The first time I met a Geordie I was kicking a hedgehog against his house

I live up north now, and over the years I've met lots of Geordies.  Some of them are quite nice.

The first time I met a Geordie though, it didn't go too well.  I was living in Leeds at the time, in a terraced house, and being keen on football, as I was, I used to like nothing better than to kick a football against a wall.  I could go on for hours.

If I didn't have a football, a tennis ball or anything else vaguely football shaped would do.  Now I didn't have a dog at the time, so I don't know why I ended up with it, but one day I had managed to acquire a squeaky dog toy in the shape of a hedgehog.  This acted in many ways very similar to a ball except with it being shaped like a hedgehog it didn't always roll very well.

One day I was kicking said hedgehog against the side of the end terraced house in our street, and this ferocious old bloke with a Geordie accent came out of his house, and told me to stop kicking that bloody ball against my house, I'm trying to watch TV.

It's not a ball, it's a hedgehog, I said.  I always like to get the facts straight, even when I'm being bollocked.

This only seemed to anger him further, and he came out with a string of expletives in Geordie, the gist of which seemed to be not to give him any more cheek or he'd be shoving the bloody hedgehog up my arse.

I sort of steered clear of him after that.

I've met loads of Geordies since and a lot of them are quite nice.

I expect he might have been too, if it hadn't been for the repeated 'bang, squeak, bang, squeak' against his house.  Ah well, never mind.

One night in Turin vs One night in Kiev

I watched England play Italy the other night.

It was the quarter final so as usual they got knocked out on penalties.

I had been quite satisfied earlier in the tournament with their effort and with their attempts to be the best team in the tournament at throwing themselves headlong in the way of the ball to stop it going near the net.  Kicking it in the general direction of a colleague they weren't too good at, but the full length blocking dive, they'd got that off to a tee.

But I was very disappointed in their efforts against Italy.  They were out on their feet from the start of the second half onwards, Rooney looking like he was running in concrete wellies and a lot of the others looking like they were running through treacle.  How come England are always so bloody tired these days?  These are young fit lads!

Anyway, I was pretty much over it before I'd even gone over and switched the telly off.  I don't know if it's just because I'm older, but I don't get upset when England lose anymore.  I just shrug and move on.  Losing to Italy this week or Germany in 2010 just doesn't hurt anymore, not like in 1986 and 1990.  In those days I felt depressed for days afterwards.  It's well documented that I always tend to blame Shilton for these defeats rather than Maradona or the Germans and that may be a bit unfair, because after the Italy game this week I watched a documentary called 'One night in Turin' about England's run to the semi final at the 1990 World Cup and in it Shilton did quite a few good saves, and he also won 125 more caps for England than I did, so on reflection I should probably give him a break.

There were some other things I noticed about the 1990 tournament in this documentary which I'd never noticed before.

That goal that Platt scored against Belgium in the 120th minute came after Gazza ran from his own half and got fouled just outside the Belgian penalty area.  In the 120th minute it was!  And Gazza was leaving people for dead, sprinting past them at speed, with the ball.  And there were other clips of him running with the ball late in games, and it was obvious that he was super-fit, and so were the players around him.  And somehow that made me feel doubly sad about England just folding up at half time the other night. 

Another thing I saw in the documentary from 1990 which I'd never seen before was this.  When Chris Waddle misses the deciding penalty the camera stays on him as he's walking away back to the centre circle and the Germany captain Lothar Matthaus follows him and tries to commiserate with him.  And I thought that was pretty admirable.  His team had just got through the World Cup Final and instead of going and jumping on a pile of Germans, he took the time to try and comfort one of the team he'd just beaten.  I also remember reading in Stuart Pearce's autobiography about how he had to give a urine sample after the match and he couldn't and he was waiting around for a while with a couple of the victorious German side, and instead of making a big deal of just having won, they were quiet and respectful and there was no gloating, and somehow all this gave me a new found respect for the Germans of 1990.

And it also brought back to me how I used to feel watching the England team in 1990, which was exactly half my life ago.  Watching Waddle and Beardsley and Barnes and Lineker and Butcher and Platt and Pearce and Parker and Walker and Wright and even Shilton but especially Gazza.  Running and running from the first minute to the 120th.  And not only running around like headless diving chickens, but running around with purpose and passing the ball to each other, and looking not only good enough to be in the semi final, but looking good enough to win the World Cup.

And I wondered what's gone wrong since then, and why I don't feel like that anymore.

Why can't football commentators believe it when the ball goes in the net? It's the whole point of the game

It's FA Cup Semi Final weekend this weekend.

As usual one of them is on Sky and one of them on terrestrial TV, and to make it more convenient for people who like to get a multipack of beer in, they're both being shown in the evening (ish).  One on Saturday and one on Sunday.  This means I'll only be able to watch one of them.  I stopped subscribing to Sky years ago.  In fact, I wish I'd never joined.  Since they started pumping all that money in, the players keep getting richer while the fans keep getting poorer.  I think buying a Sky subscription just helps a few people get a lot richer, so I'm not in favour of it, although I would be if I was one of those few.  Only age and a lack of natural talent have prevented that from happening.

Anyway, the FA Cup semi-final weekend I remember most fondly is 1990.  This was pre-Sky.  Both semi finals were on the BBC, and they were on the same day (I think it might have been the first time this had ever happened, at one time they never showed them at all).  They were on during the day, and I watched them one after the other.  And they just might have been the best two back to back football matches I've ever seen. For the record Crystal Palace beat Liverpool 4-3 and Oldham and Manchester United drew 3-3.

It was as exciting as football gets.  I won't attempt to explain why.  If you hate football, you'll think I'm nuts, and if you like football you'll know what I mean.

The final was also pretty exciting.  Crystal Palace and Manchester United.  It finished 3-3 and it had to go to replay (this was before penalty shoot-outs on the day).  That same summer it was the World Cup, and Gazza's tears and Lineker's goals and Stuart Pearce's patriotism and Shilton's statue impersonations.  In those days, I still looked up to and respected the England team (except for Shilton) and Bobby Robson was there, and if we were disappointed watching at home on TV, losing in the semi-final to Germany or West Germany, how disappointed must they have been?  And when they came home, they were treated like heroes, because they were, because they were good, and they came so close, not like the last lot in 2010, who were run ragged by some German kids, so much so that instead of sharing the collective gloom of defeat, I was laughing by the end.  Ruth came in at one point, and she hasn't a clue about football, but even she could tell England were hopeless, and she was laughing too, at how easy the Germans were finding it to score.

Anyway, back to the FA Cup.  What I wanted to say was this.  And this is one of the things I still don't understand about football.  And about commentators in particular.  Why is it, that in a game where the entire point of the game is to score goals, it is considered amazing, incredible, unbelievable even, when goals are scored?  Especially when the game finishes 3-3 for example.  That means that 22 fit blokes have been running round aiming at the goals for an hour and a half, and they've only managed to succeed in getting it in there 6 times.  Sometimes there aren't any goals at all, and they don't even get a shot in at the goalie.  As I once heard Brian Clough say when he was being interviewed at Waterstone's in Middlesbrough.  The goals don't move.  Why don't footballers know this?

I suppose one answer to this question is obvious.  Not all 22 are kicking the ball the same way.  Half of them are trying to stop the other half from scoring. I'm sure my plumber would have had a lot harder job, plumbing in my toilet if while he was trying to do it, another plumber was trying to get in the way, and stop him.  Thankfully, that's not how plumbers work.  It's not usually competitive, once they're on site.

And I know the pitch is big, and the goals are small, and I know they even have a guy on each team whose job it is to stand in the middle of the goal and try and stop the ball going in.  And he can even use his hands!

I'm not saying scoring goals is easy.  I played football competitively about a hundred times, and I only scored about 10 goals.  4 of them were in the same game against a really crap team, and another 3 were scored in two games against a team of tiny kids who looked like they were playing in the wrong age group.  Another one accidentally went in off the back of my head and another one I scored after I'd had about 10 chances and missed them all, and I nearly managed to get the one I did get in saved and if the young boy chasing it as it trickled over the line hadn't tripped it probably wouldn't have made it.

So no, I'm not saying it's easy.  What I'm saying is that when it happens, it's not amazing.  It's not incredible, it's not unbelievable.  It's normal.  Some goals are amazing, but a few goals in the same game is not.  It's the whole point of the game.  Stop trying to make it sound better than it is.  Stop labelling things with adjectives.

It's like when somebody prefaces a story with 'It's actually quite a funny story...'.  These stories are never funny.  Another thing football commentators do during a good game, is tell you what a great advertisement it is for football.  No other sport does this!

In my opinion, the unintended consequence of saying how unbelievable it is when goals are scored, and of telling us what a great advertisement it is for football when the game is entertaining, is that by implication they are also saying that most of the time football is total crap.......

....ah well, that explains it then.

Roger Moore as Bond - get that man a Zimmer frame!

This week I have been mostly watching Bond movies.  The ones with Roger Moore in. They keep showing them on ITV4, a channel with advert breaks so long, you can make a three course meal and cross-reference the other work of the whole cast during one single ad break.  Sometimes the ad breaks are so long, I can't even remember what I was watching.

Anyway, some people aren't a big fan of Roger Moore as Bond, but I think he's ace.  If you're going to be a ruthless killer, at least have a sense of humour about it, that's what I say.

And one additional bonus of watching him, particularly in the later ones, is that he's an encouragement to old and inflexible people everywhere.  He's in his fifties in these films, and even though he can hardly bend, he still manages to cuff aside assailants as if he's swatting flies.

Last night I watched Octopussy (yeah producers, don't bother burying sexually suggestive names for characters deep in the movie, get it in the title, get people's attention straightaway), and he wasn't only able to deck old blokes like himself, he managed to knock out a few circus performers as well, and some of them were extra bendy.  Even they couldn't get the better of him.

He must have been doing some sort of secret martial art, because even though he was up against really flexible people, he managed to fight them all without doing any bending at all, and he also managed at the end to hold onto the top of a plane with two tiny little rails as it was going upside down.  No-one could do that.  

In Octopussy he was really up against it.  Not only could he not bend to start with, they kept putting him in a vast array of costumes, that would have taken away even the small amount of flexibility that he did have.  They had him in a gorilla suit and a remote controlled crocodile suit, and when he had to run fast near the end to disarm a nuclear bomb, they put him in a clown suit with big clip cloppy shoes.  He nearly didn't make it.

Not since Peter Shilton in the World Cups of 1986 and 1990 have I seen someone so ill-fitted to the task he's been assigned to.  As I've no doubt mentioned before, I don't blame Maradona for 1986, or Germany for 1990.  I blame Shilton.  If, as a six foot goalie, you can't outjump a tiny little Argentinian, even if he is using his hands, then you shouldn't be on the pitch.  And as for trying to keep out Germany's penalties in 1990, he was diving in instalments.  I thought I was watching the slow motion replays until I realised it was in real time.  The Germans on the other hand had a young fit lad between the sticks.  Even if our lot hadn't been shinning them over the bar, he probably would have stopped them anyway.  He did at least look athletic.  Shilton needed a winch to get back up after every dive.  He was 40 at the time but he looked older.  I know he was a brilliant goalie at one time, but I think he should have quit sooner.  Like in about 1985.

For the last few years, I've had some problems with arthritis.  I'm nowhere near as flexible as I used to be.  When I was a teenager I used to play rugby and football, and both of these involved diving around a lot and getting back up again really quickly.  Now it takes me about 15 minutes to pick up a tea towel I've dropped on the floor.  And that's the thing I don't get with Roger Moore (and Shilton for that matter).  There would have been loads of young people around at the time.  Have you ever seen those guys doing that Parkmore or Parquet or whatever it is, where they fling themselves from building to building.  I mean, you could go get one of those guys, stop them hanging around outside Morrison's and give them a WaltherPPK or a pair of goalie gloves, and they'd probably do a better job.

Another ace thing about Roger was this.  As well as being able to fight without being bendy, he could also change women's minds really easily, a feat which I have found impossible to this day.  If a woman didn't want to do it with him, all he had to do was grab her by the head, and make her kiss him, and then she would magically change her mind.  I've never actually tried this, and I'm not going to start now, but if I did, I would expect at the very least a smack over the head with a woman's shoe, and possibly a visit from the authorities, but even a non-bendy wrinkly like Bond seemed to be able to get away with it then.

That was another great thing about Octopussy.  Instead of a load of Chinese blokes running round in coloured boilersuits inside a volcano at the end, they had loads of young women in red skin suits running around doing circus type stuff.  It was a visual treat.

One more thing.  Watching the film this time had some extra resonance for me, as there was a rickshaw chase through New Delhi, and from what I could see, between 1983 and a couple of months ago, when I was there, it doesn't look like it's changed much in (although I can't recall being chased by any ninja style assassins, only beggars and tuktuk drivers).

For some reason, probably because he was the most famous Indian around at the time, they stuck Indian tennis professional Vijay Amritraj in the movie.  Ruth said you could tell he wasn't an actor.  Having seen how things operate in India, I wondered if the casting went something like this.

Cubby Broccoli:  Hello, is that the Indian High Council of Film Things?  We'd like to do a movie in Delhi
Indian Guy:  Oh, we have a form for that.  In fact, we have several.
Cubby Broccoli:  That's okay, I'll get my Indian form filling guy onto it.
Indian Guy:  There is one other thing.  If you want to film in India, we'll need Vijay Amritraj to be in it.
Cubby Broccoli:  What, the tennis player?
Indian Guy:  That's him.
Cubby Broccoli:  But he's a tennis player, not an actor.
Indian Guy:  Well we want him in.  No Vijay, no movie.
Cubby Broccoli: Okay, deal.

I'm probably completely wrong about that, so don't sue me.

So there's plenty of good news, it seems.  If old inflexible people like Shilton and Roger Moore can still get employed doing the work that a younger man could do so much more easily, and if Indian tennis players who can't act can get picked to star in a James Bond movie, it appears there's plenty of hope for the rest of us.

Sorry Nicolas Cage - You lost me at the vending machine

I saw a terrible film last night.  So terrible that I had to watch the last 1 hour 20 minutes of it by myself.  Ruth had seen enough after 20 minutes.  And so had I, to be honest, but like Bolivia vs South Korea at USA 1994, that I stayed up till 2.45 in the morning to watch, even though I had to be at work for 7, I didn't know when to admit defeat and just go to bed.

For anyone who doesn't remember that classic footballing encounter, it was a Nil-Nil draw between two terrible teams who were both lucky to get nil.  I think if the goals had been the size of blue whales neither team would have been able to hit them.  The goalkeepers would have got more touches of the ball if they'd sat in the crowd, because that was where the shots at goal mostly ended up.

But anyway, back to the film.  The film was called Justice.  It's about a man played by Nicolas Cage whose wife is attacked and hospitalised by a man in snake skin cowboy boots.  I think my step dad had some of those.  While he's sitting in the waiting room, a man played by Guy Pearce (formerly Mike in Neighbours) comes up to him and offers to get his wife's attacker 'dealt with'.  The legal system will take too long, and he'll probably get off with eleven months, blah blah blah.  This is where it gets absolutely mental.

Even though Guy Pearce has just been openly advertising his rapist nobbling services in the waiting room of a hospital, he then tells Nicolas Cage that if he wants to accept the offer, he has to go buy two chocolate bars out of a vending machine.  Why don't you just give him your phone number, mate?, I wanted to yell.

And so what ensues is what seems like a ten minute walk to the vending machine to get a couple of bars of chocolate.  I'm not as good at suspending my disbelief as I used to be, but this was plainly ridiculous.  I've been in hospital loads of times, and when I say loads, I mean loads.  And generally speaking, although seeing your ailing relative is also quite important, heading for the vending machines is one of the few highlights of being in there.  If this was really how you hire a hitman, I would have hired one every time I've been in a hospital.  There would hardly be anyone left in the Teesside area.  Between 1994 and 1997 my first wife alone spent 70 nights in hospital.  That's enough vend to have wiped out half of Stockton.

And so from there I thought the film was completely nuts.  And it was.  After watching Knowing I'd been prepared to give Nic another chance, but I think he's had plastic surgery or something, either that or he hasn't had the make-up removed after doing Ghost Rider, and his face looks bonkers.  I liked him in Con Air and The Rock (apart from his untidy hair in the former), why didn't he just stick to having a normal face?

By the way, it wasn't just the vending machine scene, the plot was completely nuts all the way through.  These vigilante types had such convoluted ways of doing things.  Like instead of just texting him, or ringing him up, they kept breaking into his heavily fortified house to write things on his fridge in fridge magnets.  It's the bloody twenty-first century, man, what about 3G?  Fridge magnets are so last century!

They even made him start getting the bus to work, instead of taking his car, so that he could wait under an underpass to throw someone off it.  I think the killers in this movie must have been trained by the inverse Time and Motion people, they were completely inefficient.  'Yeah, well, we could just shoot the guy, but then the film will be about 20 minutes long, why don't we have him followed by a remote control helicopter with a poisoned dart attached to the nose, and when he stops at the grocery store, we'll remote control his ass into oblivion!'.  It was that bad.  Not since the end of a James Bond movie, have the means of killing someone being so ineptly conceived and carried out.

So, to sum up, my advice to you is this:  Save your money, and don't see Justice.

I used to be a genius - not any more

When I was younger one of my favourite quotations was from Mark Twain.

it went like this:  'When I was 14 my father was such an idiot that I could barely stand to have the man around, but by the time I was 21 I was amazed at what he'd learned in seven years'.

The height of my own genius was 18.  Probably on the bus on the way back from having 3 months in Germany.  Hey, I'd lived and worked abroad, mastered a new language, and now I'm off to University.  What a genius.

I used to think that courage was a thing you needed to be able to do stuff.  But I realised on that Germany trip that courage is not having the courage to do things, but doing them anyway.  After 25 years I'd forgotten that but I've been remembering it recently, and I think that was what got me on a plane to India.

Another thing that happened to me when I was younger was that I used to play football, and in the long days of the summer holidays I used to play football all day.  And sometimes early in the day I'd feel tired and my legs would feel heavy, but after a while I got beyond tired and I could just run and run.  And sometimes I'd still be out after dark, although playing football at that time of night could be dangerous because you couldn't always see the ball until it smacked you in the face.

The reason I remembered feeling like that, is because that's pretty much how I felt when I was cycling on Thursday.  For the first 30 miles or so I felt pretty weary and didn't think I'd be able to go the distance, but then I got into that magic place that's beyond tired, where your legs feel like they could go on for ever.  And even when I got to the pub at 8.30 at night I felt like I could keep going.

This week I've been feeling pretty down, indecisive about my future and some of the time when I've been alone I've been a bit despondent.  Worrying about what job to get, where to work, how to spend my free time, worrying about my home, and about my eyes.  All the usual crap.  But when I was out on my bike none of it mattered.  It didn't matter where I lived, or whether I had a job, or what I was going to do in the future.  Because I was out on my bike, and it was great.  It was almost Spring, and my winter hibernation was nearly over.  It was still cold, but inside the cold was the promise of better things to come.

And it was the same when I used to run around kicking a ball aged 14. Nothing else mattered.  Not exams, not my crazy stepdad, not the kids who lived in my street who wanted to chase me because I went to a school where I wore a blazer.  None of it.

That's what exercise with a purpose can do for you.  Some people think kicking a football or riding a bike is pointless.  What do they know?

So what happened to me for 25 years?  Since I was a genius.  I think for some of that time I lost my way.  But I'm getting better again.  I don't know as much now as I used to, but that's because I found out about a load of stuff I don't know.  A bit like Donald Rumsfeld, I now know more about the stuff I know I don't know.  I've still not caught up with the stuff I don't know I don't know, but I'm sure that'll come later.

In those 25 years what happened was that I did some stuff.  I succeeded at some things, and I failed at some things, although often it's hard to tell the difference, because it's just a matter of perspective.

Judging by the standards of the outside world, I've been failing at a lot more stuff in the last few years.  Especially getting jobs.  Before 40 I'd hardly ever been turned down for anything.  Now it happens to me almost every week.  But filling in job applications is getting easier.  Because I don't write what I think they want to hear anymore.  I write what I want.  I don't try to pretend I'm something I'm not, because I figure if they don't want me as I am, they probably wouldn't want me trying to be somebody else either.  As John Vernon famously says in the film Airplane.  I don't do impressions.

It's possible to get better at failing I think.  And I think I am.  Now I laugh when I get turned down for stuff, whether it's a job, or whether it's just a bowl of porridge.  It doesn't work to take myself too seriously.  And although I've had a meltdown in the last few months, I did find a couple of things out.

One is that you don't need courage to do things.  You just have to do them.  And the other is that getting out there and exercising, whether it's running around with a pointless football or riding a pointless bicycle, is the best way to help you feel better on the inside.  Of course it helps that it's nearly Spring, although I'm not going to use my new found energy to do myself in, as some depressed people do.  I'm going to get better.

Bert Trautmann, Harriet's Biscuits and other reasons to be cheerful this Christmas

I usually hate Christmas.  Or rather I hate having to do anything at Christmas.

I can't be bothered to shop, or to put the tree up, I rarely send Christmas cards and I resent spending money.  All in all, this doesn't make me Mr Festive Cheer 2011 or whichever year I'm moaning about.

I moan endlessly about the commercialisation of Christmas, and about greed and wanting stuff and all that.  Blah blah blah I go on.

Well, this year I'm almost enjoying it.  And as crazy as it sounds, a lot of it has been to do with working in a shop.  I haven't exactly been doing a survey, but the feeling I get from most people isn't that they've been half Nelsoned into the shops to buy stuff for their loved ones.  They actually seem like they want to do it, as if they like giving gifts to people they love.  Some of them seem genuinely excited, as if they can't wait to hand them over.  And old ladies who can't walk very well have got their coats on, got on buses and brought themselves into town to buy a gift voucher for their grandson, or whoever.  And people have been buying books about Bert Trautmann for their dads who remember the 1956 Cup Final when he played on with a broken neck.  And other people have been giggling at the till while they're buying books of jokes for their 52 year old dad, so he can sit in the chair full of Turkey and smashed on sherry with a paper hat on, and tell a few jokes before he passes out in front of the Queen.  And two girls could barely speak when they asked me for a book called 'How to Poo at Work', which is full of diagrams of cubicles and lots of real advice on etiquette and all sorts.  That will really make someone's Christmas Day (I hope).

And I've been food shopping twice.  And today I was in there hours, and thank goodness I wasn't being time and motion studied because I did more laps of the fruit and veg section than they do laps of the track in the Grand Prix, and I didn't even know what some of the stuff was I was supposed to be buying.  I'd heard of cloves of Garlic, but today I had to buy garlic-less cloves and I wasn't sure if they're fresh or powdered or they come in tubes or what.  They didn't have any anyway.  Or any lemons or cooking apples or muffins or red potatoes (so that's my Christmas ruined). 

And I got my foot run over, and I had to ask a shelf stacker to look after my trolley while I went to go pee, because I'd been in there so long my bladder had packed up, but I didn't mind at all.  I liked being in amongst people.  People buying things to make a nice dinner for their mother who's getting over a stroke, or for their stepson who is home from uni (oh hang on, that was just me).

But whatever they were in there for, they were people buying things to help them to enjoy spending time with their loved ones, and that can't be a bad thing can it?

There's a Half Man Half Biscuit song, called It's Cliched to be Cynical at Christmas, and I just listened to it, and I think I am a cliche, because I moan a lot about Christmas.  Well, moaning doesn't make the Christmas dinner, and it doesn't wrap presents, and it doesn't put any more love in the world. 

So, I have put up a tree, and I have decorated it really badly, so it only looks any good from one particular angle if you don't look closely.  And I sent 6 Christmas cards, including one to the Chemist to thank them for all the drugs, and I've bought one of just about every type of dead animal there is that you can eat.

And I'm looking forward to Christmas.  And I don't need any presents, because I've already had a really special one.  I got a parcel with biscuits in that were made by my small friend Harriet, and some of them had melted boiled sweets in the middle to look like stained glass, and some were in the shape of boots and hearts and I ate them with my cup of tea one morning, before I went off to work, to sell books to people.  And it made me feel happy.  And selling books and knowing Harriet are just two of the reasons why I want to be better at Christmas this year.

Germany 1985 - Boris Becker, Handel's birthday and Escape to Victory - the Rematch

My first German exchange trip was in 1983 to Munich.  I got given the wrong German and then I got lost and had the German police looking for me, and then I spent two weeks photographing a girl who ended up with someone else, and I also laughed inappropriately at someone eating lemons in the cinema, but overall I still had a really great time, and so in 1985 when I got the chance to go on another German exchange, I of course said yes.

Again the format was the same.  The Germans came over to England in the Spring, and we went back there in the summer.  For some reason we were sent over to Germany on the cross channel ferry in July without a teacher to keep an eye on us, and if there's ever a situation that is bound to end in disaster, it's probably seven 17 year olds on a ferry for 4 hours with unlimited access to the duty free shop.

(The full story of having to drag my drunk school friends off the ferry can be found here)

The German leg of the trip was timed to coincide with the end of the school summer term, so we got to spend some time going to lessons in the Herschelschule in Hannover as well as hanging around in Germany being teenagers.  The best thing about school in Germany is a thing called Hitzefrei.  If it's too hot, you don't have to go to school, and they let you go about 11 in the morning.  We had Hitzefrei almost every day while we were there. 

The whole trip was amazing, although I wish I'd been kinder to my exchange partner Sebastian.  In my defence I was 17 then, and in many ways an idiot.  I was particularly rude to him regarding his taste in music, which I was unnecessarily scathing about (Judas Priest I think).  And that was coming from someone who was into Def Leppard and ELO, so I should have kept my mouth shut.  But the first few days were the best of all.

The first Sunday I was there was the Men's Wimbledon Singles Final (from Wimbledon) and against the odds the unseeded German Boris Becker was in the final.  This was in the days when the Germans were normally about as competitive as the Brits at Wimbledon.  I sat and watched the final with the entire Barth family and almost unbelievably the 17 year old Boris won.  It was extra special watching it in Germany, but it was also the first time I'd seen someone my age or younger win something big in sport.  These days there's only archeryists and crown green bowlers who are older than me in sport.

The evening following the final we were off to something called the Handelfest.  It was a massive celebration to mark the 300th Anniversary of the birth of Handel (you know the Messiah guy).  There was lots of music of his played and an enormous firework display and it was incredible, but almost as incredible was that every conversation that I overheard wasn't about Handel, it was about Boris Becker.  There were elderly Germans everywhere just unable to contain their excitement at what they'd seen.  And it was great to be there.

The other day of that trip I remember the best is the day we played football against the German army in the park.  It was so not Escape to Victory you wouldn't believe.  I'm not sure what the German army were doing in the park.  We were there on borrowed bicycles having a picnic and enjoying the evening summer sun.

Somehow we got talking to them and they challenged us to a football match, but they were so gentlemanly they agreed to play in bare feet, so as not to kick our shins to pieces with their army boots.  They also shared a crate of beer with us, which they had brought along.  I think even with the bare feet they probably won, but the result didn't really matter.

I have no idea why I felt like this, but I can remember reclining on the grass, after the barefoot football match, probably a bit drunk on beer (but not a horrible kind of drunk, just that kind of drunk where you love everybody) and I remember looking up at the sky and enjoying the warmth of the summer evening, and feeling happy enough to die.  I know that sounds bizarre.  Don't get me wrong.  I didn't want to die.  I just felt like it would be a good time to go.  I didn't see how it was possible to feel any more content than I did in that moment, and I thought it would be a good time to slip away.  Being pleasantly tipsy in a park, in a summer evening, having run around a bit playing football.  I didn't see how it could get any better.

Despite the perfect-ness of the opportunity I didn't die on my back in a park in Hannover in 1985, although I might well have done a couple of hours later.  Instead of popping off, I jumped back on my borrowed bicycle and my friends and I rode erratically around the streets and cycle paths of Hannover back to our host families.  We did some absolutely crazy cycling manoeuvres and were lucky not to arrested for being drunk in charge of bikes, but luckily there weren't any police or cars around, so we didn't get either arrested or run over.

The rest of the trip was fantastic too.  Going to school with lots of guys in denim who looked like Jim out of Taxi and lots of tall girls in three quarter length trousers (including Heike Sander, who I briefly fell in love with but only from afar, I managed to take her picture once, that was all).  Catching the underground from terminus to terminus on the spotless German underground system in hour after hour of pointless 'Bahnwanderungs'.  Having a dancing competition for hours in the local disco with Andy Ramsden.  And that isn't even mentioning the most incredible part of the trip, which was the day trip to Berlin, to see the Wall.  I'll have to write about that another time.  It was possibly the most unreal experience I've ever had.

(I did eventually go back and write about Berlin and the blog post for that can be found here)

Going to Berlin proved to be a very good reason for not dying the week before in the park, as have countless experiences since, but I hope when I do pop off, it's in as nice a place as that, surrounded by friends and after having had so much fun.  

Socrates is dead and Oranges aren't what they used to be

Socrates is dead.  And so is the World Cup.

The 2022 World Cup is going to be played in fridges in the desert and the Dutch have started kicking people

I’m fond of saying that things aren’t what they used to be.  Well, the World Cup isn’t for a start.  The only thing that was like the 70s about the 2010 final was that it reminded me of Carl Douglas and his kung fu fighting.  Van Bommel and De Jong should have been running around in white pyjamas.  I wonder what Rep and Rensenbrink and Willy van der Kerkhof made of it all. 

The first World Cup I ever saw was in 1978, from Argentina. Some of the games were on very late at night and I sneakily watched them in my bedroom on a small black and white TV, with the volume on low so my mum couldn't hear.

This was in the days when I’d only ever seen about 3 football matches live on TV. A couple of England Internationals and the 1978 FA Cup Final when Roger Osbourne wore himself out from kicking the ball into the net and had to be carried off.

But thankfully the two games I remember best from 78 were on in the early evening and I got to watch them downstairs in colour.  They both involved the men in orange, although you didn‘t get the full effect of the orange, because they were playing teams in dark blue so they had to play in white with orange shorts.  No matter though.

They lost 3-2 to Scotland, courtesy of 'that goal' by Archie Gemmill and in the second round they beat Italy 2-1, in a game where the ultra-defensive Italians tried and failed to sit on a 1-0 lead.  In a tournament packed with long-range goals, the two by Ernie Brandts and Arie Haan which defeated the Italians are the two I remember the most. 

Arie Haan would shoot from anywhere.  And Johnny Rep wasn’t bad either.  In fact it was him who finally killed the Scots off with the second goal in the 3-2 defeat.  That was from miles out aswell.

Before the 78 final my primary school became divided into two camps, marching round the playground, either chanting ‘Argentina’ or ‘Those guys in orange.  We’re not really sure if it they’re called Holland or the Netherlands‘.  I was of course in the Orange camp.  Ever since I've always thought there was something special about the men in Orange. Their notion of 'total football' has a beauty about it which is worlds away from the blood and thunder of English football (although I enjoy that too). 

Maybe its just because I’m getting older, but every World Cup since 78 seems to have been worse than the one before and amongst other things, there seems to have been a decline in the art of kicking the ball into the net from a long way off.  Almost every goal in 78 was nearly from the halfway line.  In 1982 we still had Socrates and Eder whacking them in from distance.  In 86 we had Vasily Rats and Belanov.  Italy 90 was a bit of a blip but in USA 94 we had Hagi and Stoichkov who could could still kick the ball where they wanted it to go.  These days most shots seem to end up in the crowd or at the corner flag.

You know, winning isn’t everything.  Most of the teams I’ve seen in the World Cup that have captured the imagination have been knocked out by other teams that were more boring.  The Dutch deserved to win in 78, Socrates and his boys from Brazil were the only Brazil team I’ve ever really got behind, and they got knocked out in 82 by boring Italy.  They managed to lose a game by trying to win it when they only needed a draw.   In 86 the Danes and Belgians were fantastic, but as usual with small nations playing attacking football they lost too. 

In the fantastic book Brilliant Orange, David Winner took us on a wonderful journey through all things Dutch: landscape, art, politics, culture, architecture, and he illustrated brilliantly how a nation's character shapes its football.

You can't always judge a book by its cover, but with this one you can. It is both Brilliant and Orange. 

I’m only glad it was written before the 2010 final.  Otherwise the title would have had to be changed to ‘How the Dutch used to be Brilliant and Orange, but now they’re into Kung Fu Instead’. 

If I can take Silverdale, I can take anything

My mum couldn't afford to take us on holiday when we were kids, but she did manage to get us on a two week holiday for underprivileged children in a place called Silverdale.  It was 1980.

It was quite a tough regime.  There was no showing off about what fancy stuff you'd got.  They made sure of this by taking all your clothes off you when you got there and giving you a random selection of clothes out of a cupboard.  

My brother couldn’t find any underpants to fit, so he had ones that were too big that hung out of the sides of his shorts.

There was pretty much non-stop running.  60 boys in 30 a side football games which were a just a mob of swinging legs kicking anything that moved.  Cricket with a bat that was so worn away it was more like half a bat.  Running for the sake of running, sometimes just round the building.

We had a disco one night, but they only had 3 records.  One was Rockin' Around the World by Status Quo and one of the others was Toccata by Sky.  I can't remember the third.

The weather was red-hot, nearly everyone got tonsilitis and under no circumstances were you allowed to leave any food on your plate.  Most meals featured giant boiled potatoes which were undercooked but they had to go down the neck, tonsilitis or no tonsilitis.

We took regular baths, which were supervised by someone called the matron.  I was 12 at the time.  It would be a long time before I'd be naked in a room with a woman again after that. 

When we got back to Leeds and had our clothes returned to us, my brother and I were let off the bus first as we were told we were the best behaved children they'd ever had.

It was hard, but as they used to say in the old days, it never did me any harm.  I've had other holidays since, but I don't think I've ever come back from a holiday fitter, even from my cycling holidays.

I think it's all run by charity, and I believe it's still going today.  I should really write and thank them.  

Post Script. I did write and thank them shortly after writing this, and in fact I sent them a link to this blog entry.  I ended up having a lovely e-mail exchange with them.  They seemed keen to distance themselves from some of the tougher measures employed at the time I went, but to be honest, even then it was always clear to me that they were operating with completely the best of intentions, and even with quite limited resources they managed to keep 60 young children clean, fed and occupied for a whole two weeks at a time.  And it was all done charitably, so I have nothing but praise for them.  Then and now.