Stop the bus in Spain - I want to get off where life is fine and fair

Dashing up the steps of  an Alicante-bound jet at  Manchester Airport in pouring rain and a furious early-morning gale is a favourite memory of my ever-dwindling trips home to the UK.

The race across the runway to the aircraft was invariably sheer pleasure because I was about to swap the cold, miserable British weather for the Costa Blanca life I so adore.

Apart from the shivering, soggy climate, my visits to the UK continue to highlight why living in England today is more of a penance than a joy.

Yes, the beautiful countryside, unique historic buildings and ironic British sense of humour are still intact. But the breakdown of law and order and increasingly large sub-culture of yobbism, alcoholism and drug addiction is frightening.

I won’t go into the most controversial subject of all – the over-immigration which is polarising rather than uniting the country. That would be politically incorrect, even if my personal viewpoint is considerably less extreme than that of many native Brits.

One subject that really does make my blood boil is the unnecessary traffic chaos and the incompetence of the faceless bureaucrats responsible for the massive disruption on motorways and trunk roads.

Everywhere I drove, I seemed to be held up – from an enforced 30-mile motorway detour to accommodate a bridge-building exercise, to temporary traffic lights causing hold-ups on virtually every main road. The general philosophy of the transport bureaucrats seemed to be, ‘‘Cause maximum disruption to as many motorists as possible at the time the traffic is heaviest’’.

I don’t tend to drive in busy areas in Spain, but in ten years of part-time residence in the 

southern Costa Blanca, I have never seen a  traffic jam, let alone the gridlock of vehicles that snarls up UK cities almost permanently.

The Spanish attitude to traffic accidents and road maintenance seems to be the exact opposite to that of the British authorities. The priority after a pile-up is to get the traffic moving again – and to carry out repairs only when they are essential. Hence the road surface can be very iffy. 

The consolation Is that you’ll never be caught in a 10-mile queue on the M6, with two lanes blocked by a cone army and an invisible work force. In England, I rarely go out without being stuck in a queue of crawling cars.

I also had the dubious pleasure of clashing with the council jobsworths who monitor minor traffic offenders in Bury, Lancashire, where my UK home is. I lost the battle, of course, because being fair did not tally with their  mission to fill the town coffers with as much cash as possible from the softest touches of all – law-abiding motorists.

I was blissfully unaware that since the my previous visit to the UK, Bury Council had decided to prohibited one particular bus lane to other vehicles from 7am to 7pm on weekdays, rather than the normal 7-10am and 4-7pm double slot which operated for every other bus lane in Greater Manchester.

My ‘crime’ was that I went on a lunchtime shopping trip on a quiet weekday and, at 12.38pm, moved my little Kia Picanto into the empty bus lane momentarily to allow the only other car on the road to pass me. It hadn’t crossed my mind to check the hours of prohibition first – I naturally assumed the rules were the same as everywhere else.

Gotcha! The council spiders had set up a camera to trap heinous criminals like myself in their devious web. And three days later I received photographic evidence of my car tootling along in the bus lane at 25mph, plus a demand for £60 – reduced to £30 if I paid within 14 days.

How kind of them to penalise an unknowing pensioner for being courteous to another driver and clearly having no intention of using the bus lane to jump a queue or for any dubious reason.

A few days later I received a written reply from Bury’s Parking Services Manager  in which  grammar and accuracy were given low priority.
   
(Sic) ‘’I have noted your comments, however, upon further investigation of your case it is apparent that full payment of the Notice has been made,’’ he wrote, as if that was a reason the fine could not be reversed.

‘‘I can confirm that there is ample signage at the entrance to the bus lane specifying the relevant start and end times. The onus is on the motorist to check the information before making the judgement to enter a bus lane.

”Thank you for your prompt payment, however, I would like to inform you that any further right to appeal is lost and the case is now closed.’’

That’s it, then. Guilty as charged, and no reference whatsoever to my explanation.                                                                                                   

In Spain, the Trafico has some weird regulations and if you are unlucky, you could find yourself forking out 100 euros for driving in flip-flops or carrying your shopping on the back seat.

If you are really unlucky, you might even be fined for speeding in Barcelona when you have never been within 300 kilometres of the place. Fortunately, the photo accompanying the ticket showed a different make of  car – albeit with what appeared to be the registration number of my Kia Picanto.

A quick call to the Trafico sorted that one out. They cancelled the ticket even more rapidly than Bury council’s greed machine scoffed my credit- card payment.

If you're planning a holiday in Spain, beware!

The gullibility of Brits in the Spanish Costas, and not only tourists, never ceases to amaze me.

Virtually every day I hear that someone or other has been the victim of a pickpocket or handbag snatch.

The experience of being mugged in public is both traumatic and disruptive, particularly if your passport happens to be among the stolen items. Which is why I have always been ultra-careful when it comes to protecting my possessions.

I have never been robbed – unless you count the evening I found 45 euros in notes on the floor of the Irish bar in El Raso and gave it to a tipsy punter who claimed he had dropped it. I realised when I got home that the money had fallen out of my own purse!

OK, that was stupid – but nowhere near as daft as those male tourists who wander around Spanish markets with their wallets wedged in the back pocket of their shorts. And the women who leave their handbags on a table or chair while they chat to friends, only to discover when they come to pay the bill that they have no money…and no handbag.

It happened to a friend of mine a while back. She went for a coffee after a busy day at work, plonked her handbag down alongside her and when she next looked - whoosh, it had vanished.

The sting was that this particular lady invariably carried all her documents, including her passport, in that bag, not to mention a considerable amount of money. It was an experience that will live with her until her dying day – and the saddest thing of all is that it could have so easily been avoided.

My friend has been living in Spain for some time, but most of the victims of the petty thieves tend to be tourists. They are so hell-bent on enjoying themselves that being robbed is the last thing on their minds. What juicy pickings for the villains...

I follow a regular procedure with my handbag. When I am in a public place, I always wrap the strap around my wrist so it can’t be snatched. And when I sit down, the strap goes under a chair or table-leg so it can only ‘vanish’ accompanied by an entourage of furniture.

Oh, and I NEVER take a bag to market – I carry cash in notes and wedge them into my bra. It means that no-one can rob me without being arrested for indecent assault!

My advice to men is that if you go anywhere where there’s a large crowd, leave your wallet at home, in your hotel, or hidden under the carpet in your car boot. Put the cash you need in your trouser pocket (not the back one!) and to make the fortress impregnable, how about keeping your hand in your pocket as you walk around?

While the lowlife element of Spain’s impoverished Moroccan and Romanian communities is thought to be behind the majority of bag-snatches, I suspect the perpetrators come from more diverse roots. What one does have to concede is that these ladrones, however much reviled, have a remarkable skill.

One person I know had her purse stolen from the handbag on her shoulder as she browsed her way around a crowded department store. The thief not only unzipped the bag and removed the purse without anyone noticing – but also zipped the bag up again!

It was the best part of half an hour before my friend realised she’d been robbed. And the way it was done suggests that the perpetrator could make a decent living as a stage magician or in a circus.

But then, theatre audiences are not quite so generous to the sleight-of-hand merchants as the mugs they feed off every day…

A terminal problem at Alicante Airport

I have a terminal illness. It's called Alicante Airport's No.1 runway- and last week it flew to the top of my most embarrassing moments. By a distance.

I made a public exhibition of myself in front of half the population of Spain. Or to be more accurate, the weekly Fun Quiz at Monte's Bar in Los Montesinos.

The British expat community here in the Costas, particularly those of us growing longer in the tooth (if we have any left) are quite partial to quiz evenings. It's good fun, the partaking is more important than the winning (she lied) and for anyone who has a semblance of a brain, the nearest we'll ever get to a Mastermind audition.

It is also living proof that nostalgia really is what it used to be...and one of the few benefits of being a Golden Girl.

Last week's cliffhanger at Monte's ended in two-way deadlock, so our team of Marjory, Ian, the two Pats and yours truly found ourselves facing a tie-breaker question. My lips broke into a quiet smirk as my disintegrating memory flashed back to the previous occasion two teams finished all square. We weren't involved, so my guess was irrelevant – but when I hit the exact figure for the capacity of Lord's cricket ground (28,000) our gang were gobsmacked.

This time it was another numbers game. How long, in metres, is the main runway at Alicante Airport? Cue suggestions from the team of 3,000 and 4,000. ''It's much more than that, insisted Mrs Knowall, “Something like 9,000 I reckon.''

'Sum thing' had clearly snapped as I tried to figure out the difference between metres and yards because in my mind it seemed to make sense. To have Darren standing over us waiting for an answer merely added to my confusion.

Amazingly my stubbornness prevailed, despite everyone else's enormous doubts. I got my way and we lost by a distance.

I paid for it big time, too. The repeated peals of laughter that accompanied our normally sedate drive back to El Raso were all at my expense.

And if you are ever confronted by an imaginary runway stretching from Alicante Airport through El Altet and out cross the Mediterranean, you know where it came from.

Benidorm, booze, brollies and bowlers: What Spaniards REALLY think of Brits

Jose Monllor Perez is small, dark, law-abiding and enjoys nothing more than relaxing with his pals, a cerveza and a cigarette. A stereotypical Spaniard, you might say.

We all have our own views on what constitutes an archetypal native of this particular Iberian nation. But how do the Spanish see the thousands, nay millions, of British holidaymakers who swarm around their country seeking the sunshine that invariably shuns our own grid-locked island?

For the past 16 years Perez has been teaching Spanish to students of all nationalities (myself included) on the Costa Blanca – the majority of them English. Teaching runs in Jose's family and after seeing 5,000 pupils pass through Berlingua’s doors, he’s a pretty good judge of character. The Alicante-born profesora is also a dab hand at another trait that runs in the family - art. And he paints a hilarious tongue-in-cheek assessment of the stereotypical Brit.

Spainly speaking, it seems we are an apologetic, dog-crazy, dirty, unfit, drunken bunch of tattooed hooligans. And those are our good points! The bad guys apparently all wear bowler hats and carry umbrellas.

Here’s the lowdown on how Spaniards see us – as interpreted by assessor Perez.

BRIT STEREOTYPE 1: ‘‘They are always saying ‘sorry’ and ‘thank you’. Sometimes I think that if you stamped on an Englishman he would apologise. And they say ‘thank

The new Andy Murray: He's 15, blond, superfit and his name is Nicola Kuhn

Nicola Kuhn  prepares to receive serve against Yuichi
Sugita on Valencia's 3000-seat  Centre Court

British tennis fans may have a long wait for a successor to root for once Andy Murray passes his sell-by date.

So how about a blond 15-year-old superkid whose truly international pedigree adds instant irresistability to his image as the best young prospect in the game?

Nicola Kuhn is also considerably better looking than misery-mouth Murray - and, unlike the sour-faced Scot, has also been known to smile when he wins.

A multi-cultured European, young Nico is not so much on the ladder to international stardom. He is already halfway there - as the best player on the planet born in the 21st century. And while he will technically be a Junior until 2019, next year is likely to see his big breakthrough.

Two weeks ago, the Austrian-born superkid led Germany to the grand final of the Junior Davis Cup, winning an unparallelled 11 successive singles matches in a competition involving 134 nations. In the final against Canada, he comfortably beat Felix Auger-Aliassime, whose rocketing success against senior professionals on the ATP circuit has been grabbing headlines all over the world - not least on Youtube.

HIS NAME IS BLOND.....GAMES BLOND,

Nico's reward for his achievements this year was a Wild Card entry to last weekend's qualifying competition at  the Valencia Open, n ATP World Tour event won in 2014 by Andy Murray and this year featuring world No.7 David Ferrer and controversial Australian Nick Kyrgios among the seeds.

When he stepped on to the Centre Court for the first time on Saturday, Nico was  just three matches from a head to head with Ferrer or Kyrgios in the main draw. The sting was that his opponent was world No.132 Yuichi Sugita, a Japanese Davis Cup veteran and 12 years Nico's senior.

Ultimately, Sugita's subtle experience brought him a 6-2, 6-3 victory that was considerably less comfortable than the scoreline suggests. In fact, he was almost lost for words when he was told after the match that Nico is 15 years old.. "Un-be-lievable,'' he gasped. "Never in my life have I seen a player so young who can play that good. He is a star in the making, for sure.''

Nico's training and playing kit is as colourful as his tennis

So who exactly is Nicola Kuhn and why am I touting him to become one of the game's biggest names? Well, let's just say he looks the complete Tennis Super-hero  package, complemented by a squeeky clean image that is already endearing him to mums and dads as much as to teenage fans. 

Nico's roots are fascinatingly complex. Born in Austria, his family moved to the Costa Blanca when he was three months old. His father, Alfred, is German, mum Rita (from whom he inherited his blond complexion) is Russian and they live in a predominantly British urbanisation at Torrevieja. Nico speaks Spanish, German, English and Russian fluently...and if you push him regarding his nationality, he will concede quietly that he feels more Spanish than anything.

Which suggests that a major decision could be in the pipeline over his future tennis loyalties in team competitions like Davis Cup.

By the time he was three, the Kuhn kid was begging his parents for a  tennis racket - and he's been besotted with the game ever since. He also demonstrated almost instantly at Torrevieja Tennis Club that he is a natural, winning local and regional events at every childhood level.

By 2012, even the great Boris Becker was talking about him, describing the 12-year-old prodigy as "a better player than I was at his age.'' 

Nico with his tennis mentor Juan Carlos Ferrero in 2013

It was around that time that another tennis legend, former World No.1 Juan Carlos Ferrero, came into Nico's life. For the past four years, the youngster has been commuting daily between his home in Torrevieja and Ferrero's prestigious Equilite Tennis Academy at Villena, near Valencia. 

The exhausting 208-kilometre round trip to combine tennis practice and academic studies would drain any normal human being. But Nico is a one-off - he supplements the travel torture with an intense  training regime that burns off a cool 5,500 calories a day. 

His tennis advisers at the Equilite, headed by coach Fran Martinez, are determined to keep his feet on the ground, which is why they are not particularly partial to articles like this one eulogising their most valuable young asset.

I understand their logic, but I'm a professional journalist and this is a good story full of positive vibes. So, with apologies to those who want to keep his CV under wraps, I hereby introduce the new 007 of teenage sport to you.

He answers to the name of Blond. Games Blond, that is. You could even try calling him Nico Teen but that's as near as he's ever likely to get to the vices of youth culture.

The last 12 months has seen Nicola rocket more than 1,000 places up the world junior (19 and under) rankings. By the end of this year.he will be in the top 40 - and one of the youngest as well.

However, Nico has already thrown his hat in with the professionals, having won his first ATP ranking point in May this year, two months after his 15th birthday. To understand the significance of that statistic, Rafael Nadal was six months older when he achieved the same feat.

FACTS AND FIGURES: Nicola Kuhn (born March 20, 2000) is a junior tennis player whose run of 11 successive singles victories helped Germany to reach the Final of the 2015 Junior Davis Cup. He was subsequently voted the worldwide tournament's Most Valuable Player.

Kuhn, who won his first ATP ranking point in a Futures tournament at the age of 15 years two months, was brought up in Torrevieja, Spain. His parents, German businessman Alfred Kuhn and his Russian-born wife, Rita, settled in the Costa Blanca when Nicola was three months old.

Nicola showed a keen interest in tennis from the age of three, when he asked his parents to buy him a racket. "I dreamt of being a professional tennis player ever since I can remember,'' he says. 

At the age of 12, Nicola switched his tennis allegiance from Spain to Germany, whose tennis authorities offered to help with his equipment and travel expenses. He also joined the prestigious Equilite Tennis Academy at Villena, near Valencia, run by former world No.1 Juan Carlos Ferrero, where he was able to supplement his fledglng tennis career with his academic studies.

In February 2014, Kuhn emulated Rafael Nadal (2000) and Andy Murray (2001) by reaching the final of the prestigious Les Petit As under-14 tournament in Tabres, France. He ended the year ranked No.4 on the Tennis Europe 14-and-under Junior Tour rankings, despite playing in only seven tournaments. His individual successes during 2014 included the European Masters title in Calabria, Italy and the Nike International Junior tournament in Bolton, England, He was also a key member of Germany's ITF World Team Championship winning team and their viictorious Tennis Europe Winter Cup trio. Feeling that Nicola would benefit from tougher opposition, Nicola's coach Fran Martinez and support team began to enter 14-year-p;d Nicola into ITF 18-and-under events. Competing against players up to three years older than himself, he won two lower-grade tournaments in Shenzhen, China before his 15th birthday, which he celebrated by reaching the last 16 of his first Grade 1 tournament in Umag, Croatia.

Kuhn's first taste of senior competition saw him win his first ATP ranking point at Lleida in May, 2015, while at Junior level he continued to rack up ranking points and entered the world's Top 100 for the first time. In October, he qualified for his first US Junior Open, losing in the last 32 at Flushing Meadows. A few weeks earlier, he had inspired Germany into the Junior Davis Cup finals with an immaculate singles record in the European qualifying event at Le Touquet.

Competing against the world's top 16 nations, Nicola again won all his individual games to lead his adopted country to the JDC Final in Madrid, where they lost 2-1 to Canada. Kuhn's consolation was that he was voted the tournament's Most Valuable Player and in beating the much-vaunted Félix Auger-Aliassime in straight sets, staked a justifiable claim to be the world's best player born in the 21st century.

In late October, Kuhn reached the quarter-final of the prestigious Osaka Mayor's Cup event in Japan, and achievement which lifted him to No 70 in the ITF Junior rankings,

And finally, Nico meets the woman of his dreams...ME

For Fawkes sake, Britain's good Guys must blow up this American Halloween plot

I BLAME it on the Americans. In fact, I blame everything on the Americans - they are big enough to take it. Even the ones who weigh less than 20 stone (or 280 pounds in the Land of the Rising Gun).

I’m talking about the over-the-top Halloween hoo-ha that has whooped its way into Britain...and all but killed off one of the nation’s most treasured occasions.

When I was a child, Guy Fawkes Night was one of the biggest days of the year. A tradition marking the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, it commemorated a failed assassination attempt against King James I by a group of provincial English Catholics.

The plan was to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament - something I doubt many British 10-year-olds these days know anything about.

Kids in the UK today are more concerned with Halloween, where they are free to frighten the lives out of  old ladies by donning ­horrific masks and demanding sweets with menaces.

I wonder what you get if you ask for a ‘trick’ rather than a ‘treat’? Does one of the little demons remove his mask and turn out to be Paul Daniels?

To me, the Guy Fawkes culture of my youth was so much more embracing.

For days, even weeks before the event, we’d go from door to door with makeshift effigies of Fawkes and implore householders to give us ‘a penny for the Guy’.

Then, as darkness fell on November 5th, the neighbourhood would gather for a fireworks spectacular in which Guys galore would go up in smoke on top of a massive communal bonfire.

How that delightful tradition came to be usurped by the hideous ‘trick or treat’ culture, I do not know.

I believe Halloween has Celtic origins and was originally a pagan holiday in honour of the dead.

But I honestly cannot remember anyone celebrating it when I was young.

We may have started it - but as with everything else, the world has pinged it back in our faces with interest.

But I yearn for my grandchildren to enjoy the atmosphere of Guy Fawkes Night as I did more than half a century ago.

November 5th has a special place in my heart. And nobody will convince me that the Halloween takeover was not a devious plot by those over-the-top, razzamatazz Americans. A fat lot of good they've done to our heritage.

But what do you expect from a nation that dresses rugby players up as Bouncy Castles?

Wales, the All Blacks and Howard Kendall - a whole new bawl game

MY beloved Wales may be out of the Rugby World Cup, but I reckon we won almost as many new friends as did the nippy little dazzlers from Japan.

Warren Gatland’s injury-ravaged squad were on a hiding to nothing after losing key backs Lee Halfpenny and Rhys Webb in their final warm-up game against Italy. By the time they faced South Africa in Saturday’s quarter-final, they had been reduced to taking the field with two fourth-choice backs in centre Tyler Morgan and fullback Gareth Anscombe. Not to mention a brilliant fly-half in Dan Biggar whose goalkicking preparations include a passable impression of the symptoms which led to my being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease.

A hwyl new bawl game: Michael Caine in Zulu

That we beat England at Twickenham and ran Australia and the Springboks so close is testimony to the never-say-Dai spirit known in Wales as ‘hwyl’. If you don’t know what hwyl is, try nipping over to South Africa and asking a few descendants of the Zulu warriors who overran our (Rorke’s) Drift defence. Not that we managed to beat the South Africans in 1879, either. Must be down to having Englishman Michael Caine as our commanding officer - but not a lot of people know that.

For all Wales’s courage, at least we went out of the 2015 Rugby World Cup with our honour intact. That is more than can be said for the French, who found themselves suffocated by a black New Zealand cloud in Saturday’s second quarter-final. The 62-13 scoreline suggests that South Africa will also be blown away next weekend and that Richie McCaw’s champions will become the first nation ever to win two World Cups in succession.

Football has had its great international teams like Brazil and Germany, cricket had the era of West Indian invincibility and, more recently Australian dominance. But only in rugby union has a single nation dominated the world game throughout my lifetime. A tiny nation with a similar three-million population to Wales, not to mention around 80 million sheep.

Howard Kendall during his Blackburn Rovers days

HOWARD KENDALL achieved a lot in football. In fact, he was a legend. At 17, he became the youngest ever FA Cup finalist, later captained Everton to the Football league title in 1970, and for good measure went on to become the Toffees’ most successful manager ever. He also liked a drink, which became more and more apparent in his increasingly flushed visage at Goodison Park press conferences as the years rolled by.

I don't think he'd had a tipple the day he laid into me at Ewood Park. But I have never forgotten the rudeness of the Blackburn Rovers player-manager at that impromptu after-match press conference in the early 1980s. It was during the early days of hand-held tape recorders and this particular inquest was held in a corridor near the changing rooms with perhaps a dozen reporters milling around.

I was armed with notebook, pen and an untested tape machine. Fearing that the new gadget might not work, I quickly pressed the record button, placed my notebook on top of it, and stood jotting down Howard’s words with my other hand. I made no attempt to hide the machine, which Kendall spotted immediately.

“If you’re going to use one of those things, at least have the decency not to try to hide it,’’ he rapped, clearly irritated and pointing to my notebook sandwich. It would have been bad enough had the innuendo been correct. But this was positively embarrassing.

I’ve spent the last 30 years wanting to put the record straight so if you are listening up there in God’s-Own Park, Howard, now that you know the truth, I accept your apology. However, it’s too late for you to climb up there alongside turnip head Graham Taylor and West Ham’s genial John Lyall as the most polite and approachable managers I came across during two decades of covering League football for the British tabloids. There were also bosses and players some of my colleagues preferred to avoid. Keep reading this blog and I may just tell you about them....

As for Howard Kendall, he and I did have one thing in common. My other half and I called our two daughters Hayley and Lisa – and so did Howard and his wife.

It's my birthday. Welcome to the zimmer season in Guardamar

I USED to love birthdays. Particularly those big ones with a zero on the end. The ones when your boss would send you home early to have a quiet family celebration…only for all hell to let loose when you opened the front door.
One moment, silence and slight concern that nobody was in. Then, as you peered into the deserted hall, an explosion of noise as doors flew open, laughing faces appeared from nowhere, the kids rushed into your arms  -  and 100 voices burst into a chorus of you know what.
The party would go on forever as you ate, drank (too much) and caught up with the lives of surprise visitors from out of town and friends you’d all but lost touch with. Your boss and the colleagues who had masterminded the show would turn up after work and the party would go on through the night.
Yes, life was fun at 40…and blowing the candles out was a piece of cake.
How times change. Birthdays used to take forever to come round, yet I swear I’ve had four of them this year.
And the only good thing about the damned things is that if they keep coming, you know you are still alive.
I’d better amend that, because I don’t want my friends and to think I'm not going to enjoy our little celebration this weekend. Around 15 of us are taking our zimmer frames, hearing aids and skin tucks for a bit of a bash in Guardamar. It isn’t going to be a night at the Hilton, but the Portico Mar is considerably more salubrious than one or two of my previous birthday bashes,
Like when I opted for the bustle and boom of Vicente Jaen’s chaotic restaurant, where plates of freebie food fly at you from all angles before you even give your order – and then you are submerged by enough food to fill a herd of starving elephants.
There’s no written bill and the only till is the wad of notes tucked away in Vicente’s pocket. It’s all a bit of a shambles, really…but as irresistible as the march of time. Not the Ritz, more of the Pits, really  - but the chaos is pure magic.

In the chaos at Vicente's, my plan for a table for 20 was redrawn as a 12 and an eight and I spent the evening  sitting with my back to most of my guests. The experience confirmed my mathematical theory that the volume of noise generated by a boozing Brit is directly proportional to the amount of alcohol consumed. The longer we celebrated, the louder some of us got (not me, of course)  - and the more disgusted looks headed like daggers in our direction.
It was all good fun and great to have so much support in the absence of my family, who are all in the UK.
One thing I did notice in the haze of alcohol (two gin and tonics - I can’t even get drunk these days) was that there were no candles on the cake.
Perhaps Restaurant Jaen is a no-blow zone, I thought. Because I could definitely have seen off all those little sticks of flaming wax. Well, three or four anyway. I can only eat a few in one sitting.

The FIFA File: Why did it take so long to Blatter seedy sexist Sepp?

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON CHRISTMAS DAY 2010, A FEW MONTHS AFTER THE WORLD CUP IN SOUTH AFRICA. THE QUESTION IS, WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG FOR THE AUTHORITIES TO BLATTER SEEDY SEPP AND HIS CORRUPT REGIME?

During Spain's march to glory in last summer’s World Cup, I wrote a magazine article in which I described Sepp Blatter, the most powerful administrator in world football, as ”an ageing plonker”. I now accept that at the FIFA chairman is not ageing. He’s decrepit.

Sepp Blatter...decrepit and sexist

Indeed, he is so far past his sell-by date that I suggest his native Switzerland considers putting him out of his misery. Euthanasia is perfectly legal there, after all.

Now I love football but, like just about every fan in the world, I think its administrators are in another world when it comes to moving into the 21st century.

Even if those decisions are patently wrong and unfair, as they often are.

Take England’s disallowed goal against Germany, for instance. Frank Lampard’s rocket shot bounced down off the crossbar at least a yard over the line and then came out of the goal – and the referee and linesman were seemingly the only two people in the stadium who failed to spot it.

The German goalkeeper knew it was a goal, of course. But since honesty is the last thing one expects from professional footballers (we won’t mention being faithful to their wives), there was no way he was going to tell the referee. Let’s face it, England would have done exactly the same had it been the Germans who scored, so dishonours even there.

However, had the referee merely been allowed to consult a video replay, as are officials in other major sports, justice would have prevailed. As it was, nobody knows what might have happened had England been level at 2-2 at halftime rather than 2-1 behind. Why, they might even have won. (well, in my dreams).

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a player or manager speak AGAINST the use of video playbacks to confirm or over-rule controversial refereeing decisions. And the argument that the delay would detract from the game has long since been shot down by the evidence of other sports. In rugby and cricket, for example, the anxious wait for decisions like ‘not out’ or ‘no try’ to appear on the screen invariably ADD to the excitement rather than detracts from it.

Time you went to Specsavers, ref...Frank Lampard's blinding shot is a good yard over the line

Yet Blatter and his fellow FIFA duffers have consistently resisted calls for any sort of technology. And that has inevitably led to people like myself asking ‘Why?’

And in the absence of a logical reason, I can’t help pondering the recent corruption allegations over FIFA’s decision to award the 2018 World Cup to Russia.

Now I am well aware of the laws of libel, so I am not saying someone is bribing Sepp and his sidekicks NOT to say yes to the technology companies. But it makes you wonder, particularly as Blatter’s election in 1998 was later sullied by allegations that an African federation official had been offered a 100,000 dollar bribe to vote for him.

Certainly, Blatter’s logic seems to be at variance with the entire population of the world. Apart, perhaps, from his cronies in Geneva, all of whom are presumably blokes. And that brings me to another negative aspect of the man’s background.

Seedy Sepp does not seem to hold women very high in his esteem. Indeed, he seems to see us merely as sex objects. According to Wikipedia, in the early 1970s he was elected president of the World Society of Friends of Suspenders, an organisation which tried to stop women wearing tights instead of stockings and suspender belts.

Then, in 2004, he angered female footballers when he suggested that women should “wear tighter shorts and low cut shirts… to create a more female aesthetic” and attract more male fans.

I’ve got news for Mr Blatter. If he spent more time sorting out football’s injustices and less on ogling the girls, then it might start living up to its billing as ‘the beautiful game’.

He could start by introducing a law that works wonderfully well in rugby and ensures that cheats who illegally prevent a certain score don’t prosper. In such circumstances, referees can award a ‘‘penalty try’’ – yet in football, the worst a team can suffer is a red card for the offender and a penalty kick for the cheated side.

When a Uruguay player prevented Ghana winning their World Cup tie by deliberately stopping a goalbound shot with his hand, the correct decision should have been ‘goal’ – even though the ball did not cross the goal line. The incident happened at the very end of extra time, so the red card did not help Ghana in any way.

And when they missed the resultant penalty kick, any advantage was completely wiped out.

Uruguay celebrated their reprieve by winning the penalty shootout that followed and Africa’s last representatives in the tournament were on their way home when in the eyes of every fair-minded person they were really the victors. But the concept of introducing a ‘penalty goal’ award to foil the cheats has probably never crossed Mr Blatter’s mind.

Ghana did not get justice, they were robbed because the laws are an ass. It’s the sort of thing that makes football appear even more stupid than the heads-in-the-sand brigade who run (or should that be ruin?) the game.

So how is football ever going to be dragged into the 21st century? Maybe we should offer sleazy Sepp an inducement to hand the whole caboodle over to us girls. Then we could sort it all out in no time and let him concentrate on whatever else he does for kicks.