Flags And Blood

I am not "West 'am". No matter how much I love the team I have never and would never fight for its name. Whatever that means. My relationship is with the team and the team alone. I am not a supporter. I am a fan.

When I've been to matches I've felt conscious of people around me. But I get so lost in the game that what they're saying or doing doesn't interest me in the slightest. Chants are background noise. I'm there but it's as if I'm watching it on tv. I feel tuned in to what's going on on the pitch and I block out everything else. Even the annoying bloke with the loud voice in the row behind me.

I am a fan. A supporter is a different animal. He or she feels at one with their fellow supporters. At its extreme, this feeling translates into a violent pride in their own people and an antipathy towards others. All the more so if the others are as close as family. Family who choose to wrap themselves in a different flag.

All this bollocks about going back to the dark days of the 70s and 80s! Proud allegiance has always been and always will be dark.

Wave a flag and you've got blood on your hands.

Conkers and Clackers

Primary school was kind of OK. I wasn't bullied by any of the boys and even made friends with a few of them. The one Asian kid's school life was probably hell as I don't remember anybody making friends with him.

I was, however, once bullied by one of the girls. Lesley gave me a Chinese burn. So I told my mum and one afternoon by the school gates my mum got hold of her by the arms and shook her. She wouldn't touch me again.

Apart from that one incident I didn't have any dealings with the girls. I didn't play kiss chase.

In the year of the clackers we crowded into the shelter out of the rain at playtime and made a cacophonous noise. Knuckles were hurt and eyes were dislodged. I was very nervous of clackers but didn't want to show it. I closed my eyes and clacked for England.

More hand pain came with the conker season. Clackers were banned by the government but conkers remained as part of the playtime syllabus. I went to the park with the twins and we'd throw branches up at the massive horse chestnut trees, bringing fresh conkers down in their dozens. We got pretty accurate at throwing. Conkers were either put in the freezer section of the fridge along with the ice pops or pickled in large jars, along with the onions. You had to do something to your conker to prepare it for battle.

My literary life was gathering pace, too. I soon grew out of Peter and Jane and moved onto comics. None of those namby pamby children's books for me. I read Whizzer & Chips from cover to cover but never considered myself a Whizz-Kid or a Chip-ite. I was my own man.

I read other comics, too. But never the super-hero type or that prat Roy of the Rovers. Mine were more down-to-earth, prototype Viz comics. My favourite character was a boy who could only play football in his unwashed bare feet. You'd see him in the bath, his feet on the rim, nice and dirty.

Education, Education...Oh, please yerselves

Good luck to all the students who've just received their A-Level results (even the twats amongst them). I remember the complete and utter sense of joy when I opened my envelope. I leapt in the air with the other girls in my school as we all got straight As and all looked forward to a life of privilege.

I was thinking there must be some people who, even in their 20s, 30s, 40s and higher, are interested in how their old school does each year. They have a sense of pride or disappointment or pride mixed with disappointment or maybe anger that in their day their school's results weren't as good because teachers back then were so fucking hopeless they couldn't even sew their own leather patches on their jacket elbows let alone get the brightest young people of a generation into the best universities.

I was most impressed this year by the poor East London boy who got into Cambridge.

Surprise, surprise, throwing the equivalent of £24,000 a year's worth of education at a poor kid, you end up with a similar result as you do if mummy and daddy pay for their little cherub's future. It seems the experiment worked and we now know we're all the same under the skin.

Books For Blokes

What about those Bloomsbury Good Reading Guides. Useful, aren't they?

The one I find most useful is 100 Must-Read Books For Men.

Cos I'm a man, you see. You can tell just by looking at me.

The book's recommended authors include Lance Armstrong, Len Deighton, Tony Parsons, Jeremy Clarkson. Yes, it's really arty, as you'd expect a book with the name "Bloomsbury" on the cover.

And just imagine my testosterone going into overdrive as I ambled through the library at the weekend. After flicking through Wife In The North in the Quick Choice section, my eyes alighted on a sign.

"Books For Blokes".

I was like a pig in shit. James May, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, Peter Crouch, Lee Sharpe, Jonny Wilkinson, Chris Moyles, George Lamb, Graham Norton. The literary taste of every man in Britain was represented. I took an armful to the self-service machine and withdrew those books in such a manly way the young female library assistant literally fainted at my feet.

I think she'd been reading too many Mills & Boons.

Don't You Find The Weeks Are Getting Shorter?

Hi there. It's good to be back and it's good to have the football back. Good luck to all your teams and look out for Carlton Cole this season. The big man is either going to be immense or he's going to snap his cruciate ligament today against The Wolves and leave us with no centre forward.

This week I have been reading Rog's recommendation, Billy Liar. I like the book a lot but once again it's let down by the blurb on the cover. "Dictator, soldier, cripple, successful novelist, convict; this is Billy, a hero for our times." Um, no, not really. Just a selfish young man trapped in a shitty life.

Last week Tim tweeted about how good The Korgis were. So, with just their most famous song on Spotify, I took a chance and bought their Very Best. And very good it is, too.

Here's a truncated version of their first hit which you won't find on Spotify. Apparently it's "un tema que popularizo Rod Stewart". So it wasn't a hit in Spain, then?

Ladybird, Ladybird, Fly Away Home

We found our dream house, a three bedroom semi. Large garden for me to run around in. This was 1966, a year of affordable housing for an ordinary single income working family. You would need three incomes nowadays to get anything similar.

I was back on familiar ground. Back to the three of us. So much more civilised.

I started school again. Even though it was a small school, I hated being with all those children. And the teachers were so old, older than my parents.

The alphabet was drilled into us. The times table was, too. We started to read about those lovely children, Peter and Jane. Peter and Jane loved each other like most brothers and sisters in fiction. I wonder where they are now? Do they still keep in touch?

The Peter and Jane books were published by Ladybird. A different Ladybird made children's clothes. And then, of course, there were the real ladybirds in the garden in summer. Of the three, I preferred the insects. Ladybird books and Ladybird clothes weren't particularly exciting. They weren't alive.

I "played" with the girl next door. Meaning we were put together so one of the mothers could be free for a bit. I was still in my own little world and wanted nothing but my own company.

Eventually I made some friends. Or rather they made friends with me. The twins were nine months younger than me and in the class below. They were cousins of my second cousins so I guess that's how we ended up together. I was a spoilt only-child and had toys and they liked to play with my toys. One of them was more boisterous than the other and broke a lot of my toys.

I started supporting West Ham as West Ham had won the World Cup for England. Bobby Moore was my favourite player as he was the world's best player. My choice of football team wasn't based on geography or tradition. My dad had been a Charlton supporter because they were the nearest team to Bexley. I was a glory hunter, just like those Cockney Reds. All I could see in front of my eyes was a future of trophies and winning heroes, crying with joy. A lifetime of success.

The Grim Reaper

The phone rings. I pick it up.

"Hello, this is Terry from Uncut Magazine. You were previously a subscriber."

"Yes."

"We don't like to lose our readers. We're offering you the next three months of Uncut for only £5."

"No, thank you."

"Oh. Can you tell me why you stopped subscribing to Uncut?"

"I was just bored with it, basically."

"Oh. Thank you for your time."

I am amazed this magazine is still going. Those of its readers who aren't stopping their subscriptions must be dying off. Yes, Allan Jones has 8 million stories to tell, but they're all exactly the same. Allan gets pissed with Nick Lowe or Elvis Costello or Ian Gomm or Wreckless Eric or Billy Bremner or the bloke who played the drums for Ducks Deluxe. Big deal, Allan.

The magazine's obsession with so-called "Americana" was bordering on the insane. Bands who get audiences of three perennially single middle aged men wearing Bob Dylan 2005 Tour t-shirts and reeking of onions were getting double page spreads! The reviews always included "stunning" returns to form by artists who peaked in the 1960s and whose new albums were recorded on life support machines. The covers featured close ups of male artists so old that we were actually on a government register as corpse fetishists.

So, no, I didn't take up Terry's offer. For music was my first love. And it will be my last.

But it's gotta have some life in it for gawd's sake.

OU Pretty Things**

"In the darkly-comic Hangover Square, Patrick Hamilton brilliantly evoked a seedy, fog-bound world of saloon bars, lodging houses and boozing philosophers, immortalizing the slang and conversational tone of a whole generation and capturing the premonitions of doom that pervaded London life in the months before the War."

Christ, it's no wonder I only got an 'E' for my English Literature 'A' level.

1. I didn't get the humour.

2. I didn't recognise the seediness.

3. I don't remember any fog.

4. I think saloon bars are sophisticated, especially in comparison with public bars.

5. I don't remember the characters philosophising.

6. Was there any slang? I can't recall any.

7. How did these few selfish people represent a whole generation?

8. Were they that bothered about the forthcoming war?

Still, that is the blurb on the back of the book. I was inside the main character's head, saying "Kill them, kill them, kill them." and "Run away, run away, run away." I got completely immersed. I didn't see all the things you're supposed to see as a student of literature.

And that's where my problem lies, where I don't fit into the world of literary education. I am either swept along by a book or I couldn't give a shit. Usually it's the latter.

And speaking of education, did you see the documentary about the Open University? Lenny Henry said that without his extremely hard-earned OU degree he would never have played Othello. Why? Because doing a degree made him into a natural actor, I presume.

Not only is he a new Gielgud, but Lenny now understands every nuance of every Shakespeare play, as mere mortals who haven't done a degree could never do.

Myleene Klass is also doing an OU degree. I just don't know where she gets the time as she is such a busy lady. If I were even half as busy as Lenny Henry or Myleene Klass there is no way I'd find the time to study for a degree.

Kudos to the pair of them.



** Title copyright Betty

I'm An Edinburgh Man, Myself

What a load of bollocks in today's Guardian about increased ticket sales this year for the Edinburgh Fringe.

"This increase in popularity is also put down to greater numbers of "staycationers" - people having their annual holidays at home, as well as the need to find an escape from the recession through comedy, theatre and the arts."

I think what we have here with these fucking staycationers and the fashionably frugal Cath Kidston frock-botherers is the pampered rich middle class playing at being affected by the recession.

You're spending your "annual holiday" (as if you only have two weeks off a year) "escaping the recession" (as if you don't do that every day you're in paid employment) "through comedy, theatre and the arts" (as if anybody on jobseeker's allowance could afford any of these poncey evenings out).

Why not spend your time off turning off your computer and your Sky tv, shopping for tins at Lidl and getting a book out of the library? Pretend you really are unemployed.

Cameron Crow

The David Cameron smarm offensive on Absolute Radio (previously Virgin Radio for those who give a fuck about U2) included not only a dig at something he quite clearly doesn't understand but also a bit of a grovel to government-maker Rupert Murdoch.

Apparently Cameron "loves" Sky Plus.

Nice one, cuntchops.

Christian O'Connell himself was being a bit of a crawl-arsing bastard (my dad's turn of phrase) and the two chaps got on like a house on fire.

Cameron even had time to appeal to thick female students when he lied that he was a big fan of Paolo Nutini.

As we all know, anybody who likes the deeply cerebral Radiohead's noodlings would hold no truck with sincere Scottish blue-eyed soul, possibly the worst form of music in the history of the world.

Back To Bexley

I am more like my dad than my mum. Quiet. Though he had more of an adventurous childhood. He had a best friend to be adventurous with. Quietly.

In Christchurch I had no friends and I couldn't have been happier. Then all of a sudden we were on the move again. My mum had really had enough of being starved of adult company. A quiet husband wasn't enough for a fiercely sociable 34 year old woman.

So we moved back to the borough of Bexley. But we weren't able to get our own place straight away. We spent the next several months at my dad's parents' small terraced three bedroom council house. This was punishment for my mum for bringing us back. And not particularly pleasant for a young child used to space and privacy.

My dad's parents were quiet, too. My grandfather relaxed by doing the pools and watching the wrestling. The pools and the wrestling seemed to take forever, all Saturday. My grandmother seemed to spend all her time in the kitchen, boiling socks. Fish and chips from the chip shop was a weekly treat.

I remember by bedroom wallpaper most of all. It scared the shit out of me when I was ill. And I seemed to spend most of my time in that house with one sickness or another.

Shapes moved. They became three dimensional. They throbbed, heaved, backwards and forwards, side to side, span and spiraled. The wallpaper was alive and its only reason for being was to drive me mad with nausea and fear.

I started school, a tiny school around the corner. I immediately contracted measles. The wallpaper had a field day and the measles perforated my eardrum. My mum and dad were arguing. My grandparents were, too. They were all only keeping together for the child. The sick, weak child in the box bedroom.

Come on, Dad. Hurry up and get a deposit on that dream house!

Libraries Gave Us Power

In response to a complaint about our library's self-help service, a council spokesman said the following:-

"The use of self-service enables staff to perform more customer-focused functions within the libraries, such as helping choose books and offering guidance on the use of the public computers."

I don't need to use the public computers but any suggestions on which books I might enjoy reading are welcome.

So the next time I see my favourite library assistant I will ask her if she could point me in the direction of suitable books. I'll say I'm 47 years old, I enjoy intelligent films and television, have extremely catholic taste in non-bland music, and am leaning more towards non-fiction as I get older though I have recently enjoyed reading the library's stock of John Wyndham books and am currently enjoying Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square. My political views are pretty left wing for this day and age, I do not wish to read about sport as the only sport I like is football and footballers' autobiographies are notoriously fucking brainless, I hate Jeremy Clarkson with a passion, Stephen Fry, though I think he's a nice chap, bores me senseless, comedians and journalists are mostly a bunch of tossers, I went through a period of reading plays in my 20s but I've grown out of that now, same with Philip K Dick, I do like a bit of poetry but couldn't sit down and read a whole anthology, I am not interested in anything a man of my age is supposed to enjoy such as cars, trains, Brunel, DIY, finance, religion, eighteen year old girls, murdering the mother-in-law, koi carp or fucking Wii.

"Please, Mrs Library Assistant? Can you point me in the right direction?"

Blind Date

Hattie Lancaster, 33, PR and Marketing Executive

Mark Barrett, 32, Systems Analyst

MARK ON HATTIE

First impressions Friendly and outgoing. I was very nervous and a bit tongue-tied to begin with so I was relieved she took the initiative.

What did you talk about? Anything and everything. From Rothko to Andy Murray's chances of eventually winning Wimbledon. And music. We were both at the same Animal Collective gig!

Any awkward moments? I dropped my fork on the floor but the waiter was nearby and quickly gave me a clean one.

Good table manners? Excellent.

Best thing about her? She was funny and interesting. And she has a lovely smile.

Did you go on somewhere? She had to be up early the next day. So, no.

Marks out of 10? 8.

Would you meet again? Yes.

HATTIE ON MARK

First impressions? He seemed a little nervous. A friendly face, though.

What did you talk about? Music, mainly. And Andy Murray for about half an hour.

Any awkward moments? He sneezed into his hand then asked me if I had a tissue.

Good table manners? I've seen a lot worse. And a lot better, I'm afraid.

Best thing about him? He likes some good music.

Did you go on somewhere? I had a long journey home and had to get up early the next morning.

Marks out of 10? 5.

Would you meet again? I may see him at a gig. But, no, there was no spark between us.


Mark and Hattie met at some poncey expensive middle-class wanky restaurant in London.

Part Review Of A Book I Took Out Of The Library Using The Self-Service Machine

I am currently reading NOT IN MY NAME: A COMPENDIUM OF MODERN HYPOCRISY by JULIE BURCHILL & Chas Newkey-Burden.

Yes, that's how their names are written on the front of the book as everybody's heard of JULIE BURCHILL and nobody's heard of Chas Newkey-Burden.

It's very entertaining of course, as most things JULIE BURCHILL is involved with. Mainly because both the writers tend to see things in black and white.

There are no grey areas.

I'm just waiting for the moment when they get together on the last page and say:-

"LET'S BOMB IRAN!" just like that dickhead Kenny Everett did at that Tory Party conference.

OK, that was Russia and that was *funny*. Bollocks was it.

Peace, Julie.

Suicide Is Painless

I'm sure the verdict on Michael Jackson's death will eventually be "Death By Misadventure".

But for the so-called Peter Pan of Pop, an overdose of painkillers is somewhat less of a misadventure than, say, flying too close to the sun.

All That Dorset Has To Offer

Christchurch was lovely. I loved it. My dad went out to work and I had nobody but my mum for company. We'd go out for walks to the shops, get the bus to the seaside. I got a little brown body in the south coast sun and a Batman outfit in which I ran down Bournemouth High Street, oblivious to the crowds.

I went back to Christchurch a few years ago. Surprisingly I could kind of remember it. The waterside, the park, the castle, the high street. Most people in Christchurch are now retired. My parents' generation. In a different life we could have stayed there and I could have developed a regional burr.

My dad loved it there, too. He enjoyed working for Shand Kydd and was settled in the house and town.

But my mum hated it. She wasn't making friends. She missed her parents and sisters. As entertaining as I was, I was not adult company. I wasn't due to go to school for over a year so there were no young mothers for my mum to chat to. It was a pretty lonely existence in a very nice place.

Two memories that stick out for me from our year in Christchurch were both frightening. Once we were crossing a bridge over the railway just as a steam train whistled underneath us. And once my cousin was babysitting me and the silly girl got it into her head that there was a prowler in the house.

But with my mum in the house I was safe. Happy playing by myself in the living room, listening to food being prepared, rooms being hoovered and the quiet druggy sound of the radio.

As my mum was going mad with loneliness, I was loving my own little world.

As for my dad?

Was he in his own world, too?

Bring Back Robin Day

Last night we watched Question Time for the first time in years. Jarvis Cocker was this week's non-politician and he's usually entertaining.

Jarvis didn't really have much to say and only seemed to be on there for the Michael Jackson question at the end.

But demonstrating just how far to the right the Labour Party has gone over the years, I found myself in agreement with Iain Duncan Smith on identity cards and with Peter Hitchens re. the railways.

i.e.

Identity cards are a waste of money
The railways should be re-nationalised

It was also a bit rich of Jarvis to slag off Michael Jackson for being crap for the past twenty odd years when Jarvis himself hasn't exactly set the world alight with his solo "career".

Though still staunchly anti-Tory for most of their views I found myself getting more angry at the audience than the panel. They seemed to clap at everything like performing seals. You even get members of the audience with seemingly very strong views asking leading questions then applauding the panelists who give completely the opposite opinions. What kind of mind-altering drugs are these people on? If the Question Time audience is supposedly a cross section of the public, do we have a public of moronic floating voters agreeing with everybody then closing their eyes to place their cross on the ballot paper?

Probably.

Me And The Muggers

Dino went to a good home and I was allowed my own space. I was an only child and I soon learned to play alone, happy in the company of Baby and Daddy Mugger, my two pandas.

My first few years were spent in Welling, not far from where Kate Bush was growing up. Except she lived on a farm. A Welling with a farm is a different Welling from the Welling I've always known. Maybe she lived in a magical, invisible farm in the sky above Welling.

My mum and dad were pretty close to their respective sisters and parents so there was quite a lot of visiting. I didn't enjoy the company of people outside my immediate family. I knew most of them were nice and they gave me nice drinks and nice things to eat but I would rather have been alone with Baby and Daddy Mugger and my toy cars. I loved the shapes and colours and metallic feel of the cars and they would tootle along at a nice slow pace under my gentle guidance. I had no truck with those children who hurtled their cars along as if they were machines of destruction. Those crashing, smashing little bastards were all around but not yet destroying my toys. Not yet.

When I was four my dad got a job as an engraver for the Shand Kydd wallpaper company. The job was on the south coast and we upped sticks for Christchurch. The next year was to be one of the happiest years of my life and one of my mum's most miserable. They say you can't please all the people...

My Tiny Carbon Footprint

No, your eyes do not deceive you, we are still at home.

I woke up at three o'clock on Saturday morning and immediately had a panic attack. It's not the first time. They usually occur when I'm away from home and have had a stressful day's driving. This time it was the night before. I still don't feel right now.

So bollocks to Wales. Last time we were there I nearly killed ourselves and the people in the other car. I'm not a reckless driver but I do sometimes lose concentration when I get tired. Which is every afternoon thanks to this bloody medication I'm on.

Anyway, I'll stop whingeing and make a list of nice places I will take my lovely car in future.

1. ASDA.
2. Sainsbury's/Homebase.
3. My mum's.
4. Bluewater, if they ever show a decent film ever again.
5. Ebbsfleet International Train Station for those exotic foreign holidays.
6. The council tip.
7. The petrol station.
8. The place where they service the car.

If it wasn't for the car I don't know how I'd survive.

Look, You're Getting These For Free, What Else Do You Want?

Before I leave you for a week I have something to get off my chest.

Yesterday I took some books back to the library and picked up some I wanted to take out.

"You can use the self-service computer to return and take out books," says the library assistant at the counter where there is no queue.

So I try to scan the books I'm returning and there is a malfunction. A teenage library assistant clears it for me and takes away the book that doesn't scan.

I try to work out how to scan my library card to take the new books out. The screen demonstrates a hand feeding a card into a slot. I have a hand and a card. But I see no slot.

I go back to the original assistant. There is still no queue.

"Can I take them out here? I can't work out how to use the computer."

"It's very straightforward once you've done it once."

"Well I haven't done it once."

"Maybe next time you'll get more help."

"Is it now policy to direct customers to the self-service computer?"

"It's very easy, you know."

I was trying to bond with her, to agree how terrible it was that stupid rules meant that even though there was hardly anybody in the library, library assistants like her weren't allowed to do the job they'd been trained to do. Of course the reality was, she was thinking...

"They employ these young girls to do nothing. I'm not going to work my arse off while these young girls are walking around the library with nothing to do, getting paid for doing nothing. I've been here for five years. Does seniority count for nothing? I'm going to have it out with the senior librarian. That young slip of a thing should be explaining to customers exactly how to use the self-service computer. She should stand over them while they do it, correcting any mistakes, making sure that the next time they use it they won't come running to me. I am more important than her. I shouldn't be spending my time behind a counter checking in books and checking them out, rushed off my feet, when some young thing who hasn't been here five minutes can't even pull her finger out to help the public properly!"