The Franchise

The NBA is in town and I've got myself accredited to go and watch the Miami Heat take on the New Jersey Nets at Bercy on Thursday night.

I was at a practice session today watching the lithe young men manipulate a basketball. All very astounding. But like anything you've got to work and work again.

So I must persevere with the tennis lessons. After the first one on Tuesday, I felt as if there had been no huge revelation but maybe that's it. There's not supposed to be anything like that.

Will have to wait and see.

Now while the world is melting down and we're broaching the death of capitalism and the end of the United States as a superpower, I have been wondering what music to put at the start of the Sports Insight magazine at the radio station.

It is not easy. Things that I would want to use from TC's Space Music podcast or the Fresh Air lounge series is not really sporty, it's more downtempo chillout for after sports.

I'm due to record the programme on Friday or Saturday and what with the busy schedule of watching NBA stars, playing football myself and working, there's not much time to listen to music.

Perhaps the Eurostar journey on Sunday afternoon will provide me with the decent chance.

During the twilight hours this morning, I was wriggled out of bed by the boy, so I came to sleep on the sofa and listen to the radio, I slept undisturbed for a few hours before the middle child decided to come and grace me with her presence.

There was some truncated conversation about not wetting her bed but wetting the night shorts. I didn't want to get into the details as I might have really woken up.

A financial forecaster was interviewed on the BBC World Service and he said he'd seen all this coming but his regret was that he'd said so far too early. While on the hand he was happy to have been proved right - since that's his raison d'etre as a forecaster, on the other hand no-one listened.

I didn't know such things existed. But I could have guessed as they have trend predictors who tell us that black will be the new black.

Bust banks are the new black. Anyway the forecaster, Roger Bootle, said there'd be an intellectual malaise as a result of all this downturn and that's where I fell asleep.

One morning during the World Service haze, they interviewed a psychiatrist who said that trips to the clinic are usually seen as a luxury adjunct and they were all starting to worry about gloomy times ahead - so to speak.

But far from it, the bust means boom time for the shrinks as all kinds of psychological issues are now emerging.

So you spend your last few thousand dollars going to a person who says no, you're not going crazy, it's the system going kinetic that you've been propping up for the last few years.

Well the shrinks have got onto a winner on this one. Me? I can't even afford the time to find music for a radio magazine so I'm hardly likely to trip hop off to the Freudian headhunters.

But for some reason I picked out Star Wars from the DVD library. Episode IV - A New Hope.