"Nicole Kidman on the phone," shouted my wife, Rachel. "She was wondering if she and Hallé Berry and a half-pint of olive oil could have the unbridled use of your body together for an hour or so, any time you like.", writes Kevin Myers.
"Tell them to get lost," I roared, cramming a pound of crisps into my mouth and washing them down with a basin of Sauvignon Blanc.
"Ah," she continued, "in that case, you probably aren't interested in the message from the Corr sisters, asking you to join them in some skinny-dipping, with champagne and lobster and whatever follows later this evening?"
"Correct," I cried, pausing only to yank the phone-socket from the wall, bringing down several miles of telephone poles across Kildare, and then flushing my mobile phone down the toilet. For nothing quite compares with the European soccer championship. It is not just the greatest sporting contest of all; it also provides an extraordinary insight into Europe's national characteristics.
We like to imagine that the Italians are noisy, boisterous, wine-drinking, imaginative, unpredictable southern Europeans, with none of the inhibitions of us northern Europeans. Their soccer team declares that in fact, the Italians are cautious, conservative and careful. Italians are not flamboyantly individualistic, but are obsessed with order, appearance and self-control. The result, when expressed athletically, can be the direst, most mind-numbingly awful football played anywhere; and what's worse, intentionally so.
National characteristics are often best observed in the activity for which football is a metaphor - war; and wars are won by people who are intelligent, assiduous, courageous and organised. Any student of the two world wars will tell you precisely how Germans will play football. When you attack, they will instantly counter-attack: they know no other way. They are well-organised and disciplined, brimming with individual courage, initiative and determination - though those characteristics were not too evident on Wednesday, as the German game passes through what is merely a cyclical, if rather long, trough.
The Dutch should be rather similar to their neighbours, but aren't. The Dutch experience of making a living beneath the North Sea seems to have bred an almost anarchic individualism. When the Dutch get drunk, they invariably argue and bully. The primacy of self over group is the reason why the nation which has produced the most talented footballers in Europe over the past 30 years has not enjoyed as much team success as it should.
The Czechs? Well, forget the pacifist clichés about the good soldier Schweik. In 1918, against ferocious odds, an army of Czech prisoners fought their way home from Siberia, capturing a Bolshevik train laden with gold en route. Moreover, the Czechs prepare properly for battle - which is why the Czech arms industry in the 1930s produced some of the best tanks in the world, and also invented the famous Bren gun, which remained in service for over 40 years. But did they not capitulate in 1938 and again in 1968? Indeed so: Czechs are intelligent realists, and as such, they see no point in purposeless sacrifice. The most talented team in the championship.
But surely the Spanish, with their martial traditions, should produce good football teams? Well, no: they produce great players, to be sure, but their parent culture is bullfighting, one which is built on machismo and individual flair, not on the solid, patient, self-sacrificial co-operation that great teams require.
English teams are very English - stoic, brave and rather unimaginative, best when working a system, as in 1966, or El Alamein in 1942. Such football teams are uncomfortable with star players - which is why the brilliant Jimmy Greaves was not in the World Cup winning team, and the stolid, loyal and virtually brainless Roger Hunt was. The French, of course, being French, defy characterisation.
But lazy stereotypes are worthless with the arrival of pure genius, which is unrelated to environment, education or parentage. Pele was such a genius. I am perhaps the only person in Ireland who saw him play, in the flesh, when he was 17. I was a little boy, and appreciated what he was doing only through the astonished oohs and aahs of the Leicester crowd watching him perform in a friendly.
Some time later I saw the very young George Best - then 18 - play at Filbert Street. Injured, he dropped back to midfield, and spent the match spraying out the most sumptuously beautiful passes I still have not seen bettered. Leicester City would have beaten any other club in England that day. Manchester United, thanks to the injured George Best, annihilated them 5-1.
Such a genius has arrived again: Wayne Rooney. As with Best and Pele, his brain intuitively and instantly sees options and ways to implement them that are entirely beyond the understanding of others. Pele was fortunate. He was surrounded by many great players, and the disparity between him and them was not unbearable. Moreover, and vitally, the Brazilians lack a boozing culture. They dance instead.
George Best came from a different culture; and good though his team-mates were, they didn't compare with the many Brazilian luminaries who cast such a glorious light over world soccer. So he grew bored and frustrated with his colleagues, and turned to the curse of this island and our people. Pray, then, that Wayne Rooney, probably the greatest soccer player the world has seen since Pele and Best, and like the latter burdened with those Irish genes, follows not the worst ways of Best, but the best ways of Pele. Take up the rumba, Wayne.