New directive - five-minute plan: forget livestock, pig iron, all pig iron ...

or, er, consumer electronics.

Instead, increase studio-based cuteness production by record levels.

(By whatever means necessary.

Yes, apparatchiks, even utilise the Teletubbies trope, if need be need be.)

Projected out-turn: world domination inevitable.

Imminent.

Even enjoyable.

Ah, how better to spend these unseasonably sunshiney early-summer afternoons, than by snatching and stamping daffodils and dandelions, gurgle-sniggering Beavis-style,

and tearing apart the News Review section of the Sunday Times...?

No, not me (well, not mostly), but Harry. (Honest.)

And now, yet another nephew is about to stumble into the scene - long-lost l'il Kim, way out Far East since Boxing Day, but arriving home much-missed (and much more hairily-headed, it seems!) on Monday for what should be a week of much-needed family specialness.

Yep, get those happy feet on the pedals, pal...
Welcome back to dear old Blighty.

"They can see no reasons, 'cos there are no reasons - what reasons do you need...?"

"Sorry, pal. The law requires a five-day waiting period. We've got to do a background check."

- "Five days? But I'm mad now..."

There are doubtless factors warning against too-simplistically blaming the horrific college carnage in Virginia on American gun-nuttiness alone.

Deep-seated, disturbing psychological issues within the culprit, certainly.

A culture of thoughtless violence crossed by instant gratification, possibly.

A rather ragged mess of a response by police, apparently.

But for now, the expansive savagery of such lethal wherewithal does call to mind the old line suggesting the most sensible method of gun control.

Just the one question on the application forms:

"Do you want to own a gun?"

And if the answer's "Yes", then you're certainly not having one.

Seville disorder...

(Surprisingly, this wasn't the most troubling sight of the stay...)

So. This entry should, and still could I suppose, have been mostly about the strange and beautiful bonding of English guests and Spanish hosts - for a start, in the makeshift, central "Fans' Zone" offering free paella and at least free-flowing beer, tucked respectfully away from the cramped alleyways down which Jesus and mother Mary models glided upon the shoulders of multi-coloured KKKesque outfits, and with which no perfectly-distracted-anyway-thank-you football fan had any idea of interfering.

Or else, elsewhere, when despite - or due to - the Chas and Dave CD being on constant rotation, the cheery if beery Tottenham boys and girls and old men and young kids would drift into outlying districts with maybe a word from a helpful, and Betis-sympathetic taxi drivers - towards the healthy, patient bustle of tasteful and tasty tapas cafes, where hale owners and dainty-figured, friendly-faced, wide-eyed and charcoal-eyelined serving-goals helped while away the waiting for seats with towers of cheese platters and, well, wine, plenty and purple of it.

Or perhaps let's lurch into the alarming, disarmingly charming Semana Santa parades striding through those identikit streets - if "streets" is not too generous a word for some of the cobbled backyards they somehow slunk within and around. Frighteningly intense, the fervour with which those sturdy-yet-fragile-looking figurines were hoisted, pursued by kids in their Maundy Thursday best, young and old, very old women wearing black lace mantillas combining above-knee skirts, surprisingly-low-cut tops but more appropriate, severely towering headpieces.

And those outfits - I'm sorry, I know they have a historic significance entirely unrelated to how such apparel has been hijacked by the Grand High Wizards and their weird brigades, but these could have looked for all the world like Ku Klux Klan rallies, were not the all-whites just one representative of the spectrum, with pale violet, pink, ecclesiastical green or crimson also liable to abruptly arrive around another corner.

After about two hours' sleep in two days, even my bleary eyes couldn't be rubbed raw enough to fully appreciate today's pre-proper-sunrise, 6am sight of the all-in-black pointy heads being cheered on by carnivalesque crowds swarming the dim streets, all to a pungent scent of incense and the almost-menacing soundtrack of thuddering drums.

Ah, all this and much more.

But ah yes, and the unfortunate, the inevitable subject that seems to have dominated the headlines back home (though seemed strangely absent from the Spanish Press coverage, at all).

Yes, the sheer audacity of Spurs fans booing that laughable penalty decision and thus clearly provoking, indeed inviting, the bombarding charge of baton-swinging riot police, brutally coshing most startled supporters into fleeing desperately higher along the already-steep and stifling stands...

The police raiders swiping out at all, whether wheelchair-bound or assisting, even thumping the Sevilla and Spurs stewards who had been coping with and calming the crowds perfectly well alone, thankyou. Note, no Sevilla supporters came under threat or in any contact with Tottenham fans. The only things exchanged between the two sets of fans all day, I reckon, were warm words, replica shirts and memorabilia.

Of course, there were Tottenham idiots in the mix too, tossing seats and fighting back whether under direct attack or not. But most were simply scared. Thankfully, I was a little higher, so out of harm's way but among the many looking on in dismay and disappointment and frustration at such a hideous over-reaction and its effects.

Here, for example, a little unnecessary police brutality - out of proportion and out of the blue. What were these goons actually doing there, and just where might the closest far-distant Sevilla supporter actually be?

And coming just 24 hours after the ugly scenes at the Roma-Manchester United match, the telling "coincidence" seems not to be the involvement of English fans as the merely-guilty parties, but the inadequacies of a clobber-now-evade-questions-later police strategy you thankfully don't see being called upon at games in England. Hm, now there's an idea...

In fact, for all the valiant efforts of the stewards, there had been a little anxiety on entering the stadium at the blithe instructions to visiting fans, regardless of the seat and stand number on their tickets, to merely: "Sit anywhere, anywhere you like, doesn't matter."

Maybe that's what it was like in the good old days, but it does seem a strange and ominous approach for a high-profile, Uefa fixture, leading an imbalance between the crowding of upper tiers and lower tiers - and, of course, a recipe for at the very least unpleasantness when combined with the boys in black's rather more antagonistic approach.

Well, well, that's quite enough for now, I suppose - other than to be grateful it didn't turn out significantly worse. As for the game itself, before the baton battalions got stuck in, and after they mysteriously disappeared at half-time, it was all very entertaining. I do think our players were at least partly affected by the simultaneous storm in the stands, that 25 minutes before half-time our most nervous and sloppy.

But the players rallied well after the break, looked the more likely than Seville to score and certainly posed enough problems for the home defence - the marauding Daniel Alves on the right aside - to whet all appetites, especially Keane's and Berbatov's, for next Thursday night at White Hart Lane.

And the memory, the moment of celebrating that opening goal will linger a long time - even if the thrill was tempered a little by the abrupt realisation of just how stomach-lurchingly steep those terraces could feel beneath the bouncing feet...!

All things considered, I think when personally revisiting these recollections, I'll simply go back to the very beginning, a very good place to start.
And stay.
And simply celebrate those heroes among Sevillans.

Hod fuzz...

Concentration on the new Wembley was diverted a little by this rather alarming photo, contained in Saturday's Under-21s official programme:

And there was me thinking the young Glenn could barely muster a wispy excuse for a moustache to make Gary Neville's look Merv Hughes-esque.

Presumably this picture was taken before some kindly soul told Hoddle that Chas and Dave were fine for FA Cup Final songs,

but not - repeat NOT - for personal grooming advice.

"Everybody will be singing..."

Okay, I know I promised no more football posts for a little old while.

But, well, it's not every day you get to go to the long-awaited, oh-too-too-long-awaited opening of the shiny new improved Wembley.

Granted, it was only the Under-21s, and strangely enough,

about as dull as a 3-3 game could ever be.

Let's just hope that junior England defence

is not the senior England defence of the future.

Even the usually-ever-reliable Leighton Baines looked dodgy, albeit against an Italian strike duo - the historic hat-trick man Pazzini and surely-not-under-21-let's-see-that-passport-again-please-Mister Rosina - who might soon be moving up a level, if the reigning world champions' status in fourth place behind Ukraine, France and Scotland continues much longer...

But, anyway, Wemberlee - well, hello hello, it was good to be back - wandering, struggling, down the still-a-little-shabby Wembley Way among the hordes, remembering vividly past visits to see Spurs lose a cup in 1987, win a cup in 1991, win another cup in 1991

- and, well, plenty more Wembley visits for one reason or another.

Thinking about it, I'd notched up rather a lot of Wembley wends: starting in 1986 with a Rous Cup victory for England over Scotland, 2-1, thanks partly to a rare Glenn Hoddle diving header, and culminating in the 1999 FA Cup Final in which super-sub Teddy Sheringham helped Manchester United clinch the second third of that Treble.

Oh, and we thought that was as dramatic as it might get...

In between came the day I, my mother and one brother arrived amid a forest of, er, Forest fans, them wearing grim Pearce and Clough masks, us in Morris boaters with Spurs players cut out and stuck on - and being told merely: "Oh dear, oh dear, what have we here..."

Only to be comforted, as Pearce's free-kick hurtled in, Gazza hurtled off, "goal"scoring Lineker got called offside, then frittered away a penalty.
"See, I told you you'd score," that friendly Forest fan reassured. "Oh..."

I'd like to say I was as magnanimous when we eventually came back to clinch a (deserved) win.

Ah, but I was so much younger then...

Otherwise, there have been the 1999 Worthington Cup win ("The man in the raincoat's blue and white army"), Wolves winning the Sherpa Van Trophy (mum and grandma), Bristol Rovers losing the Leyland Daf Trophy (dad), Ascoli beating Notts County to the Anglo-Italian Cup (dunno), being left speechless by Rene Higuita's "scorpion" save, being left similarly so by Koeman's winning drive for Barca's first European Cup (the second seemed quite sweet too), the rush from Seaman's save to Gazza's dentist chair against Scotland in Euro 96 - oh, and the only Wembley game I missed that summer, the 4-1 v Holland I had to crane to capture from a Villa Park pressbox as Scotland, somewhat less thrillingly,

scraped a 1-0 win against Switzerland...

Well, anyway. The here and now.

And what a stunning stadium it is, new as it is, same place as it stands.

The crowd was well below capacity, and there were lengthy stretches of silence - but when a roar went up, it certainly did stick around.

The design of the roof does seem to keep it all in, bouncing back into the ground rather than drifting away over the North Circular.

That atmosphere will feel and sound immense, just as soon as a full, proper crowd gets packed in, no doubt about it.

Just a shame Spurs won't be there for the first FA Cup Final.

Then again, with 107 steps to the Royal Box instead of the old 39 - I'm not sure our esteemed leader Ledley would have made it,

God rest his dear departed soul...

(As for the other England. Least said, the better...

Then again, for all the flak Mac will surely get:

How, incidentally, really, is Venables earning his money?

If he's such a tactical genius, how did we manage to spend almost the entire game in the opposition half - and yet the player who seemed to see most of the ball was Jamie Carragher?

At least we can't do anything but beat Andorra.

... can we?)

"Be thankful I don't take it all..."

22p down to 20p ... one per cent up per annum, to 22 per cent by 2010 ... £17.45 to £20 by 2010 ... 20 per cent, but really that's 10 per cent, to £6,600 ... £7,280 for under-75s becomes £9,770 in 2011 ... £300 for insulation, or £4,000, or somewhere in between anyway ... 2012 zero-carbon homes (whatever they are - tents?) stamp duty-free to £500k ... eight per cent, to 2.7 per cent, to 1.4 per cent, in five years ... £60billion, to £74billion, in four ... and overall, that's £674billion ... and, after all ...

... that's Numberwang!

Oh, those and many more dizzying statistic shall surely be streaming before my eyes, my dreams, this evening after that day again, mired under a mountain of figures and calculations and conclusions and recalculations and convulsions, all in aid of simplistic restylings.

A business studies GCSE only goes so far... well, not very far at all.

On a purely selfish scale, I can't help but be reasonably satisfied enough, on earlyish digesting - as a non-smoking, spirit-drinking, small-car-driving, mediocre professional whose salary sits conveniently (uncannily so) between the £17,000 and £43,000 gates outside which the other income tax reforms do actually kick in no-doubt-annoyingly.

(Then again, looks like I'm a couple of hundred down on non-refundable flights thanks to the rather exhibionist religiosity over in Seville. Huh. "There is no deadline", says Uefa - a lovely insight into how much the average fan means to those oblivious old soaks... But anyway.)

Away from the forensic economic analysis - of which there will no doubt be much but not here, oh no - I thought Gordon Brown comfortably trounced David Cameron on the jokes front, especially of a Stalinist theme. Cameron, usually so suave, seemed more blustery than brilliant today, his Kylie line especially toppling into the gutter, forlornly, unfunnily...

Then again, he did seem a little stunned by that superb, "oh-and-one-more-thing" touch of showmanship by Brown, as he dug that income-tax cut from the depths of a back pocket.

Yes, the emerging ramifications may bring some bitter stings, and abolishing the 10p tax rate emphasises the "Gord giveth, Gord taketh away" element of the whole affair.

But, er, isn't that what they all, always, do?

("Tax - it has to be paid", as an ardent Stevie P told The Glory Game in 1972. "Aren't all the players Labour?" Er...)

Heavens a'mighty, that a Chancellor of the Exchequer should have the audacity to levy taxes?

Honestly, some people - they win the popular vote at the most recent election, and they think that gives them the right to govern...

(Interesting-ish fact: When George Harrison toured Japan in 1991, his live version of "Taxman" had backing singers replacing "Ah, ah, Mr Wilson" with "Ah, ah, Mr Major", "Ah, ah, Mr Heath" with "Ah, ah, Neil Kinnock".

The first fitted slightly better than the second.

Okay, not even interesting-ish, but anyway...)

Anyway, that final flourish was rather cherishable in the delivery.

Almost as much James Brown as Gordon.

All that was missing was Mr Blair handing Brown his cape at the climax...