Let’s start with sport; and in order we start with cricket and the catastrophic slump in form for the English XI. The home team being beaten comprehensively by the West Indies by 93 runs on the third and final one day international to consign England to a 2 – 1 defeat on English turf! Chris Gayle and Runako Morton were the stars of the West Indies innings both batmen scoring 82 with Morton finishing the innings ‘not out’. Just for a change Shiv Chanderpaul failed in his batting innings by recent standards being caught on 33; Dwayne Bravo made a useful contribution of 42 before being bowled by James Anderson. The Windies finished their innings on 289, setting the home team a target of 290 to win. The story of the innings wasn’t so much the West Indies batting performance, more the poor bowling by the English which the West Indian players took full advantage of. It’s a very simple idea, if you bowl wide and short, you’re going to get hit around the park, so the English need to tighten up their bowling to restrict runs and hopefully pick up a few wickets by forcing the batsmen into making mistakes. It was yet another disappointing batting display from the Englishmen, Owais Shah was top scorer with 51 before edging to wicketkeeper Ramdin. Paul Collingwood hit 44 from 50 balls before being bowled by Dwayne Bravo, the only other score of note was Ian Bell’s 27. Kevin Pietersen failed with the bat again being bowled for a duck on the second delivery he faced, even the in form Matt Prior fell for 1 run. All 10 English wickets fell for a rather disappointing 196 in 44.2 overs. At least the West Indies can walk away from their tour of England with some pride after their humiliating 3 – 0 test series defeat, a drawn Twenty20 series and a 2 – 1 one day international series win isn’t so bad considering their test series performances, but it’s definitely a case of “must try harder” for the English one day side based on this series!
It was a disappointing Sunday afternoon for British F1 fans as Lewis Hamilton failed to take victory in his maiden British Grand Prix. Things looked good after Qualifying when the Brit took pole position for the race and started the race strongly getting into the first corner ahead of Kimi Raikkonen. Hamilton started to pull away from the Finn in the opening laps but started to fade as his first stint progressed and had to fend off the Finn’s Ferrari for the final laps before his stop. Lewis’ second stint was even worse, falling back from Kimi and was leapfrogged by the Finn and team mate Fernando Alonso. Hamilton eventually finished almost 40 secs behind winner Kimi Raikkonen and 37 secs behind team mate Alonso. But the Brit still maintained his amazing record of 8 consecutive podium finishes, but that was helped by the Felipe Massa’s stall on the grid consigning the Brazilian to start from the pit lane. If Massa started in 4th as he should have done, I think that his Ferrari would have been faster than Lewis’ McLaren. Massa fought his way from 22nd through to 5th, just being held off 4th by BMW’s Robert Kubica. The Pole is certainly a star of the future, even Lewis Hamilton has said that Kubica will be his main rival in the future. Both BMW’s finished in the points again with Kubica’s 4th and Heidfeld’s 6th with the Renault’s of Kovalainen and Fisichella finishing in 7th and 8th respectively. Jenson Button and David Coulthard finished in 10th and 11th respectively and Anthony Davidson retired with handling problems on lap 35. Although it was technically a good result for Hamilton, it’s still disappointing for us Brits, it’s hard not to be caught up in the expectation of an Englishman winning the British Grand Prix, it’s been a long time since a British driver won the British GP, you have to go back to 2000 when David Coulthard won for McLaren, oh well, guess we have to hope for next year, with a little luck Lewis will be returning to the British GP as world champion!
My drinking has been kept under control, I only spent £15 all week on alcohol which is much better than spending £100+ each week; at £2 per drink, that’s an awful lot of booze consumed! I feel a lot better within myself as well, it’s nice to wake up with a clear head; for the past few months my life has been a bit of a blur. Sleeping all day, waking up feeling like death warmed up; then working until 12am – 1am, then drinking until 4am – 5am, not really much of a life is it? I’m glad that I am out of that habit now, it’s given me a more positive outlook on life. I have given up on Ali completely, she won’t accept my phone calls and now doesn’t even reply to my texts so I have deleted her phone number. It had been mentioned to me that she used me for sex or because she wanted attention and once she go her fix she wasn’t interested in me anymore. I didn’t want to believe this was true, but it seems that it may indeed be true, so much for wanting to stay friends with me. I had become resigned to only being friends, but it seems even that is too much now, so it’s time to move on and start to rebuild my life. I am not going to fall into this situation again, which is why I have simplified my online life deleting my Faceparty and Myspace profiles, I am just on Facebook now and all my friends are people I know in the real world. If I am going to meet someone now, it’ll be locally, fed up of long distance love prospects, I don’t want to feel how I felt when Ali left again, I am not even looking any more, just going to see what happens!