8% "special time"

About 2.30am I was thinking about the ridiculous hours I have been keeping through this World Cup. Of course you console yourself that its' only every 4 years. But then I did the sums - it's one month every 4 years. That's 1/48th of the time. A bit more than 2% of my life has consisted of World Cups. Similarly, the summer Olympics take about a month, every 4 years - another 2% (too many of the winter Olympic events fall into the categories of "sports where you score points for costumes" and "sports that are simply sliding downhill"). The AFL finals take 4 weeks every year, but they are only on weekends - say 8 days of the year. That's another 2%. Then there are Ashes tests played in England. That's 5 tests of 5 days each, every four years. Throw in the occasional one-day match and you might as well call that another 2%.

So that's about 8% of my life so far that I have treated as a special case, when you can bend the rules, sleep in, be obsessive, draw up little tables in the back of notebooks, and never be short of conversation with complete strangers. Hey mate - did you see that bloke from Equatorial Guinea in the 1500m freestyle - wasn't he something?