Tim Dowling's World Cup diary

At the start of the Chile-Honduras match I set myself a spectatorial endurance test: could I, at the end of 90 minutes, still find the sight of a long-haired Chilean defender wearing a shirt that said PONCE amusing? The answer, sadly, was no. I stopped laughing after 20 minutes. ▶ Watching a daytime match on your own can be lonely. For the second half I retreated to my computer to try ITV's online "watch and chat" facility, where the game opens in a small window alongside rolling chat from "dude@work", "peeking at work", "atworkandshouldntbewatching" and others. Not only are these employees using company time to watch football, their hands are idle enough to type out a running commentary, with several allowing themselves the luxury of spelling Chile with two Ls. The commentary itself is a stream of bland asides ("good effrot"; "unlucky"; "shoud have scored") about 30 seconds behind the action: irritating enough when everything's working normally; exasperating when the screen freezes and you have to rely on it to figure out what's happening. But it's not interactive if you don't join in, so I coined a username ("workinhard"), and waited for inspiration to strike. When Chile missed an easy chance five minutes later, I typed "ponce – LOL" and hit send. Not only did I receive no replies, I silenced the chat for so long I thought I'd broken it. ▶ A claim made on these pages today – by a British vuvuzela importer – that "musicians can get three notes out them" intrigued me, not least because it sounds a very easy claim to musicianship. Grabbing my own vuvuzela from the place where my wife had hidden it, I tried to master its intricacies. According to the guitar tuner I clipped to the bell, the plastic horn's main note is an A below middle C. I can also manage a breathy, wavering D below that, and even another A an octave up, although not without losing my vision for some minutes. Does anyone know a song that goes like this? It's got to be short, otherwise I pass out. Foreign swearing for today's matches. French: "Va te faire foutre!" Korean: "Tong kumong!"