I've been married to Liverpool FC since 1985. I could have been a self respecting fan of Southampton, by dint of being impressed with a pic of Steve Williams in a shiny Admiral made kit in a Shoot annual we got from a neighbour now long since departed. But no. Liverpool were for me. It was a marriage made in heaven until Wimbledon and that penalty against Wimbledon.

Mesut Oezil. Really.

Since Arsene Wenger went Arse-ways and look what happened: I've been having a football fling with that French floozie in North London. By floozy I mean of course more Madame Pompadour, but watching L'Arsenal is like going to the ballet. Even on a bad day they'd rather lose pretty than win ugly. More Joan Fontaine than Julian Dicks. 

I'll be rooting on in a stripy shirt and a string of onions around my neck, munching on Currywurst, in total-aestheto-football-ecstacy. 

Sorry 'Pool, you broke my heart too many times. And that's before even mention Paul Stewart... You'll always be my club, but you're warned...

Throw the Booker at them.

I'm writing a book. Yes, I can confirm that I'm going to take all my unfinished ideas, baseless bragging from my early twenties and finally get it together. It will be a mammoth epic of 34521 pages, its plot complex and clever, based around the blueprint for traffic management in and/or around Junction 13 of the M50 in the run up to Christmas Eve. I'm also hoping to have it finished by next Tuesday. Despite its length, complexity and thoroughly unrealistic completion date, not to mention my chronic inability to finish colouring a book let alone write one, I still stand a better chance of winning the Man Booker prize than Colm Toibin.

Although Toibin happens to be the greatest creator of fiction we've produced since Bertie Ahern's legal team at the Mahon Tribunal, the great man is in danger of becoming the Ivan Lendl of international literature. Unless judging committees for book prizes stop infusing their decisions with the cruel pleasure of deliberately overlooking a man whose persistence, let alone talent, deserves to be rewarded, Toibin's only comfort will be when he wins the Nobel Prize. This of course will be soured by the BBC calling him British, and you just can't unring a bell.

Given his perceptibly shabby treatment by Booker, Toibin's next novel will be called "The Testament of Colm" and will consist of: one slightly scrappy looking jotter page, drenched in a tin mug of Pernod, with four words scrawled in regularly interchanged order over and over again: when, prize, give and sodding.

Schürrle not!

Years ago I went to see Swan Lake and I can remember two things - the disappointment that the dancers didn't sing  - it looked like God sat on the remote and hit the mute button - and the raw athleticism of ballet. It was wonderful, and it didn't look all that complex either. It was simple moves done well. Cue a dreadful football match and Andre Schürrle.

Say what you like about the Irish team, chances are you have. Nonetheless, they looked an awful lot less embarrassing (and embarassed) than every previous game during Trapp's tawdry stint as Irish coach, when they were clunky, fearful and losing. They were respectably rubbish. Oddly, though, Germany weren't much better. They gifted two soft goals, and one which was every bit as poetic, every bit the contradiction to the German character. Andre Schürrle balanced a ball as if it were a bubble in danger of bursting, turned himself carefully and planted it with the grace of the White Swan into the Irish net. Eat your heart out, Natalie Portman.

Even in the most pedestrian of things, you can find a little beauty. Germany does simple things well. The tale of Germany's football resurrection starts with a man in the German FA getting into his car, driving across Germany and doing clinics in close ball skills in every backwater he could find, where there was even a suggestion of football being played. The likes of Schürrle came out of that. A simple plan gave rise to the poetic.  

To steal a line from Yes, Minister. the match may have been a dunghill, but it grew a beautiful rose. Shame it was against us...

Little Boy Blue (-shirt) and Labour's Love's Lost

Last weekend's Seanad vote reminded me why failure is weirdly rejuvenating for Enda - Every time something goes wrong, his indeterminate middle age recedes to display a little boy in daddy's suit, pretending at grown ups. Really it's quite sweet.

Like all children, he didn't want to admit that he got it wrong, in all humility. And like all childish things - he tried to break up with 29 FG Senators, who got an electorate less responsive than Ariel Sharon plugged out to explain in no uncertain terms that breaking up is hard to do.

This'll get awkward when they keep turning up, persistently giving him gifts, like a gun rack for their 'anniversary'. Not having a need for a rack, not possessing a gun or guns for that matter, poor Enda will have to keep smiling through his buachaill grin until he looks again like a man of indeterminate middle age clothed in Enda's very own suit.

Meanwhile Eamon Gilmore. Nuff said, really. My wife and I once went to lunch with Michael D. and by the end he had me volunteering to canvas for Labour. No really, it's not a joke. Still waiting for the punchline nevertheless.

Meanwhile, here's footage from FG's first day back in Leinster House; Upper House undemolished.