CULTURE CLASH

“People come and people go, moving fast and moving slow…”

Despite my current lack of animation and motivation, the world continues to unfold around me in strange and peculiar ways. The news remains full of angst and woe, and the silly little schoolboys are squabbling over their pocket money whilst rushing us headlong into a war that nobody really wanted.

And the world gets madder, and the world gets madder, and humanity becomes ever more disappointing to those of us able to see it, as we massacre our fellow species as effectively as we have learned to massacre our own.

But as long as we’ve got our new toys to play with, it seems that few of us are actually prepared to care, and the minds of the young are manipulated into partaking in the madness by master-minds able to lift the blinkers from their eyes and show them the laughably imbecilic world that we’ve created.

So what hope is there for any of us…?

I was on a train at the weekend, and my journey home rom the theatre happened to coincide with kicking out time at one of the bigger footballing games of the weekend, and so the train was not only packed with families on their way home from a day’s shopping, but also with a number of footballing supporters who sang extraordinarily crude songs at the very tops of their voices despite the fact that we believed that their language excesses might have been likely to be tempered by the presence of lots of young children and people who might have resembled their mums.

No such luck.

People these days, it seems, have little shame and few boundaries.

“My old man, said be a XX fan…”

Ah, you probably know it.

Interestingly, at one point a passenger in front of us, drinking from a beer can and wearing a shirt of the opposite footballing hue, finally snapped and headed off back down the carriage towards song central, and a very ominous and intimidating “THUD!!!” was heard throughout the carriage shortly afterwards, but that still didn’t stop the singing.

More interestingly, in front of us sat two distinct and separate families which both had amongst their numbers small boys of about nine or ten. Of course, as is the way of things nowadays, neither family made the youngsters give up their seats for the older people who got on the train later, but I suppose that I’ll have to let that pass.

It is, after all, an “old-fashioned” point of view, even though I would never have got away with it my youth.

The point here is that we noticed that each of the small boys was wearing a footballing shirt, and they were shirts from opposite sides of the great Manchesterford Footballing Divide, as I like to call it. They were both sitting on adjacent seats, albeit on opposite sides of the carriage, but neither was hurling abuse at the other simply for having a different favourite, or an alternative point of view.

It was the Beloved who pointed them out to me as they were gathering their things together (including shoeboxes claiming to have “Average contents – 2”) to disembark.

“The sad thing is” she remarked, sagely “Add fifteen years and they’ll be hurling abuse at each other just like those others…”

And, you know, the really sad thing is that she’s probably right.

MOONRISE

Last Sunday evening, whilst t'Beloved (and, it seemed, the rest of the universe) were watching the World Cup Final, we happened to glance out of the window of the place we were staying in for our holidays and saw the extraordinary sight of a moonrise over the headland across the bay.

Now, because this was a rather full moon, and given that the so-called "super moon" had happened 24 hours earlier, this all seemed rather more impressive than the deathly dull nil-nil draw which seemed to be playing out on television, and so we gaped and gawped at this rather beautiful view for several moments before deciding that we'd like to capture it in a photograph, even if it was going to have to be taken through the window because I didn't feel quite like dashing outside with a load of old clobber at that time of night.

Now, for some bizarre reason, it turned out that I had four photographic devices with me on that particular holiday. In fact, if you count the Kindle, I actually had five, but let's not, eh, because I didn't even try with that one.

First of all I snapped a quick shot with the teffalone before it was suggested that I ought too try using a "proper" camera, and so I rummaged about in the backpack, produced the tripod, and set up the SLR.

Sadly, my knowledge of night settings for such pictures is sadly lacking, and so I spent a few minutes producing shiny blobs on dark backgrounds before remembering that the pocket camera had some special "night sky" settings and grabbed that out of the bag.

Rather miserably, I couldn't work out where those settings were on the menus, and more blobs were produced as the clouds began to gather and the moment was escaping us.

In the meanwhile, of course, the Beloved snapped off a couple of rather smashing shots on her own camera that I'm now very jealous of.

All of this frantic scrabbling about was not helping me to appreciate this rather serene moment, but I grabbed the much underused "bridge" camera, the batteries of which - rather happily - I'd charged only that afternoon after finding them to be completely and utterly flat.

Once again, the moon proved to be far too bright for the "night sky" setting, but by spinning the dial I managed to find a setting that worked reasonably well, and got a snapshot that I'm relatively happy with, even if it's never going to impress any "proper" photographers.

But the fact that it was born out of chaos and much frantic leaping about will always make the story behind that beautiful moment very memorable to me.

Oh, and apparently Germany won the football in "extra time" (whatever that is) which I'm told means that whoever's best at football has finally been resolved forever and there'll never be any more football.

So that's nice.

JULY 11th 2014

Going much against my usual instincts, and perhaps to even your surprise, I actually sat down and watched some ballfoot on television the other evening.

To be honest, I still didn't really want to, but the Beloved has more than a passing interest in such things - not least because she still had an outside stake in her office sweep - and it only seemed polite to keep her company despite the potential lateness of the hour.

And so I huffed, and I puffed, and I chunnered away to myself, and I tapped away at the Kindle, not really paying much attention as the shouty nonsense in the park was going on via the telly in the corner.

It was, apparently, a "semi-final" which, much like the term "quarter-final", is a term which I find a tad bewildering, given that I always thought that "semi" meant "half" and this was by no means half of a final.

It was more like all of one of the last games before the final… but I digress.

Anyway, whilst I sat there, not really watching, something very strange happened. A ball seemed to have appeared in the back of what, to all intents and purposes, if you were listening to what the "experts" from teams that hadn't made it to this particular stage of the competition were saying, was deemed to be the "wrong" net.

Then, a few moments later, this happened again, and again, and again, and, by the time this had happened five times in what seemed like as many minutes, and even my disinterest was piqued enough to realise that something unusual might be occurring, to persuade me to lift my eyes from my hand-held screen and wonder what was, as the saying goes, afoot.

From that point on, things did, rather surprisingly, become at least mildly interesting from a psychological point of view.

For example, I began to wonder at what point the average sportist comes to the conclusion in their own mind that the game is utterly hopeless and unwinnable.

After all, knowing that you suddenly need to get six of the round things into the net thing to have any hope of winning, must be a little bit daunting, given how difficult the other side are supposed to make it for you, even if they've just proven to you how easy it could be to do so.

After the intermission, where more "experts" chunnered away meaninglessly about how surprised they were that a game in which one team or the other was supposed to emerge victorious was being won by one of those two teams, that target eventually became eight, and, to be honest, even to a layman like myself, it looked as if it could have been even more than that. Pretty soon it seemed as if there simply wouldn't be enough actual minutes remaining for that sort of mathematical requirement to be a credible option.

But there was no shaking hands and saying "Well played, mate… You've obviously got us beaten!" Instead the whole sorry spectacle just carried on towards its inevitable bitter end.

Meanwhile, the various reactions of the audience also became very psychologically fascinating to me. In general, it appeared, they had obviously been misinformed that the result would be a foregone conclusion for what they presumed to be the "right" team, and then seemed to get more than a little bit upset when this turned out not to be as likely as they had been led to believe.

They didn't even win the second half, although, to be fair, that result was a lot closer.

And, even though there hadn't been a fatal tragedy involving their relatives or close friends enacted in front of their eyes, it began to look as if the audience thought that there really had been, rather than recognising that what they were watching was just a game - something involving play which is something that we learn to do as children - in which one of the two sides had to lose.

It just happened to be the team that they happened to like that achieved the losing part, that's all, which seemed not to have been a possibility that had crossed any of their minds beforehand.

Such is the way of hubris, I suppose.

The next evening, and because the other game involved the Beloved's sweepstake team, we settled down to watch the actual last game before the final, if you don't count the other game before the final which is not the final.

This was a far more dull affair, and my head scarcely lifted from my Kindle device. Even the Beloved, who had a whole £2.50 of her hard-earned resting upon the result, went off to bed at the half-way point, which turned out not to be the half-way point anyway.

Strangely, out of a sense of loyalty to her rather than anything else, I hung on to the bitter end of that game too, reminding myself in the process why I don't really have much interest in the game of ballfoot as a rule, before retiring at around midnight and subsequently having a lousy - and very brief - night's sleep.

She won't be winning the sweepstake, by the way, just in case you were wondering.

IN THE CAR PARK

It's a beautiful afternoon in a beautiful part of the world and yet, as you stroll around the car park, you find dozens of people sunbathing in their budgie-smugglers or bikinis, and dozens of others sitting around chatting and eating their picnics all of whom don't seem to have moved more than six feet since they parked the car...

We're a funny lot, the British, marking out our territory and protecting it, and seeming to have very little in the way of a sense of adventure when it comes to venturing forth despite, our nation's long, sometimes disgraceful and perhaps undistinguished history of venturing out into the world and planting our flags in strange lands and claiming them for ourselves.

Is it about our fear of car break-ins...?

Or just laziness...?

Or do we just need to bask in the shelter and comfort of something familiar, our own little bit of transportable home that the nearby car seems to represent...?

Because there are lovely spots just a short hop and a skip away which would serve the purpose of having a picnic or a sunbathe just as well, most with quite relaxing, breath-taking and spectacular views, most of which give you far less exposure to carbon monoxide, and which have far fewer risks of a distracted motorist driving over your foot...

But, instead of going over and looking at the beautiful scenery, the presence of which was probably at least in part why that destination was chosen in the first place, a sea of boxy steel becomes the vista of choice...

Still, if you want to go all that way and then sit or lie down in a car park all afternoon, I suppose that's up to you. People will do what people will do, and the strange antics of other people will just have to continue to confuse me as I trudge along through my own bamboozling existence.

And it's not just the picnickers or the sunbathers, either. Despite the fact that there are cars coming and going all the time, some of which have drivers who are new to the area or distracted by looking for a clear spot to park in, some people still use this field as a playground, kicking footballs around, throwing Frisbees and generally doing the kind of playing in traffic that would not be advisable in any more urban car park.

This kind of "fun" of course, I wouldn't normally have noticed, but then I had the "football moment..."

We were idly strolling across the car park towards the next tea shop, chunnering busily to ourselves about the number of people not venturing beyond the car park and unfortunately displaying their budgie-smugglers to the world at large when we passed quite some small distance away from a father and son who had set up some "jumpers for goalposts" and were having a kick about.

Unfortunately, and perhaps almost inevitably, there was what I believe is known as a "mis-kick" and the football came rolling along the ground straight towards us.

Now, I must point out that I have very little skill in the footballing department. My main footballing injury sustained at school came when I was knocking the mud off my boots by bashing them against a wall and the footballing teacher was playing "wall-ee" and kicked a football right at my head, bashing it hard enough on the one side to make the other side whack into the wall next to it and, whilst this was a good lesson in Newtonian Physics, it did little to endear the sport itself to me and a few years of spectacular uselessness, being the last picked to make up sides, and trying to avoid the ball as much as possible followed.

For a moment I stared at the ball as it came towards me, thinking "Why me?" and swiftly realising that I would be expected to return the ball to the players about thirty feet away for whom fetching it themselves suddenly seemed far too much trouble.

So, I approached the ball with a certain amount of trepidation and the memories of all those youthful years of being mocked for my pointless aerial antics of trying to stop one of these things in mid-air in my mind, and kicked it back to them...

Reader, it went in a straight line and, furthermore, that straight line was precisely the direction it was supposed to be going in...!

The father waved back in gratitude and we moved on, although I had slightly more of a spring in my step than I had only a few moments before, and I also completely failed to trip over any bikini-clad sunbathers despite it now being a much larger risk, given their amount of ground cover and the fact that my head was momentarily in the clouds...

IT DOESN’T MATTER

Why do I always believe

That these things are so important?

Why do I have to keep on

Contributing

To online word games

In which nobody cares

Whether I join in or not…?

Why do I feel that

If I fail to come up with a new one,

Somehow my own little world

Will come grinding to a halt…?

Why does it bother me so

That I don’t know

What’s happening right now

In a game of cricket which is happening

On the other side of the planet…?

Because there’ll always be

Another cricket match…

Once this one’s over,

Won or lost,

I’ll forget all about it

And start wondering about

The next one…

It’s like that

“Oh-so-important”

Footballing game…

A couple of days later and

It doesn’t seem to matter any more,

And there’s always another one

To get worked up about

Coming along any day now…

It just doesn’t matter…

So why do I always believe

That these things are so important?

Lying awake

And so eager to please

Nobody.

You see, none of it really matters…

There’ll always be

Another blogger to read…

One who’s smarter,

And wittier,

And funnier than me,

And far better at it

Than I could ever be…

There’s always someone else

Who thinks that they might

Enjoy being a writer

Or a poet…

There’s always another

Joke to be told

And you can be quite sure

That if I don’t

Get around

To telling it,

Someone else will

Come up with it

Eventually…

Tesco wrote apologies

With unusual line-breaks

And structuring,

And they called it “free-form poetry.”

So I thought that I might

Restructure a thought

And toy with a form

I know nothing about.

Because in the end

You see,

None of it matters

At all.

Thank you.

NOT MUFC

This is NOT me, okay...?
Any resemblance is strictly coincidental.

I am not now, nor have I ever been Manchester United Football Club, although I sometimes wish I had their money…

Such is the slightly strange and surreal nature of my life that I was recently mistaken for that particular footballing institution in an email. This, I think, is quite odd because the resemblance between myself and an internationally followed football team is slight at best…

They run around the world playing their little games in front of various crowds of people and have a huge stadium parked somewhere on the very edge of the city after which they are named, and a group of very vocal fans all over the world, and I’m…

Just some bloke in an office somewhere.

And yet someone still made the very basic yet fundamental error that implied that they really couldn’t tell us apart.

Okay, so I’ll tell you what really happened, although I’m sure you’ll have already figured this out for yourselves. After all, you’re all intelligent, discerning and rather brilliant people (otherwise you wouldn’t be here in the first place…) but if I don’t bother to tell you, then the rest of this page is going to look very blank indeed.

It might still look that way anyhow. Those words are yet to be found…

Okay, to explain. I work in the exceedingly unglamorous world of Graphicke Designe which basically means that occasionally I have dealings with printers to whom I send what is usually derisively referred to as my “work” for them to transmogrify into our finished product, whatever it might turn out to be this week.

This means that those printers do, on occasion, have to liaise with me and ask me questions of the “Are you really sure you want us to print it looking like this?” or “Where are all of the linked files?” or “Did you really think this was any good?” variety and so, because they’re terribly efficient in their homespun “We’ll change all of it and he’ll probably never even notice” way, they do me the simple courtesy of adding me to their computer’s address book just in case they ever decide that they might need to explain exactly why they decided to change everything that I had sent them because they “reckoned” that it would look “far better” done their way…

But, putting the long-standing feud between the designers and the printers aside for a moment, this does tend to mean that I quietly lurk forgotten and unloved in the “M” section of the computer of someone whom I’ve never even met, and this means that, if they’re in a hurry to reply to that oh-so-very important email that they’ve just received, they might just click on their pull-down menu and accidentally click on the wrong “M”

Me…

Which is why I now have some terribly exciting pictures taken backstage at the TV studios of Old Trafford football ground which were, I presume, supposed to be printed out at a large  size over the weekend for some publicity event or other that’s supposed to be happening quite soon.

I’m sure that they’ll still be able to print them of course. After all, they were merely attachments being bounced back to me in some misdirected reply, but it amused me for a moment to, rather ironically, be mistaken for one of the biggest footballing clubs in the world.

It’s probably rather flattering that it’s such an easy mistake to make. It happens all the time. I was once mistaken for the Taj Mahal, you know, and the entire island of Madagascar, and I’ve never told you about the twelve years I spent as the Maharajah of a small far eastern country best left unmentioned, have I…?

FIGUREHEADS, FEAR, FOOTY AND A FRANTIC HOUR

Yesterday, once again, I had that familiar thought: “Thank God it’s Friday!” The end of the standard working week for many of us, and a chance for a couple of days without the stresses and strains of battling along playing our tiny part in the great economic cycle of life. Once upon a time, one retailer of chocolate bars tried to leap on to the bandwagon of Fridayness by attaching their slogan to it – Thank Crunchie it’s Friday! – but I think in recent years, Friday has started to lose that significance. For those in the service, retail, financial and catering sectors, as well as many others in so many other spheres, Friday is merely a marker on their way through more shifts and flexible working patterns and the dreaded “home working”, and so for significantly increasing numbers, Friday has lost its special place as the full stop on the sentence of their week in the paragraph of their year. For the retired and the unemployed, Friday can slip into being without being even noticed, so maybe it’s now only schoolchildren who can honestly find true joy in that “Friday feeling”. I’ve even known a few parents who have gone against the grain and rather taken to liking Mondays in recent years because it means they can get back to work and “away from the kids” so maybe sales of Crunchie bars have fallen back and could be used as an indicator of social trends, in much the same way that the “Mars Bar” unit of economic comparison once was. I was once told that, for about 50 years, the number of Mars Bars you could get for the price of a new car for example remained surprisingly solid.

My own big Friday night out was to go out and have a trim. This meant a frantic hour driving about in the blatting rain trying to juggle with typically delayed train connections to collect my beloved, with whom I only got to spend the five minutes of her journey homewards, before negotiating another chunk of Friday evening traffic into town trying to get to the salon in time for my appointment, and I barely made it. I tried stopping on the way to get some much needed bread but the queues in the supermarkets were too long. I guess it was just a brief insight into the frantic Friday evening all those parents have getting their little tykes to their ballet classes or judo or football practice or the latest party. Sociable bunch these youngsters, aren’t they? I’m sure my own youthful Fridays were infinitely duller and, at best, involved bicycles and chat and playing in the street. I am, however, now getting a regular haircut after having spent several years resembling a yeti, as my own lengthy tresses never managed the silky smooth elegance of all those photogenic vampires, but just jumbled up into a tangled mess. Finally, I managed to find one that opened in the evenings and was prepared to make long-term regular bookings in much the same way as my dentist does, which was probably the only way I was ever going to get organized enough to remember to actually bother to get it done.

The talk in the hairdressers was all of football which I later realised was due to there being some sort of grudge game this weekend (or something like that anyway). Sadly I had to fess up (as I’m sure the kids don’t even begin to think of saying any more) to the blokes there that I had a (not very) tragic lack of knowledge about the subject, although I don’t think that my less than insightful observations of my own lack of understanding were taken too seriously. Despite having grown up on the outskirts of Manchesterford, the allegedly beautiful game had no place in our household (perhaps it was because my Dad was Welsh?) and so I am able to view it all with a remarkable sense of detachment. I do find all the tribalism rather bewildering and I never understood the ability to do a mental U-turn that the more venomous fans have when a player transfers from one team to another. Why is it that someone who is such an object of hate and derision can suddenly become the greatest player who ever lived just because he now puts on a different shirt to play his games? I don’t get all the hatred, either. Surely, if you enjoy the game of football, it shouldn’t matter who wins if the 22 blokes on the field have played well, but some of the spite and loathing that I’ve heard over the years just doesn’t seem rational to me. I guess that’s because I never got the football bug bad enough to understand it. I’ve known people who’ve had it so bad that they’ve sat down and publicly wept over a result or just sat on a terrace for hours with their heads in their hands unable to cope with the distress. Equally, I’ve known people who have been open minded enough to be willing to say “well played” at any result but who will still make exceptions for certain, deeply loathed teams. When it comes to national allegiances, it seems to get even worse. I’ve heard of supporters of certain nations who’ll stick up for anyone who’s playing against the team of a particular other country, but that happens on a local level too. Surely if the local side gets through to the cup final or whatever, you should feel at least some slight need to back them to win…? But no. If it’s the old local rivals even the hated opponents are more worthy of your support than them, no matter how happy the result might make some of your own friends and neighbours. I suppose it all just help makes up the “blokey banter” that some chaps seem to feel more comfortable with than discussing their real problems with each other, and I will admit that the game that apparently occurred whilst I was on holiday last year did seem to have the effect of being extraordinarily inclusive for tourists and locals alike for a day or two.

Friday also brought about a world altering regime change when, rather out of the blue (although the writing was obviously on the wall) President Mubarak stood down in Egypt which cued much jubilation in the streets of Cairo, and also from Polly Toynbee on “Any Questions?” Whilst this is obviously something to celebrate for a lot of people, I found myself feeling extraordinarily naïve when the news reporters kept banging on about the “brutal police state”, because I was generally oblivious to that whole aspect of life there last year as I sat safe and secure in my tourist’s bubble. Amongst all the jubilation there must be a certain amount of fear. This has, after all, been described as a “youthful revolution” and I do wonder how the older citizens might be feeling today. Will they have quite such faith in the future, or are they fearful of what comes next? Time will tell, of course, but change, whilst necessary, is sometimes a bit scary, and I think a lot of Egyptians will wake up this morning and wonder “what now?” as many of the fundamentals of their everyday lives have gone. I got to wondering how it’s going to feel in the UK when the sad day comes when our monarchy moves on to the next generation. I think we’re all going to feel very strange, because nobody under sixty will remember a time when Queen Elizabeth wasn’t our head of state, and, whilst it’s unlikely to be a massively political change, it will still feel very odd when it happens. All those little things that we deal with every day, like money and stamps for example, will all have to be updated. It felt odd enough when Mr Blair took over from Mr Major, and equally odd when the Clemeron took hold of the reins of power last year, but when that day finally comes, it’s going to mean a massive culture shock for all of us.

OLD TAT

This house is a terrible mess. There’s junk everywhere. We’ve got too little space and too much stuff. Believe me when I tell you that the attached picture only represents a fraction of the chaos I choose to live my life in. Most of it is old tat that I simply can’t bear to get rid of, of course, some of it dating back to when I was ridiculously young, and most of it isn’t worth anything at all to anybody except me.

Normally being surrounded by all this clobber really doesn’t bother me, but occasionally I get kind of obsessed with trying to find a certain something and suddenly the stuff all has to be moved and ploughed through and generally examined in a way it normally isn’t, in order to find the one little object that my mind has suddenly remembered, despite having been forgotten about for years, and simply must be found. That’s when I start to wonder about all the junk and whether I really should be thinking of getting rid of some of it.

This is usually because there will then follow a totally obsessive couple of hours or more as the object is tracked down (or sometimes not) by trawling through endless boxes, bags, piles of tat, shelves and cupboards. Sometimes, when I still can’t find the wretched thing I’m looking for, I will finally give up the hunt, but it can nag away at the corner of my mind for days afterwards, and I might at any time suddenly leap up with inspiration when I think of another nook or cranny I might just not have explored yet, and return to the sofa disappointed half an hour later having failed to find it once again.

Sometimes I’ll eventually forget about it and start looking for something else because that’s suddenly popped into my head and jumped ahead of the previous search in the priority stakes. That’s often when I find the first thing of course. Occasionally, to stop myself from brooding about the missing object, I’ll write myself a note with the word “find” on it and it will slowly sink from the forefront of my thoughts. Then, of course, a few days or weeks or months later, I might well find that little note I’ve written to stop the incessant hunting and the whole quiet revolution will happen again

Unless I’ve found it by accident in the meantime, which is, more often than not, what usually happens. If only I could develop a more holistic approach to these things, or just relax and say to myself that it will turn up eventually.

I sit here in my workspace surrounded by clutter and I think that it really can’t be healthy. My feng shui must be completely stuffed, which probably explains my mental clutter. I don’t know whether it dates back to having once been an art student, but I’ve always found it difficult to part with anything in case it one day comes in “useful”. I still have a ridiculous amount of the very poor artwork I produced as a student. Somewhere. I’ll have to dig it out… Now, where did I put it? Hold on a sec…

(Several hours elapse.)

I look around me and I realise I live in a total mess, and it’s really not as if any of this stuff has any actual value, except to remind me of things or to give me comfort in the knowledge that I know it still exists or it’s still there. Some of it belonged to my father or my grandparents and, I suppose, is just a way of hanging on to a piece of them. There used to be a TV show where a woman I used to unkindly refer to as the “House Nazi” used to declutter people’s lives, and I found it kind of unbearable viewing, but she would have had a lot to say about this need to hang on to the past I imagine, and would probably have made me blub on camera. However, I do think that maybe it’s time to start going through it all and really think about getting rid of some of it. Perhaps this process is something I will share with you. Maybe as I find some (un)interesting old piece of tat I will take its picture and tell you all about it. I know there are some old medals somewhere that might have a story to tell, and I’m pretty sure I saw some Kermit the Frog soap the other day when I was looking for that photo album I never found…

One of the things I’ve hung on to from my youth is the “Soccer Quiz Book” you see here and which I mentioned in passing a couple of days ago. Printed in 1971, it’s a cheap old thing but says a lot about how things have changed in children’s book publishing in those 40 years. Page one, question one (under the heading “Some easy ones to start you off”) is “Who scored the penalty that kept Arsenal in the F.A. Cup at the semi-final stage in 1971?” The answer is scrawled in my 8-year old self’s handwriting, so the book isn’t as unsullied as I thought, but that’s pretty much the only page that I  have touched, so I imagine that was on the day grandad bought it for me and my enthusiasm for my exciting new gift was still at its highest. Nonetheless, any children’s book that has words like "Panathinaikos" and "Gzira" in the so-called “easy” stuff seems to assume a level of knowledge from a seven year old that I guess we’d only expect from “Mastermind” finalists nowadays. I’m sure everyone else knows the answer to the question above, by the way, and it’s just me in my “shameful” football ignorance who hadn’t a clue, but of course the answers are printed just over the page in full size type and not back-to-front or anything. Perhaps we kids were easier to fool back then… or just more honest…?

Meanwhile, one of the pieces of old tat I do lament the passing of is the old “Public Information Films”. A lot of people found them rather silly, and said that they were just about common sense. Nowadays I’m starting to wonder if it was those little 30-second movies that were the things that instilled a lot of the common sense in the first place. On these dark mornings, when vehicle windows are steamed or iced up and the light is still very poor, an awful lot of people out and about in their dark clothes are practically invisible, and it amazes me still how many cycles don’t have lights on them these days. In the words of the old  PIF, “Get Yourself Noticed - Wear Something White” ("or carry a newspaper…" as it went on to say) because you know the councils are going to start turning off the lights to save money.

Keep yourselves safe, people.