During a visit to a homes and garden fair last weekend – it was at the instigation of my beloved I assure you – I learned that a medium-sized hive on display, held as many as 60,000 honey bees.
These industrious creatures swarm around non-stop to create just a small amount of honey. Indeed, in its lifetime the average honey bee makes just 1/12th of a teaspoon of the stuff. That’s an awful lot of effort for very little reward.
And that endeavour is also put into perspective when you consider that not even the mighty Queen bee has achieved the commercial nous required to set up a method of decanting and taking to market.
The concept of a plethora of flair-less industrious automatons came back to me while watching England’s Under-21 side struggling to earn two draws against Spain and Ukraine in the European Championships.
England seem to have a surfeit of midfielders who can run around a lot, earning yellow cards, and playing long balls into the channels, but no Queen bee, to put a foot on the ball, be creative and do something out of the ordinary.
We got back in the game against the Spanish because, unlike the senior senors, their arrogance did not have sufficient cutting edge. Technically and creatively, we were poles apart … and come to think of it the Poles probably have better players.
It’s certainly my belief that all of the hype which surrounds our domestic league can make young players victims of their own publicity.
Jordan Henderson, for example, was a really good player until the papers starting saying he was a really good player. Now, one suspects Kenny Dalglish may have bought a £20m pup.
As somebody on Twitter said yesterday: “The Spanish are amazing – it’s like they’ve had thousands of good coaches teaching their kids how to control a ball from an early age.”
And I bet Spanish honey bottles itself too.
