101 YEARS OLD AND STILL BARING BEARISH TRUTHS...

HAVING not seen our resident polar bear in the Beachcomber Towers breakfast room for more than a week, I was beginning to wonder whether I should be making enquiries, or even instigating a hunt, so I was relieved to see him yesterday morning idly toying with a kipper.

“Delighted to see you looking so well,” I greeted him. “I was beginning to worry that you may have reacted badly to your incorrect World Cup prediction last time we spoke.”

“It wasn’t incorrect,” he snorted. “I calculated that Sweden had a 41 per cent chance of winning without the need for extra time compared with England’s 32 per cent. That, I maintain, was perfectly correct, but an England victory was well within the margin of error. Is that what happened?”

“I believe so,” I said, “though I didn’t watch the match myself.”

“Curiously enough,” the bear said, “on the evening of the match, at a time when I judged it was over, I heard some members of staff, apparently the worse for having imbibed much alcohol, singing something to the effect that football was coming home. I believe their precise words were ‘Football’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming,’ which struck me as rather repetitive and uninformative concerning the result of the game they had been watching.

“Did this homecoming, I asked myself, refer to the game of football returning to the place of its alleged birth in England in 1863, when Rugby Football and Association Football went their separate ways, or did it suggest that the footballers themselves were coming home? In the latter case, of course, it would imply that they had lost and been eliminated from the competition, while the alternative homecoming interpretation would suggest the opposite, carrying the implication that the players still cherished a hope of bringing the trophy back home. The trophy in this interpretation, of course, would be seen as synechdochically representing the game of football. I asked the singers but they merely repeated their song without expanding on its lyrics.”

“Well as I said,” I told the bear,” I believe England won, thus qualifying for a semi-final against Croatia.”

“You seem to know a great deal about this football business,” he said suspiciously.

“One picks up these snippets walking around the estate,” I said modestly.

“So is this football thing in Russia still going on,” he asked, “or did they manage to finish it in time to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his family on the night of July 16-17, 1918?”

“Good question,” I said. “I’m not sure. I know Mr Putin went to Finland yesterday to meet Mr Trump but I’m not sure whether that had anything to do with football or assassinations.”

“So you don’t know,” the bear deduced astutely, “whether England won this World Cup thing.”

“Correct,” I said. “I was rather hoping you might tell me.”

“Some chance!” said the bear. “But I don’t think it matters anyway.” And we resumed eating our kippers in silence.