For the second day running I have been more than usually active doing something that blisters my hands.

Yesterday, the spud-planting left me aching and my hand sore, and my arm covered in scratches and grazes that I can’t remember doing.

Today, I went with friends to a golf driving range near the River Trent to see whether I am as awful at golf as I am at every other sport I have ever tried.  There does seem to me to be some appeal at wandering around a field hitting tiny balls – at least compared to standing around in a room running on the spot.

I got on reasonably well.  I hit most of the couple of hundred balls I hired – some of them got hit reasonably far, others barely made it off the astroturf.  But like all sporting activities I have no idea what I was doing differently.

Not sure at all whether I will have many more goes, let alone invest in the equipment.  But I can keep trying it out for another few weeks.

Managed finally to find some time to get my potatoes in the ground, after buying them months ago.

I’m not sure if this actually is potatoes or whether it’s the next Dr Who monster. It was getting to the point where if I didn’t plant them in the ground soon, they were going to take root in my sitting room, something that surely wouldn’t have been popular with ‘im indoors.

So this afternoon, I went over the friend’s house where the garden is that I’ll be using as an allotment, and got to work.

It took about three hours to turn this:

Via this

To this:

… with which I am quite impressed, and which gives the entirely false impression that I actually know what I am doing.

There are about 4kg of seed potatoes in the ground, and the tripods are for drying beans (which I have been singing to the tune of the Crying Game all day) and runner beans.   Potatoes come without instructions, so I dunno whether they are deep enough, properly spaced, etc, etc.  I don’t know how long it will take to see anything, and probably, the minute my back is turned, the local squirrels will leap into action, dig them all back up again and eat them.

There was one rather brave robin who kept showing up to eat recently unearthed bugs, which was rather sweet.

Lets see how it all goes!

Another thing we discussed last night related to the relative size of the nations involved. Andorra has a population of 72,000, Germany a population of over 80,000,000. Andorra can allocate as many points as Germany, meaning an Andorran vote is worth over 1,100 German votes.

Can we use this to our advantage? What if we sent songs in for each of our nations and regions instead of a UK entry? What if we had a Welsh song, a Scottish song, a Northern Irish entry, and an English one?

That way, we’d also get the opportunity for separate Welsh, Scottish, Northern-Irish and English allocations of points. It could make all the difference.

We thought about this for a bit and eventually decided England would probably still end up bottom of the league table, as allowing our nations to vote separately would probably encourage them to vote for anyone but us.

Right.  Apparently Scooch aren’t all that bothered by their result.  It was a good song!

Next year, I think we should get the voting done first to have it out of the way, and THEN show the songs.  It seems most people aren’t voting on the music anyway.

So, Eurovision was a little disappointing. I was at a party with close friends, some of whom had got into the swing of things very much, watching the semi-final, following the acts, etc, and some of whom hadn’t at all.

The house we were in was in the throes of being decorated, which allowed us to stick things to the walls, and our host had prepared a full set of flags for the countries who qualified, and as each song was sung, we stuck a flag to the wall, higher or lower depending on whether the assembled throng liked the song or not.

Here’s our final ranking:

Germany, Sweden, Greece and the Ukraine came top of our list. But our own song – Scooch – for which obviously we weren’t allowed to vote, was a big hit at our party. Many people there hadn’t seen it before, and really liked the moves, the routine and the innuendo that went with the song.

The nations were divvied up between the attendees, who had to come with a drink and a dessert from their countries. I found Romanian and Bulgarian wine, and made a Charlotka (Apple Charlotte – my version was basically a bread pudding with apple purée spread on the slices of bread). Spot prizes were awarded during the evening for a number of arbitrary categories like “Scariest Lead Singer”, “Most Sexually Offensive Dance Routine”, and “Least Clothes by End of Set”. There were also detailed factsheets for each of the nations filled in with entirely spurious comedy facts.

So, the evening progressed, I twittered a bit, and we were all in fine fettle.

And then the voting began.

We voted Germany, Sweden, Finland, Ukraine and think the UK should be in with a real chance partic when West Yurp reacts to being voted out.

Our working hypothesis was that the new tranche of Eastern European countries had voted for each other to force the Western European countries out at the semi final stage. But those countries all still had votes. We rather expected them to be voting against the Eastern bloc on principle.

But it didn’t happen.

No votes? None at all? Mood at party plummeting. I blame Tony Blair.

Halfway through the voting we were languishing at the bottom of the table on 0, having failed to score any high points from any other country, and worse, also having failed to score any of the low ranking points either! We were down there with Latvia and Ireland. We hadn’t liked Ireland’s song, and Latvia’s tenor ensemble wasn’t too bad, but certainly didn’t deserve 0.

Deflated debate ensued about whether they hadn’t liked the song – perhaps it was too irreverent? Too blatantly sexual? More like pop from a decade ago?

Or do our European neighbours really hold us in such low regard?

Or is it just the Eastern European bloc, with its high numbers of small nations, each with high numbers of points to allocate, and with loads of equally small neighbours to placate, skewing the vote?

Then the unthinkable happened!

Now even Ireland and Latvia have something! And us on nil! I’m definitely getting a Scooch-based ring-tone.

Latvia and Ireland managed to score before us! How could this be?

I absented myself from the room to answer a call of nature, and missed all the countries who did actually favour us with their votes, but I heard the cheering from the other end of the house.

Turkey?! 12 points to Turkey? Ireland deserve to tank, but SCOOCH WUZ ROBBED! The creepy serbian lesbos have it.

So by this time, fully deflated, we turned over to watch the TOTP2 Eurovision special, and attempt to finish off the food.

I wonder if I should write Scooch a letter – they must be feeling awful!

One good thing to come out of the evening – I have finally found a strong enough super maxi supreme ultra grip hair gel to do what I want to do with my hair…

(That was my “straight-one-from-scooch” costume – strangely enough, I had a ready supply of yellow ties and just needed to find white shirt, blue jacket for that impromptu airline pilot look.)