Rest day. For a while now it's been sitting there in the diary, an oasis of inactivity. No trams, no trains, no timetables. No packing, no unpacking, no repacking, no backpacking. Most improbably, though, maybe some Brat-Packing, for the hotel is most pleased to provide guests with a selection of 80s movies for your room's VCR, The Breakfast Club at the top of the list. But only maybe. Nothing organised, nothing fixed, nowhere to be, no one to see. Paradise.

Paradise, once the eyes are opened, is a small town called Bruhl, 20 minutes or so outside Cologne. It has no claim to fame apart from occasioning the first use of an umlaut so far in the Tribune's Wor ld Cup coverage. It's 10 or 11 streets of cracked footpaths and unweeded gardens, of rusty scaffolding and dusty roadworks. It's Nowheresburg-am-Rhine, glove-fitted for idle hands.

So. Breakfast (because you can't use an umlaut without cracking eggs). Then, online.

Check emails. Delete emails.

Read papers. Realise, not for the first time, that those at home probably know a lot more about what's going on than those out here. Update fantasy team. Realise, not for the first time, that luck fights dirtier than judgement when it comes to these things. Move on.

Into downtown Bruhl for a potter about. Kills five minutes. Into uptown Bruhl for a potter about. Kills four. May as well be pottering around Carrick-on-Shannon. Slowly, glacially in fact, the drip-drip of realisation comes that maybe doing nothing isn't as much fun or even as relaxing as had been hoped.

Listen to some Steven Wright on the iWireless. "A girl asked me the other day how I was feeling. I said, 'You know when you're sitting on a chair and you lean back so you're just on two legs and you lean too far and you almost fall over but just at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time.'" Resolve to go back to hotel room and give it a whirl.

Fall off chair.

Bored now. Head down to hotel bar. Make friends with Tomasz, the barman/receptionist. Tomasz is a Croat but has lived in Bruhl for years.

"Not much to do here, " he says cheerfully. Seems he likes it that way.

World Cup news on the television. Footage of a portly, mid-50s-looking chap in a vintage-style red England shirt watching England's game against Ecuador on the couch in a poky flat. What gives, Tomasz? Tomasz translates.

"He is Martin Rooney.

He is uncle of Wayne Rooney. He lives in Bremen. He comes to Germany in 1973. ARD [German public broadcaster] did interview while he watch the game on Sunday."

Rooney's uncle? Really?

That's a good one now, you think. Nice feature for the German news to do alright.

Mind you, it seems a bit strange that the ever-enterprising British tabs didn't get a hold of such a tasty nugget before the tournament started. And, for that matter, how come he's watching the game in what seems to be the kind of joint Rigsby would have turned his nose up at? Couldn't his nephew have sorted him out with a ticket?

Or, come to that, his brother?

"Sister, " says Tomasz. Sister? "Yes, " says Tomasz. "His sister is Rooney's mother."

Wait a second, if his name is Martin Rooney, how can he be the mother's brother? Surely her maiden name wasn't Rooney as well, was it? Something's clearly amiss here.

Head to internet, intrigued and in full Lieutenant Columbo mode now. Bring back some print-outs for Tomasz an hour later. Turns out 'Martin Rooney' is something of a professional Englishman living in Germany. The earliest mention of him in the German media is from 1996 when he waxed long and lyrical about being at the 1966 World Cup final in Wembley. He has said that he learnt German from Kicker, the German football bible, and that he chose Bremen to live in because it was the home town of Bert Trautman, the famous broken-necked German goalkeeper who played for Manchester City. For all that to happen and be documented and then for it turn out that he's the uncle of the future of English football is surely a Zapruder film'sworth of coincidences.

And so it transpires. By Thursday, the rest of the German press are onto the scam and ARD are lampooned across the country. Rooney himself is asked about this phantom uncle at a press conference and expresses nothing but bafflement. By Friday, even Rooney's granny . . . a Ms Pat Morrey, 75 . . . is disowning the man who claims to be her son.

Anyway, it kills a couple of hours. Head to room with book. Read. Doze. Curse the very idea of a rest day.

Promise never to look forward to one again.