Turgid

Though not in the phallic sense, City's turgid pre-season performances in Austria, along with the incessant Twitter updates from the social network boys at Eastlands have not exactly enthused me with any football content just yet. Perhaps the hundreds of thousands of unsold Olympic football tickets are also testament to the fact that - like me - everyone just can't wait for the season proper to start. Funny though it will be having the Community Shield at Villa Park, at least it's comforting that the current incumbents of that ground share with us an element of the nomadic existence, relocating as they did from their original patch of grass in the early years.

So for now, it's all banks and Olympics. After the Barclays LIBOR scandal comes the Mexican drug lord money laundering and the jaws drop further with each new revelation. What next? Will we find out that the Royal Bank of Scotland have been using live babies to fuel the central heating at their Canary Wharf headquarters (if indeed, that is where their HQ is). Or perhaps Howard at the Halifax has been secretly moulding an army of super Orcs to plunge the world into everlasting night and enthrall the forces of good forever. I wouldn't be that surprised, really. But, there aren't many options, are there? The ring has been returned to the dark lord already, and we cannot escape. Countless trillions have to be thrown at the teetering edifice, no matter how pointless it all is, because the alternative is chaos. No more boring Sunday mornings, washing the car. No more nipping to the cashpoint or the supermarket. No more tubes. No more nothing (if you'll excuse the double negative) and let's see how long this little island can bump along without imported foodstuffs.

Much has been said also about the G4S/A4E situation, and the wider implications for the great god of outsourcing so beloved of our great and good leaders. Of course, this bullshit was being peddled long ago, championed as much by Blair and Brown as by Thatcher, Major and Cleggeron. Everyone always knew that private companies were not really more efficient than public ones, it's just that it's easier to pass the HR burden on to someone else, and HMG can hire and fire with alacrity if the workforce is employed by that someone else. Private companies, being what they are, and managed by people who are not better than they should be, have been concerned only with the bottom line. So we end up in the situation we're in now.

Ho hum.