Monday

Today I need to pop out of work to go and pick up some Euros for our trip to Berlin on Wednesday. This involves walking halfway home down Wood Green High Street to a First Choice travel agent (the only open bureau de change in the borough, it seems) - the sort of grubby, old-fashioned, pre-internet place where people used to actually come and browse through catalogues to find their perfect holiday.

Do people really still do that? Apparently they must - though instead of searching for a lovely summer cruise I instead find myself standing in a queue behind a woman who is probably about 40 but has the sunbed-ruined skin of a 90-year-old and is trying to haggle a better deal on her unspent holiday Euros. After listening to her spend 10 minutes whining about how exchange rates aren't fair because they change - probably expecting the 18-year-old girl behind the till to put a call in to the treasury - I finally get to the front of the queue. Annoyingly I have to take less than I wanted, because they've only got a few notes left. If the stupid woman in front of me had accepted the fickle nature of international finance I could have had all the Euros I could have ever wanted. Ah well.

I get back to work to catch the end of Portugal annihilating North Korea 7-0 on the BBC live text and later head home to keep an eye on Spain v Honduras (in which the favourites finally grab a 2-0 win which, by all accounts, could well have been as one-sided as Portugal's earlier effort). The second round of group games is now finished and the groups as a whole will be done by Friday - it's all whipping by far too fast for my liking; and the end of the groups marks the sad end of there being at least one game on every day. How will we survive?