Last night some friends and I were sitting in the front half of a drainingly hot, smokey, smelly bar watching Spain battle it out with Italy in the Euro-Copa quarter finals. In a large room behind us, 40 or 50 crazed supporters were watching the same game, on the same channel yet, infuriatingly, they were getting the signal 3 seconds ahead of us.
This meant that their ‘oooooooooh’s and ‘ayyyyyyyy’s would let us know that whatever was looking like an exciting dash towards the goal on our tele, was already another cock up in real time on theirs. Most annoying. Turns out they were watching an analogue signal on a huge old TV, whilst our plasma TV used the newer, but delayed, digital tuner technology. That’s the thanks you get for splashing out on a newer Television.
At half time we couldn’t take another minute of the the heat, smoke, and pre-emptive groans from the room next door, and went back to a friend’s house to see Spain eventually make it through to the semi-finals for the first time in a major competition in about 3,000 years. More of the same on Thursday!
In other (related?) news, classy on-line paper 20minutos.com reports that Spanish women are the most depressed in Europe (no doubt because their men are so obsessed with the football), whilst the men are the second most depressed after the British, and continent-leaders on the anxiety ladder.
Thinking this sounded unlikely (penalty shoot-outs aside, Spanish men don’t look all that anxious), I tried to google my way to the original article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, coming away only with this far more likely sounding article from 2001 in the Telegraph:
Liverpool worst city in Europe for depression. People living in Liverpool are more than twice as likely to be depressed as people in other parts of Europe … The lowest rate was found in Santander, where only one in 40 people was a sufferer.
Whatever the case, if Spain win when the final whistle blows against the Russians in Thursday’s semi-finals, expect half of Spain to become instantly, euphoricly un-depressed… followed by the other, more up-to-date half of the country with better TV’s three seconds later.
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 