This can't be History! It hasn't finished happening yet!

Yesterday I watched the FA Cup Final, between Wigan and Manchester City.

Wigan were the underdogs, but they won, and they deserved to.  They were the better team, and so when they scored in the 90th minute I was pleased for them.  It reminded me of the first FA Cup Final I watched in 1978 when underdogs Ipswich beat the favourites Arsenal.  That final was also similar in that Ipswich played better, had lots of chances, but didn't score till near the end.  When they did score it was completely deserved, justice was done blah blah blah.

My enjoyment of Wigan's last minute winner was however, spoiled somewhat by Clive Tyldesley, who, nanoseconds after the winning goal, set off on a speed-talking sprintathon down Hyperbole Avenue which didn't stop for about 20 minutes, going on and on about what a historic moment it was, and how it was the most historic moment since 1988 when Wimbledon won, and then he pretty much went through all the underdog goalscorers they've ever been in the history of the FA Cup.  He also pointed out that goalscorer Ben Watson looks like Prince Harry, and then tried his best to get a load of Royal references in there too.  I would have switched the telly off, or kicked it in, but I wanted to see Wigan celebrate their success.  The only time good ol' Clive stopped talking was to allow the equally naff Andy Townsend to get a few equally nonsensical words in, about finding the last piece of the jigsaw and other unrelated tosh.

please see previous rant about over-excited commentators

Later in the evening, I found a documentary on ITV about Aberdeen winning the European Cup Winners Cup in 1983, when Alex Ferguson was the manager, and they beat Real Madrid in the final in Gothenburg.  The programme itself was absolutely excellent, but a special treat was the highlights of the Final, which was commentated on by Brian Moore and Ian St John.  Tyldesley and Townsend they are most definitely not!  They didn't go on about history in the making and all that, they just talked about the actual game they were commentating on, and what was happening in it.  And sometimes, when there was nothing that needed saying, because it was all up there on the screen, they didn't do any talking at all.  They just sat there quietly.  

if you want to see what I mean, follow this link

It's fair to say that when I was 15 and I watched Aberdeen win the Cup Winners Cup I was aware of what a good team they were, but I probably didn't fully appreciate the quality of the two guys in the commentary box.

Brian Moore died in 2001.  Something I didn't know about him was that he was a lifelong Gillingham fan and the club's fanzine was called 'Brian Moore's Head looks like London Planetarium', which in turn is named after a line in the Half Man Half Biscuit Song 'Dickie Davies' Eyes'.

here's the video. I think the guy smashing his flat up at the end might have just finished watching Tyldesley

I pinched this little excerpt from the fanzine's website:

The recent loss of Brian Moore was felt right across the British game. He was an icon, and not just because of the shape of his head. For many of us during our formative years he represented the face of football on ITV – fronting The Big Match on a Sunday afternoon. His commentaries were knowledgeable and passionate. His love for the game was obvious for all to see (and hear).

He was from an era where football was less about money and greed and more about the sheer childish joy of watching the game. His style was unique and his reading of the game on a par with any of his peers. He came across as a true gentleman without the arrogance or ego of many within the game.

There are millions of reasons why you could argue that modern day football isn't what it used to be.  That's maybe why football commentators over-excitedly seize on any drama whatsoever and shout it from the rooftops.

I miss lots of things about the football I remember from my youth.  And since yesterday, I miss Brian Moore too.

Flushing my head down the toilet, melting my face off and hanging around near the Death Star again

I don't like to celebrate my birthday for just one day.  I usually like to spread the celebration over the course of a week, partly because, on the actual birthday itself there's way too much pressure.  I can hear my internal monologue screaming at me every second 'ARE YOU HAVING A GOOD TIME?' YOU'VE GOT TO ENJOY IT, IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY.  Sometimes I feel more relaxed on the days either side, because the pressure's off.

This year was no exception.  The actual birthday was on Sunday, but just to make sure I also celebrated it on Saturday and the following Wednesday.

I went to see my mum, brother and nephew on Saturday, and we had a nice family day.  My brother is moving house soon, so he's in disarray and even if he wasn't he probably wouldn't have got me anything.  I spent some of the day making him offers for some of his furniture and white goods, which he mainly just laughed at and said he could get more for it on Ebay.

As I was leaving, and as an afterthought he gave me a small size red girl's onesy which was on his staircase, and wished me Happy Birthday.  It doesn't fit, and even though there are no pictures of me trying it on, I wish even the mental picture I've got of me looking in the mirror at myself wearing it could also be destroyed.  My 3 year old nephew Jack gave me a small yellow car, which he will probably want back.  Later in Leeds, my mum bought me fish and chips from the politest fish and chip shop in the world in Leeds, where all the staff repeatedly addressed the customers as lady and gent.

Sunday was my actual birthday.  I went on Facebook early in the morning, and nobody at all was wishing me happy birthday on there.  A few months earlier I had deleted my birth date off there in case someone tried to steal my identity. Whether this has stopped me being cloned by a gang of criminal masterminds is open to debate, but more to the point it was now stopping me getting publicity for my birthday.  My immediate response was to abandon all worry of identity theft and to start firing out attention-seeking status updates.  People ignoring you updates on Facebook is bad any day of the week, but on your birthday.  Give me a break.

After doing a bit of digital attention seeking I went off to Asda with the birthday money my mum gave me and bought 5 DVDs for £15 and Born to Die by Lana Del Rey for £7 (I had to add £2 of my own money).  The jury's still out on Lana Del Rey.  She does seem a bit on the miserable side, and it's not exactly easy listening, but it didn't make me want to crash the car, like Nicky Minaj once did.

When I got home from Asda, Ruth took me out for my Sunday dinner to Chadwicks in Maltby.  I like to go there because you can tell what the meat is.  Sometimes these Sunday dinners places, they serve up generic meat which could be anything, but at Chadwicks you can definitely tell that the pork is made of pork.  This filled me up for most of the day, but I still managed to be ridiculously greedy and have curry for tea.  I was so full by bedtime I had to leave the rest till breakfast on Monday.

In the afternoon I watched one of the DVDs I'd bought from Asda which was Everything Must Go, starring Will Ferrell.  It was supposed to be a comedy about an alcoholic man who gets locked out of his house by his wife, and has all his stuff dumped on the lawn, and he has to sell it to get some money for some cans so he can carry on being an alcoholic.  I'm hoping to sell my house too soon, and I might be getting rid of some of my stuff too, but I'm not locked out and it's not on the lawn, and I'm not an alcoholic, so there the similarities end.  I don't really know why two of the films I bought had Will Ferrell in because I don't even think he's funny and this one certainly wasn't funny at all, just a bit sad.

I took a break from celebrating my birthday on Monday and Tuesday, so I could attend some training at work, the purpose of which is to help me prepare me for a job I won't be able to do, and which I don't really want.  The training is so solid that every other day my brain starts overheating so badly I have to go flush it down the toilet and hyperventilate into a brown paper bag for a few hours, until it resets itself.

Because my brain keeps melting, I decided to spend Wednesday doing some more birthday stuff.  I had a Yorkie for breakfast (which was left over from a previous day's 3 for 2 offer) , and then after another instalment of the training I don't understand, I went out after work to Alfornos with my pals from the Batching and Scanning Team (a job I almost understood).

I had about an hour between the finish of the training I hadn't understood and the start of the meal, so I parked up in Darlington and had a wander round in the sun looking at stuff and then I went to Nero's for a coffee.

I spent some of the hour revisiting my redundancy hotspots.  It's not really much of a tour as the places I've been fired from are all pretty close together.  I went past Lloyds TSB on Blackwellgate (fired 1998), Poundland on High Row (used to be Waterstone's, fired 2008), Waterstone's in the Cornmill (fired 2012).  Don't forget I'd also just come from direct from Student Loans (fired 2012).

As I was wandering round in the sunshine, I reflected on the fact that for me, Darlington is a lot like the Death Star.  I never really want to go there, but once I get within a certain radius, it starts pulling me in with its tractor beam, and it only lets me go when it's ready to dump me overboard before the jump into hyperspace, with the rest of the space junk and astronaut poo.

Looking back on my decision making in relation to Darlington, I never know how much of it is free will, and how much is tractor beam.  I completely illogically chose to go work at the TSB there in 1993 when staying in Stockton was closer and easier, and I also chose to go work at the Waterstones there in 2005 when staying in Middlesbrough would have been much, much easier.  Both times I took on extra travelling and longer hours in the hope of a better job, and both times I was fired out the door, like crap off the bottom of a shoe.  Both times I sort of did get a better job for a while, but then when Darlington had finished with me it blew me away like the Planet Alderaan got blown away in Star Wars.  For a while after each obliteration I was just space dust floating around in smithereens.

After the second lot of getting smithereened in 2008 I said I'd never go back to Darlington, as I was sick of getting Death Starred, but by 2012 the only job I could get in 6 months of trying was at Student Loans. so I had to go back on my promise.

I got fired from Student Loans on Halloween last year (the only good point of which was not having to answer the door to trick or treaters because I was out having a leaving do) , and just for good measure I got fired from Waterstone's again at Christmas, just in case the first firing hadn't made me feel enough like a piece of dead bird the cat had dragged in.

Yet despite everything, I got my Student Loans job back again in January, I got offered a fixed term contract in April, and in the same week I even got a promotion, although I'll probably lose that when they figure out I don't know what I'm doing.

Anyway, as I was wandering around and drinking coffee, and it was nice that it was sunny, I stopped thinking of Darlington just as somewhere where things have ended badly, but started to think of it as a place where good things start too.

All the jobs I've had in Darlington, even though they went wrong in the end they were good at first, and they all lifted me up out of the stupor that I was in at the time, and I shouldn't concentrate on just the ending, because I met some great people along the way who I'll always remember.  It would be a mistake to focus only on the shitcanning and the getting fired into space and destroyed part, because the canning was just the bit at the end, and everything ends eventually anyway.

I also reflected that Darlington has been the starting point for lots of my best holidays.  Time spent sitting nervously on the platform drinking Costa coffee, with cycling trousers on that made it look like I'd got two melted lolly sticks for legs, had often been the jumping off point for some of my greatest  adventures.  Darlington was also the place I was relieved to end up at, after I nearly died in an episode of Air Crash Investigation when the flight from India I was on didn't run out of fuel over Glasgow, even though I thought it had, because I was deaf.

So this was what I was thinking, in that hour between having my head flushed down the toilet and going out for a meal, I was thinking about all the ends and all the beginnings that have happened in and around Darlington, and how everything ends eventually anyway, but that the end isn't the whole story.  And I was thinking also, that life is a lot like the movies, because sometimes really good stories have rubbish endings, but after the titles have gone up, and you've seen who the dolly grip was, and the confusion of the ending that doesn't make any sense has passed, the adventure and the thrill of the story still remains.

And so emboldened by this new thinking about Darlington, I went to my leaving do, which was also a birthday meal, and also a general team meal out.  Times are hard financially these days, so any meals out I go on have to serve at least 3 purposes all at once.

I was the last to arrive at Alfornos, and I discovered we were sat on the same big long table as last time, but this time there were more people, so it wasn't quite big enough.  I managed to force my way in somewhere, although this resulted in not enough room for everyone's elbows, so Kirsty had to eat her dinner whilst sat in the Argos over the road.  The fact she couldn't reach the table seemed to affect how much she gave as a tip.  I could reach fine, so I gave a pound and five pence.

This time I sat next to Jack and Natalie, which I haven't done before, as usually they're at the opposite end of the table.  I've been sending them links to my blogs on Twitter, so they have heard most of my interesting stories already, and this made me worry that in person and in real life I might not be interesting enough, because usually in the blogs I just leave the best bits in, whereas in real life, and in real time, all the boring bits are left in too.

There was quite a spectrum of drinks on show at the meal.  My end of the table, including me, were mostly on the pink cider, but the far end of the table seemed to be heading full speed ahead on an out of control train to down a cul de sac of Guinness towards oblivion.  The bar staff at Alfornos couldn't pull the stuff fast enough.  Phil and Nathan had entered into some sort of dark matter drinking competition, during which Nathan may or may not have been sick.

Once I'd got myself wedged into place, the birthday presents came out.  This was the moment I'd been waiting all these months for, when I'd been putting money into other people's collections.  I reflected that it was a lot nicer getting presents in Alforno's, than out of a cardboard box next to the scanners.

I got quite a few different presents, and I did my best to hold people's attention, while I opened them.  But that's a lot harder to do than it used to be in the 70s.  These days you're battling against people looking under the table at the their Twitter feeds and watching people falling over on Youtube.  This is smart phone hell.  I tried waving my arms a bit, and showing stuff around, to try and keep people's attention, but these days it's a tough crowd out there.  I think at least some people were interested.

The presents I got all seemed largely appropriate.  I got a DVD of the Hurt Locker (at work I don't have a locker), and a DVD of the Green Zone, (I think if I survive my training I'm going to work in the Green Zone).  I got a Parker pen (I used to watch Thunderbirds) and an old man's tie (old men need ties, it makes them look like they know what they're doing), and I also got a cinema voucher to add to the pile of cinema vouchers I've already got for winning team of the month.

I tried the tie on, even though it didn't go with my shirt, and I kept it on for a while, which resulted in me having a hot neck, and feeling like my head might overheat again.  How the hell does Kevin T wear a shirt and tie for work, sometimes with a jumper over the top?  My head was nearly on fire after wearing just a tie for 10 minutes.  I took the tie off after a while and put my head in a bucket of ice, but then I put it back on for the photos (the tie, not the bucket).

Unlike last time at the same venue, I didn't have to wait hours for my pizza and they didn't need to keep flinging Italians out of the kitchen to apologise to me, which was good, but not as funny.

Also, the restaurant staff were nice enough to let us bring a Morrison's birthday cake in, instead of opting for any of their £4 desserts, and they even mouthed the words to Happy Birthday when people were singing it to me, although they dipped out at the part where my name went, because they don't know who I am.  And the cake even had candles on, which I got to blow out, and I can't remember the last time I did that.  And when I was blowing them out I felt like I was 8 again, and people said that's how I looked.  And some people took photos of me looking 8, although I haven't seen them yet, to see if it's true.

While the cake was still on fire, and even though I thought it might set fire to my face, everyone said I needed to make a wish but I couldn't think of anything, except that I was having a nice time being alive, so all I could think of was I hope I don't die soon.  I wasn't too specific with the age I didn't want to die before, just not too soon.  It's not the world's most positive wish, but it's much better than 'I wish I was dead', which I of course don't.

And as I drove home after the meal, I realised that Darlington isn't really the Death Star after all.  If you spend enough time anywhere, bad stuff will happen to you, because it happens everywhere.  I should try and keep things in perspective, and when I think about all the bad stuff that's happened to me in Darlington, I should also remember all the people I've met there who have made my life so much better than it would have been without them.  And while it's not possible always to forget the sadness of things ending, I should also make sure to remember that feeling of hopefulness and optimism that comes from new beginnings too.  Because it was that feeling that brought me to Darlington in the first place.

And so off I go into my latest Death Star / Darlington adventure.  I hope that this time I don't end up getting flushed away with the rest of the space junk, at least not for a while.  And even if I do, I hope I have a nice time first.