…Day off again and nearly finished my map.
Did more organising for my TV on the World Cup…

No, I wasn’t setting up my own pretend TV channel in order to do some self-commentating. Instead, caught up in the mood of the occasion (more than I would ever be in subsequent tournaments), I fell to preparing a personalised viewing schedule, aided in no small measure by the arrival on newsstands and in our house of… 

Chances are I would have skipped past all of this…

…and headed straight for this:

“Second half live on BBC1”? Wouldn’t that be like starting to read a book from the middle? Not that I would have been able to watch those particular games, seeing as they were way past my bedtime. But I can’t deny that I was quite excited by the 1986 World Cup, chiefly for the spectacle, the history, and the novelty of all that TV schedule-shunting. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you who was in the England squad, but I would have been able to tell you what time the first England match was on television, *and* whether it was also on Radio 2 MW.

With only days to go until the first game, however, one question above all else was beginning to dominate my every waking minute: just where on earth was my Radio Times/Grandstand World Cup Wallchart?  

Note: The “map” that I mention in the diary extract was a “map of the local area”, which I’d decided to start drawing the day before. Yes, I know: another map. What can I say? I had a crush* on cartography.

*”Had” a crush?