photo - and their heads so small in the image that it is barely worth taking. So I decided I will not do any more big groups.

And how can I tell the couple this? It took me 1 minute to change the mindset. Instead of a big group of ‘all the family of the bride’, I will now break this down to 3 groups - grandparents, aunts/uncles and cousins.

That will mean more meaningful and faster pictures.

One concession - if an elevated position is possible, I will do one group photo of everyone.

Evolution by innovation. Except it is probably way too obvious to receive a plaudit.

When I discovered Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, via the eminnetly readable, practical, and aptly titled book “Feeling Good”, I learnt that I ticked all the boxes for behaviour that makes for an arduous life. Such as making extreme judgements based on one point of failure.

Although I am intelligent enough, and really do no want to make my life any more arduous than it need be, I suspect that I made these cognitive mistakes, and continue to do so, simply because my emotional reaction to each scenario paints a picture that makes the inappropriate response seem entirely valid. The emotion itself is inappropriate, and hijacks me, marginalising mypowers of rational thought. Much as happens, for example, when someone gets angry - they are effectively incapable of a balanced, reasoned viewpoint.

This morning, I awoke to a seriously tired head, as if I had had no sleep at all. So I was hardly well placed to discover that the book I am writing failed to print because of a transparency error. And no clues as to which page(s) the problem resided on.

My immediate reaction was to have a sinking heart, and seriously feel that the problem would be unresolvable. This feeling is so powerful that it is tremendously difficult to ignore. Such ill feelings can often last for hours or days, lingering often beyond resolution of the problem itself. So not only is the initial reaction extreme, ill judged (I simply do not know yet if the transparency problem can be resolved), but it sets up a background negative state that weighs heavily, tarnishing the enjoyment of the day.

However, I have developed a fabulous habit now of recognising that my emotions are highly likely to be misguided. Ijust let them ride, and calmly seek remedy to the problem. Not only that, but with a view to gain as I can from the problem.

So far, precisely this has happened - an email dialogue from the printers  has helped me set much more sensible PDF document generation parameters.

And I have not been burdened with a negative emotional state.

This has been a record - I was emotional for about an hour.

By focussing on my inappropriate emotional reactions, I am essentially applying CBT methods - retraining my brain to serve me better.

Senescence was a new word I encountered today. It describes the aging proces in humans and animals. Where our bodies are programmed to decay and lose function as we go into old age. We either die of an illnes, injury, or simply old age.

What no one had told me in my 51 years on this planet is that creatures such as turtles have neglible senescence. When they mature, they do not age. If they can avoid fatal illnesses and injuries, they are in effect immortal.

So why is it no one told me that? And what does it me in evoluntionary terms?

I had assumed that the aging process ensured nicely finite lives, preventing the evoluntionary process from drawing out too long. Or from a disproportionate percentage of the aged amongst the popluation.

Do you know any more?

My Sony RDS radio entertains me as I work at my PC in one of my bedrooms. Behind it is the window, but often the window is obscured by a large piece of hardware. I use it to block the sun so that I can process photographs on my PC with a uniform light and colour balance. A modern dark room as it were.

The hardboard is precariously supported by a barometer on the wall. One day, I failed to secure it properly, and I returned to the house with the hardboard squashing the radio and LCD monitor flat on the table.

The radio was on, and loud. I know that I had switched it off when I went out. I tried to turn the sound down but even at the lowest position of the volume control, the sound was still quite strong. Most, most odd. After switching it off and on again, all was well.

This is strange enough, but fairly regularly now when I return to the house from one of my coffee shop sojourns, I can hear the radio blaring. The exact same symptoms return. This time, with no ready cause.

I guess this has happened a dozen or so times now, and I think very little of it.

Except that it never happens when I am in the house.  It would frustrate the life out of me if it happened over night, but it has never done this.

So not only does it behave strangely, but it chooses when to do so. I might be tempted to believe in ghosts!

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