Into the mystic

By Paul Flower on Jul 6, 10 02:20 PM

Every now and again I get the impression that I'm psychic. This delusion rarely lasts long enough for me to lose any money on rash betting schemes, or appear on television wearing a dubious scarf around my head whilst speaking in a funny voice (that bit comes naturally). This is largely because I'm fully aware that my insights are only as a result of experience and memory. I'm psychic because I'm old.

I can point to a few recent examples of this 'ability'. At the moment that England was forced to play Germany in the World Cup I knew that they would lose. This 'vision' was inspired by a few certainties - England rarely beat Germany in a major tournament, England had been playing badly, Germany had been playing well. England appeared to be falling apart at the seams; their opponents did not - even though they'd had a player sent off in the group stages. For me it was a foregone conclusion, an easy prophecy.

If you'd like a bit more of my insight I can forecast with some certainty that Fabio Capello will pick a very different team for his next England match. There are two reasons I know this - one is because he'll want to demonstrate that he can change and the other is that the next match is a friendly and it barely matters.

I can also tell you that for the next match of any importance (Euro Championship qualifiers) he'll be very cagey and might pick a squad that looks different from the World Cup team, but the starting XI will look very familiar to us all, boringly so in fact. I know this because the evidence is there for all to see - he chose some unusual players for the initial world cup squad, and then failed to pick any of them to play. As Confucius never noted 'a leopard rarely changes its spots'.

In my final 'England-related' divination I can assure you that, contrary to popular rumour (and the Daily Fail), Facebook will not be sponsoring the team. This one smacks too much of speculation and experience tells me that anything that sounds too much like speculation usually is. As Nostradamus once failed to say 'if it walks like a duck...'

A few months ago I reassured you that BBC 6 Music would not close . No-one listened, or rather no-one wanted to listen. It was clearly more fun to indulge in some campaigning, some moaning and some BBC-bashing. I continue to cleverly forecast that eventually the station will lose some of it's bigger-names (because they're paid too much) but it will survive in virtually the same state as now, and the number of people listening to it will gradually start to decline again. When it drops to around a half-million weekly reach there'll be calls for it to be closed, these won't be coming from within the BBC but print-media titles like The Independent and the Daily Mail. As Mystic Meg once said 'what goes around...'

i also don't need a degree in prophecy to know that current nut-job and gun enthusiast, Raoul Moat, will go out in an unpleasant way - but we won't have to wait long before some cod-psychologist blames his actions on an addiction to violent video games rather than jealousy, paranoid-machismo and steroid abuse. I'll give it till the end of the week because as George Santayana said: 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'

In a similar vein I have no doubt that I'll return to these themes and my overwhelming hope that age & guile beat youth, innocence and a bad haircut. PJ O'Rourke said that and he was usually wrong.