Completed another year on this planet and the best present I could get today would be if Holland was forever excluded from any attempts to host either the Worldcup or the Olympic Games. For some reason best known to themselves the national football association and the lobbying circus surrounding that august organisation have decided we all would love to have the Worldcup come to the Netherlands in 2018 or 2022, a prospect that fills me with about as much horror as the periodic threats of a new Olympic bid for Amsterdam do. Holland is too small for these events, even if we co-host with Belgium. Getting ready for a worldcup means upgrading a lot of stadiums to capacities they will never ever use again, saddling the responsible clubs (or more like, their respective city councils) with an expensive white elephant. Economically most of the big money would be earned by FIFA and drained away abroad (untaxed of course), the big sponsors would demand exclusivity and local firms would notice little or nothing of the games. The big carrot hold in front of us is tourism, but we’ve got those coming out of our ears anyway and it’s a well known fact that big sporting events like this chase away as many tourists as they lure, as South Africa saw this year and Beijing did in 2008. Hosting a Worldcup or Olympic Games would cost a lot of money for dubious gains and what’s worse, the costs would be borne by society as a whole, through public investment while the gains would be limited to a few big businesses. A perfect microcosm of contemporary capitalism perhaps, but not in my backyard.
On a more personal level, being thirtysix today feels no different from being thirtyfive and 364 days yesterday and what with all the stuff we’ve had to deal with this year I’m not feeling particularly birthday like. Not depressed either, just not finding it that important — much more important was that S. could finally come outside for five minutes today for her first fag in weeks, having caught a case of chicken pox on top of everything else and having had to stay in quarantaine until today. The doctors are now optimistic about the possibility of quickly scheduling her hopefully last operation, which would “clean up” some of the issues the kidney transplant left behind, help lower risks of infection and yank up her resistance a bit without endangering the donor kidney. She may actually be free of the hospital this year — a far better present than physical gift, but don’t let that stop you…