Silence please, the game's on

A long-time correspondent, Ann from Waterford, writes to complain about the current ubiquity of football. Or "bloody football", as she calls it. That's the entire first sentence of her letter, in fact, but it's an accurate summary.

Long-time readers may remember Ann from an earlier occasion when I featured her comments on the dawn chorus, performed in her locality by a choir of crows, none of them with a note in its head. They were particularly loud when Ann was pregnant, a problem she solved by discharging a shotgun out the window every morning. What surprised her, she wrote then, was how her husband could sleep through the sound of a firearm going off "within six feet of his head".

What surprised me was that she supplied her name and address - information I withheld in case the local guards were reading. So imagine my surprise when Ann wrote again to point out that - guess what? - her husband was a guard, and had cracked up when he saw the column. My suspicion is that he may have cracked up some time before that, but we'll let it pass.

Anyway, although Ann doesn't identify it by name, her latest problem clearly came to a head with last week's World Cup qualifier in Tehran. This would explain why, when she attempted to "take refuge" with her children in the library on Thursday afternoon, she found "the bloody match" showing there too. And "on widescreen"! Perhaps the library had signs saying: "Silence, please. There's a game on." But either way, for Ann, it was the final insult.

"I had to switch off The Last Word on Today FM all week and couldn't get Lyric tuned in," she writes, adding: "To cap it all, RT╔ had the temerity to show the match on Network 2 during the one hour of quality kids' TV. OK, so Barney's not exactly quality, but it's all relative." Her letter concludes: "By the way, who won?"

Well, on behalf of football fanatics everywhere, I want to say straight away that we may be guilty of a lot of things, but we did not jam Lyric's wavelength last week. Having said that, and in the interests of fairness, I have to admit that Ann does have a point here. Barney really is the pits.

In case there are any of you lucky enough to remain unfamiliar with him, Barney is an annoying purple-and-green dinosaur who co-stars in his own programme with a group of annoying children. The children, whose acting is as natural as Barney's skin colour, start each episode playing among themselves, until a toy version of the dinosaur suddenly springs into giant-size life. This is cynical merchandising, encouraging children everywhere to buy toy Barneys, in the hope that he may come to life in their homes too. And all I can say is, if he ever pulls that stunt in my living-room, I'm getting a shotgun.

But to return to football (something I believe we need more of on TV and radio), the bad news for Ann is that our boys won, and have qualified for the 2002 World Cup. So if she thinks things are bad now, next year promises to be bleak. Before long, the state of the peace process will be competing on news bulletins with the state of Niall Quinn's back; and the economic slowdown will be of less concern than the prospect, however unlikely, of Gary Breen speeding up a bit.

So my advice to Ann - and the many others who feel as she does - is that now would be a good time to emigrate. Preferably to a country which hasn't qualified. Iran springs to mind, if only because a woman who prefers not to watch football there will find the state very supportive of her choice. Then again, the West Indies might be a more pleasant option.

I mention this because, after a recent column about the problems at this newspaper, I received a poignant e-mail from Margaret Hughes in Grenada, who reads our web edition daily. Grenada hasn't been in the news since the US invaded in 1983 and President Reagan famously announced, for reasons neither he nor I can now remember: "We got there just in time." But the invasion was clearly a big success, because Margaret says The Irish Times on the web is currently "the only sane alternative to 35 US TV stations". Consequently, she urges: "Get to those union meetings and fight for us exiles in dire need."

We'll do what we can, Margaret. Speaking of those 35 TV channels, though, it occurs to me that none (well, perhaps one, but it's in Spanish) will be showing the World Cup. And it's just a suggestion. But in the interests of mutual sanity, maybe Ann and Margaret should consider a house-swap.

fmcnally@irish-times.ie