Byatt analysed Euro in the pages of The Observer

Byatt analysed Euro in the pages of The Observer.'' Did that get people going on the Rosetta Stone Guardian blog site, or what? Even a Marxist weighed in. A joke circulated on the internet: ''The English team visited an orphanage in Cape Town today. 'It was tough to see all the faces without hope' said six-year-old Benny, after the team had left.'' I thought a post from Norberto put it well: ''Good heavens. The tension. The angst. The schadenfreude. The future of our game, our heroes, our nation. And we're playing Slovenia. Bloody Slovenia. Not Brazil.'' Mind you, the English do have a problem to ponder. Gerrard, Rooney and Lampard are stars in a competition with some of the best players in the world. But they don't star for England. On Wednesday, like France, England had a team that was highly paid and deeply troubled. Meanwhile, the Kiwis, who were playing out of their skins, had a team that included a player who works for Westpac and plays for an amateur team back home in Wellington. England won 1-0. So did Germany. They now meet in the quarter-finals and, let's be frank, England and Germany have got history. This post, by an Englishman living in Germany, suggests at least some of the old swagger is back. ''It's 11.25 pm. Outside my house in Berlin, ze Germans are still partying. They even bought some bloody vuvuzelas. Partying the teutonic way. Lots of howling and tribal screaming Rosetta Stone Software going on, no soul in it. The Germans don't realise how weakly the German team actually played, how tight the decision actually was. No doubt they will be eliminated by a far more experienced English team.'' As she fell behind, she feared the lender would take her washing machine and fridge, which she had put up as collateral. She made payments where she could, but never seemed any closer to paying it off. ''I was ringing up and saying, 'How long have I got to pay on this loan? It seems like I've been paying it forever,' '' Peterson says. ''And he was saying, 'Oh, you've got another year, year and a half it's interest.' '' She eventually stopped when financial counsellor Martin Stevens advised her that she had paid enough, and had no capacity to pay more. Robert Meldrum, the owner of Cash Loan Money Centres, defends the legality and morality of his loans, saying they fill a need that banks do not. The charges were legitimate and there was ''no cap on fees in Victoria'', he said, and most of his customers were ''only too happy to have the opportunity to get the money''. THERE is no dignity in poverty. Peterson is budgeting more tightly now, but she cannot get by without a car, and she has neither life insurance nor car insurance. She drives ''praying to God I don't have an accident''. But what eats away at her is her lack of a funeral plan. ''I Rosetta Stone Greek don't want to be buried as a pauper. I'm somebody's mother, grandmother, great grandmother.