TWITTER was on fire the night of the awful Brazil defeat to Germany, with many terrible jokes about not being able to take it and Neymar; but really it was not funny at all when you think of all those stadiums that were built instead of schools and hospitals, and then the poor host country getting annihilated at home by a 22-legged Teutonic goal machine.

TO send your children halfway around the world to learn a new language in a geographically and culturally distant place requires quite some doing – especially financially, if you have chosen an upscale language school and decided to send your kids off for six whole months.

IF men got cystitis the way women get cystitis, it is without doubt that within 24 hours a state of international emergency would be declared.

A friend of mine is known as Johnny A&E. He doesn’t drink much or very often, but once or twice a year when he gets properly hammered — he’s a birthdays and Christmas kind of drunk — he always ends up in A&E.

WITH pocket money sent from well meaning relatives comes a degree of financial independence which does not always translate quite as smoothly from its theory of giving to the reality of spending as one might hope. I call it the Lynx Effect. Give a ten-year-old boy a bus fare, access to cash, and a trip into town with his mates, and you are asking for trouble.

THREE days to go before it all kicks off. Then a month of relentless football action on the telly, down the pub, on the big screens, in the news, everywhere.

IN the early 1980s, the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood wrote about why men fear women — they fear that women may laugh at them — and why women fear men — they fear that men may kill them. And Germaine Greer famously wrote how few women have little idea of the extent many men hate them. Nah, you might think. Surely not.

IT used to be that when couples went on holiday together, they would realise after a fortnight of sitting side-by-side by the pool reading their John Grishams and eating hotel buffet ‘fayre’ that actually they didn’t have a whole lot to say to each other.

THE trainer, a lovely curvy woman in tight lycra whom I have expressly picked out from a line up in the gym, because she looks normal rather than someone who exists on egg white omelette and kale, assumes I have engaged her because I want to be thinner.

I THINK I may have found a new source of renewable energy not previously explored to its fullest. Were I not feeling so insanely irritable I would sit down and tell you all about it in a nice calm manner, with relaxed body language and an easy smile. However, given how cranky I am right now, I will instead explain my brainwave through gritted teeth.