8 March - Life is not a dress rehearsal............

Matt says...

Somebody much wiser than myself once assured me that, "life is not a dress rehearsal", and this indeed proved to be very poignant on Wednesday evening.

I had suggested to Lynne that we go to see Buenos Aires´current top football side River Plate play Ecuador´s El Naciónal in the Copa Libertadores which is South America´s equivalent of Europe´s Champions League. She wasn´t too keen and I have to say neither was I after the debacle which was Wednesday´s Español lessons. So, I dutifully completed my Spanish homework and we left the hotel at about 8pm to go and have dinner.

As we sat down in the restaurant Lynne noticed that they had the game on the restaurant TV (yes, that´s how fútbol obsessed they are over here) and she graciously offered for us to swap seats so I was facing the television. The sides were just going in for half-time and River were 3-1 down which, at home, is pretty disgraceful. I, rather cynically, thought that I had made the right decision to give the match a miss as the atmosphere from the supporters would have been pretty woeful given the team´s poor performance.

The outcome? River staged an absolutely remarkable comeback and won the match 4-3 in the dying seconds.

Sorry, Auntie Brenda. On this occasion I failed to take heed of your words of wisdom. Never again!