Cream Crackered

I'm utterly knackered today.  The reasons are down to lack of sleep and the causes of this are far too dull and involved to go into.  So I won't.  The long and short of it is that I've sleep walked my way through the working day and now it is all I can do to keep my eyes open as I crash out on my sofa.  Consequently, thanks to my current state of exhaustion, I've been forced to do some rescheduling.  As I remain determined to get the next Sleazecast out this week, I've made that my priority, (there's only one segment left to record before it is edited together), and I've decided to hold the story for The Sleaze I was going to write this week over until next week.  Doing that, of course, will take The Sleaze into August, traditionally my holiday month.  I've noticed that a lot of my favourite sites and blogs take the whole of August off, resuming the posting of new material until September.  I must admit that I was toying with the idea of doing the same thing myself this Summer, with regard to The Sleaze, at least.  It's traditionally a slow month for traffic.  However, having made the decision to delay the next planned story this now seems a non-starter.

While I'm here, knackered or not, I thought that I'd briefly follow-up yesterday's post about the ongoing Gareth Bale transfer speculation, with a couple of further observations.  Whilst today's crop of articles and reports on the subject still lack any direct quotes to support their claims, I can't help but notice a degree of back-peddling in some quarters.  Most notably, the BBC have changed their stance that Bale has indicated a desire to talk to Real Madrid, to 'it is believed' that Bale has indicated such a desire.  In another 'development', the press are now full of claims that Real have tabled a formal bid of £85 million for the player, possibly as long ago as last week.  In which case, one wonders, why have neither Spurs nor Real confirmed this?  At the same time, the Real mouthpiece Marca - from which most of the speculation regurgitated by the UK press has originated - is now claiming that Spurs have set a value of over £100 million on Bale, which they characterise as 'Crazy'.  Which could be interpreted as laying the groundwork for Real not to bid for Bale this Summer - 'he was too expensive', they could tell their disappointed fans.  But who knows?  Certainly not the UK media.