The Week in Words: Golden Balls

In this week’s wonga news, Vodaphone sold nearly half their business to Verizon Wireless for £84bn. That’s about the going rate for a Tottenham Hotspur midfielder these days. Actually, Gareth Bale’s move to Real Madrid was for only £84m. In the deal, Bale will receive £300,000 a week for six years. An extraordinary amount of money for one footballer, clearly. The last time I checked there were 10 other players on a football team. For that amount, he should be sidelining as boot room boy, caterer and groundsman, as well as banging in the goals.

And I thought Spain was broke? In 2012, its Eurozone bailout bill was £80bn. European football, however, is an over inflated cash cow. According to a Newsnight report, Europe spent £1.2bn on players earlier this week to beat the transfer deadline. The English Premier League alone increases its worth by 10-15 per cent every year. Companies like BT and Sky are the cause, piling more and more cash into the game as they compete for TV rights and making the clubs, particularly the rich ones, even richer.

Bale is a great footballer. Have you seen him take a free kick? He can kick a ball like it’s a cruise missile. The moral argument says no individual could be worth such a large sum of money, but if a football club working within such unique economic parameters deem £84m to be a viable price tag then clearly he is worth it, and I’m sure you won’t be hearing many Real Madrid fans complaining.

With no salary cap in football (unlike the NFL or Super League), wages will continue to reach astronomical figures as long as there is the money at the club to pay it. I’m sure we could make room for a player like Bale at Swindon Town, but what could we offer him? Nectar points? A year's supply of pasties? A time share scheme? Football players ultimately want to play for the best teams, and you can’t begrudge a player for wanting to win things.

There you are, reading the paper, scanning the back pages for the quick crossword when you find this: "We are all actually Martians.” Say again? “Life started on Mars and came back to Earth on a rock." Woah there! Let’s back up a minute. You're telling me this now? Not only that, but you're burying it in the Guardian's comment pages? Surely this earth shattering news should have taken precedence over the story about an old man who wrote a song about his dead wife? (Actually, it is quite touching).

The comments were made last week by Professor Steven Benner at the Goldschmidt international scientific convention in Florence, where I’m sure they throw legendary after parties. This is no great revelation. The theory has been around for centuries. But Benner's notion that only Mars could have housed the microbes needed to build life on Earth is new and quite startling. It looks like we finally have an answer for Bowie’s question, "is there life on Mars?" Yes, David, there is, and it's us.

While you get your head around this - it took me a while – let’s quickly consider what we humans think aliens look like. I was watching Gareth Edwards' fantastic 2010 film Monsters the other day, and saw the same repeated sci-fi motifs we consider to be alien: slimy, squid-like tentacles, feeding off electrical impulses with noxious, toxic extremities. Like Piers Morgan.

As Philip Hoare’s article observes, in showing aliens in this light we are only replicating the image of our own aquatic ancestors. And what incredible irony that it seems these depictions may have been from another planet after all! Anyway, it's fascinating stuff.

I was at a lunch for the new Pol Roger 2004 vintage at Manchester's Midland Hotel - where Rolls met Royce - and conversation turned to Winston Churchill, who was partial to a drop of Pol Roger. The last time he visited the Midland he popped in for what he would call a "light snack": two glasses of champagne and 18 oysters. There was an exchange of favourite Churchill quotes. A waiter once asked Churchill if he had enjoyed his meal, to which he said, "Dinner would have been splendid if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish, and the maid as willing as the Duchess."

And this one, which I hope is true. After a particularly grueling Prime Minister's questions, Churchill jumped into the bathroom to avoid bumping into Labour chancellor Stafford Cripps. A political aide apparently knocked on the toilet door asking that Cripps wanted to see him, to which Churchill replied, "Tell him I can only deal with one shit at a time."