Suck and Sweet

Listening to: Out of time - REM. 'Radio Song' could have been tailor made for wistful 90's montage sequences I reckon

First the suck. When I heard there was a fire on a certain Wellington street that a friend of mine lives on, and wondered it if it was her place, and had a look at the picture on line, and thought, 'nah that doesn't look like her place', I was wrong, and in fact my friend's flat did in fact burn the other day (Linky).

Luckily she wasn't at home, and her room is downstairs, so didn't actually combust. All her stuff is now wet though (although thoughtful firemen managed to get a plastic drop sheet into her room to keep some stuff like her bed dry), and she will likely have to find a new place to live. Suck. Especially when you hear what the supposed story is behind the fire, which I'm not going to retell here because this is a public forum, and it is likely sub judice and only 'alleged' at the moment.

That's the suck then, onto the sweet.

The NZ football/soccer team qualifying for the next World Cup is pretty sweet (video linky here, complete with hype and gushing commentary), even if it will take a while for this rugby obsessed nation to grasp just how big a deal that is. The All Whites (as opposed to the All Blacks rugby team for the non local readers) last went to the Soccer World Cup in 1982 (which I can remember, along with the Springbok Tour (linky) and bunch of other events I can bore younger people with in the relating).

I'll confess to not being the biggest football fan, and find it much more fun to play than to watch (and I did play as a schoolboy). I never watch it (apart from what gets on to the plays f the week), and didn't make plans to watch this game, attending a house warming and some leaving drinks instead. But since the game was being held in my city, and I was interested in the outcome if nothing else, and I could see the stadium as I drove into the city for the farewell function, I started listening in on the car stereo, and then I was hooked, lined and sinkered. I watched the second half of the game in the bar where the drinks were on. The tension with us being 1-nil up was palpable, which made the saving of a penalty attempt to equalise by our keeper even more memorable. The final three minutes of injury time after the official clock had run down were probably among the longest ever experienced in New Zealand sport.

The coolest moment though was when I wasn't watching the game at all. I had parked the car and was walking across the road to the bar when the single and ultimately winning goal was scored. On the central sity street I could hear the roar of celebration from the crowd at the stadium more than two kilometres away. That was cool, and definitely something to tell the kids about years from now.