I am never especially quick when it comes to technology, but it came to my notice about half a decade ago that I could watch top-class soccer for free. Rather than pay for Sky, or BT Sport, to see live games, there were websites that streamed a huge number of live soccer matches from around Britain and Europe, for free. This has made a difference to each Saturday afternoon. Wherever and whenever West Ham play, I can watch on my PC. And a few other teams, every now and again, to add diversity.

Going through the rigmarole of attending games in person has long lost its savour. Factors that were once taken as necessary parts of the ritual – the travel, the waiting, the cost and the weather – are now mainly unacceptable trials. I just cannot be arsed, although there are exceptions. In April, Al Campbell and I went to watch Billericay Town play on a beautifully sunlit evening. A totally relaxed adventure, at a new venue for both of us.

Today the Hammers play Watford. I’ve just looked at the team sheets. Watford look very big and physical, but we have won four on the trot. Both teams adjacent in the league table, with 24 points each. A Hammers win would take us to 6^th place in the table.

I will be looking in on either VIP Box or First Row Sports. These sites run on advertising revenue, so the trick is to get rid of the adverts that cover the screen. After that, the service is so good that it is often possible to receive 90 minutes of uninterrupted coverage.

Superstitions have been built into the ritual. A cup of coffee for each half, but never to be fully consumed before the 45 minutes and added time are up. And as much of a bar as possible on people entering the room while I watch, as this will clearly upset the Hammers’ rhythm and concentration. You see the logic. I know you do.

I’m as aware as anybody that football is the great distraction, full of stupidly overpaid, and often gracelessly argumentative prima donnas. But it is also a window for great athleticism, teamwork, bravery, skill and even balletics. It is my ritual of 50 plus years, and I’m sticking to it.

0-2. Watford too strong. But an exciting game.

 

 

The idea that the moon holds some sway over human behaviour appears to have been widely accepted before science began to have its say. Try Googling the subject. It seems to be dismissed now as an unproven notion, lacking the multiple empirical studies required for verification.

My experience, on countless occasions, has been to endure days of gloom, misery and unhinging internal volatility, before I take a look up at the bright evening sky and see the orb shining in its fullness. “Aha”, I utter, with a glimmer of relief that the pattern is at least a familiar one. In Blog 40, there was a minor flavour of this. It’s all about the waxing.

The start of the last week was a major struggle. Driving back from my dad’s house in Brentwood on Monday I was drowning in feelings of negativity. If somebody had offered me a week’s sleep I’d have bitten their hand off. So many worries, about Eric’s ability to cope alone, about our finances, especially an unpaid tax backlog. The situation where our daughters’ partners (once best mates) have fallen out, our inability to provide Rory with more money for his university course in Cheltenham. Maureen’s plantar fasciitis condition, which limits her ability to walk far or stay on her feet for extended periods. My work, which I have near-total disdain for, but which keeps us afloat. And more.

The cumulative effect was unbalancing. Frighteningly so. One of my strengths, an ability to concentrate, and to stay in my own inner worlds for long periods, was being breached, flooded and overwhelmed by the inflow. All of these issues are constant, 365 days a year, but I have a general ability to hold them at bay.

And then John Madden sent me a message. “Has your moonitis started yet?” What a good friend. “You prescient bastard” was my reply.

The week got gradually easier, as the waxing unravelled. A big positive came when my offer to repay HMRC a fixed sum for the next year was accepted. My last few work jobs were finished off. Had a nice drink with my brother Wednesday afternoon. Maureen finished the Christmas shopping. Thursday evening was very enjoyable. We watched an old edition of Silent Witness, with Amanda Burton, an excellent half hour of Eastenders and then Mark Wahlberg in Shooter. You could pick tens of holes in the plot but its depiction of rogue elements within a government was easily believable. Good touch where the former Marine sniper has turned his back on society. When the knock on his door comes, he is reading the 9-11 Commission Report.

The blogs always help when gloom prevails. Write it out, open it up to view, and a kind of magic occurs. Whatever the subject, a lifting of the spirits.

And now the huge bonus of the winter solstice. Every day bringing more sunlight for the next six months.

Was Thursday night’s dream linked in? Our three black cats had to be loaded into a storage chest, within wicker baskets, and placed onto a paternoster lift. As the lift reached the top of its cycle, the baskets flipped over, and then fell a long way, through space where the platforms were somehow missing. At some stage, we found three lifeless black feline bodies.

Optimistic view says my mind is processing the turn of the year, and the retreat of the darkness. Hope it’s nothing more than that. I love those pussies.

 

I don’t know much about Michelle Obama.

I have long thought her husband to be a very slick performer, whose lofty rhetoric far outweighed his achievements. But Maureen has voiced her respect for Michelle, as a progressive voice for females and mothers.

Puzzling, then, that Mrs Obama has sung the praises of a bloke who was involved deeply in the murder of about a million Iraqis, all of whom had mothers. “We’re all Americans. We all care about our family and our kids, and we’re trying to get ahead,” Mrs Obama said last weekend, in widely-quoted comments about George W. Bush. “And that’s how I feel about [Bush]. You know? He’s a beautiful, funny, kind, sweet man.”

Well who am I to deny Michelle’s opinion? Maybe it was sincere, and the endless piles of Arab corpses which Georgie boy was at least partially responsible for creating, for no legitimate reason, just slipped her memory. It happens. My dad forgot where he had placed his car keys a couple of days ago.

Also, and this is a really important point which the US media drilled deep into, Mr Bush has now given Michelle two pieces of candy. Two. On separate occasions. She had this to say. “He has the presence of mind and the sense of humor to bring me a mint, and he made it a point to give me that mint right then and there and that’s the beauty of George Bush.” Well said girl. I’m beginning to wonder if I may have to reconsider GWB. I had this idea of him as a war criminal, at the helm of an illegal invasion soaked in blood and gore. Maybe this is a heart-warming, redemptive moment where my perception changes.

Could it be that he is actually just a cute, cuddly guy, whose mind-boggling levels of deception about “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and deliberate targeting of a nation’s civilian infrastructure to gain a strategic advantage were just a mistake that any regular Joe might make? Michelle knows his “beauty” better than me. She has taken his candy deep inside her.

Imagine one of your neighbours who you see going to the newsagents each day, whistling as he takes the morning air. It turns out that he is a serial murderer who has killed thousands of humans, yet has never suffered any consequences. If you mention this, people throw you anecdotes about what a nice man he is, the real man. “OK, so he’s not squeaky clean but try and focus on the positives. He is a stalwart in the neighbourhood litter patrol, and our streets feel safer. Some of the people he butchered were homeless. It’s not right that you let a small detail in his life override all the small but good things he has accomplished,” they protest.

In all societies around the world, murder is treated as the most serious crime anyone can commit. No greater violation of personal sovereignty exists. If I am ever involved in the deaths of a million people, and the unimaginable trickle down of grief through their families, and communities, I now know that handing out smarties would get me off the hook.

I once believed that if you conspired to murder a large number of people, then you were a mass murderer. On that basis, here are two of them.

Once I would have felt sick at the sight. But now, now I can start to see two beautiful, funny, kind and sweet men. All thanks to Michelle.

 

He may not remember it, but Shaun Wilson provided a lifeline for me in early December 1977, just a week or two before the term finished.  We were larking around in the library, when he noticed that a girl had just sat down on the far side of the room. The unusually-named Saxon Brown had caught my eye several times. We had smiled at each other. Shaun highlighted a big opportunity that lay in the moment, revealing that she had recently split from a long-standing relationship

Over I trotted and sat down next to her. A bristling sound arose from the others at the table but her face said welcome. Butterflies in my stomach but there was no point in prevaricating. The prize was enough to make the risk of disappointment worthwhile. Did she fancy a drink one evening soon? Her assent made my spirits leap.

A strange incident had enmeshed me a few weeks earlier. Going out one Wednesday evening for a swift pint or two, a mate and I had found ourselves in the company of two girls. I was uninterested, but he sparked up with one, leaving me chatting to an Australian woman with a limp and an ability to talk. She insisted on a coffee back in Harborne and regaled me with details of the headaches she suffered as a result of a brain operation as a kid, leaving her with a metal plate in her head.

By 2 a.m, she asked if she could share my bed, rather than take a taxi. I didn’t fancy her in the slightest, but it was cold, and snuggling up to another body was no bad thing. Sex was offered but I couldn’t see the point, without some kind of attraction. My mates reacted with astonishment when I told this, but I could only be myself. A myth nonetheless sprang up that I had bedded a mentally handicapped Australian cripple, which I denied strenuously, while adding that she was also blind and deaf.

In a similar vein, I had asked out a Lancashire lass named Lynn at the end of one of the Northern Soul events. We had a few drinks several days later and I walked her to the bus stop. She asked me back for a coffee, explaining that her flat was empty. Quick micro-calculations. We didn’t have much in common, and no sparks were flying. Didn’t fancy her, but her signals suggested she wanted a relationship, and was probably prepared to offer herself to start if off. I declined. I wanted quality.

Was ever a boy so ready to fall? I wanted a pretty woman all to myself, with no games or complications, and a fulfilling sex life. I wanted it so much it hurt physically, inside. I suppose I must have wished hard enough.

Saxon was a tease on the first date. When I told her about the ABH incident in Cambridge, she got up with her coat and feigned an end to the evening. The world turned black until she started laughing. This just confirmed my feeling that she would accept me lock, stock and barrel, and gave me the confidence to play slowly, always my style. First of all, home for Christmas, and a temporary postman’s job.

 

Temporarily homeless in Birmingham as the autumn of 1977 began, Martin Dyer and I started to look at the accommodation adverts that were dotted around. It was comfortable to be ensconced in Andy, Shaun and Neil’s Maple Bank flat as the beginning of my third year loomed into view. But the full set of five occupants would soon be back.

Retrospect says this was a time of considerable confidence. My yearning for a deep relationship with a female was bubbling and nagging away, but there was clearly fun to be had in the interim. The American Studies course was OK, I had a wide group of mates, and another two years to enjoy myself. I was generally happy.

Martin was a robust bugger. Tall lad from Tetbury, Gloucestershire, who was very tidy about his appearance. Often to be heard singing one of a range of his favourite soul tunes, and not immune to a fight, especially when drunk. Bio-chemistry student who was the only person I have ever known to dissect his turds, once a month, as a check on his overall health. We both wore long, dark leather coats.

A house in Harborne, to the west of the university, was found. Not too far from the pub, the Plough, outside where Big Dad had scaled a municipal bus. I found the street on Google maps 15 seconds ago. Clarence Road. We would be sharing with some people who turned the hot water on just once a week. When the dishes would be washed and a bath taken. One of them, Fergus, looked like a dirtier version of Robert Plant. Their strategy was a money-saving tactic.

Each to their own, but I was never poor or alternative enough to enjoy this stance. Nor Martin. It was quite dispiriting to try and cook something as the week progressed and you had to boil a kettle to wash grime-encrusted plates and cutlery. We both started eating more on campus and taking a shower in the sports centre each day. Not great circumstances, but we adapted.

For alcoholic escapades, we usually returned to two halls of residence on the Vale Site, Lake and Mason. In Freshers Week, standing at the Mason bar, I had the pleasure of a newcomer, Anne Clayton, deciding that my lips needed kissing. A thrill. We hooked up for a month or so, but I knew fairly soon that it was unlikely to last. From Stoke, Anne was a kind girl who (for me anyway) had a heavy set of protocols governing the what, when and where of a male-female relationship. I was probably hard work. The desire to be free, and unaccountable, led me to break it off. The right decision. If there was to be a girl for me, long-term, she would need a flexibility that I still had to encounter.

But Jesus, I did want somebody – and year three was a time when I was inundated with a growing level of interest and offers. A great development that autumn was my discovery of Northern Soul music, referred to back in Blog 3. This firmed up a friendship with Rick Hibbert, another individual from Stoke. Rick and I developed a daft double act. Often operating in the general reading room in the library, where we must have annoyed the hell out of the more studious boys and girls. The library was a regular location for devouring my packed lunch, more often than not tuna or pilchard sandwiches that must have stunk the place out. I can imagine the sighs of relief when we left.

At the end of October, Martin and I had endured enough of the Harborne house. We found an alternative in nearby Ladywood – which turned out to be the world’s coldest, darkest and draughtiest flat. It cost us a pittance in return, but Martin’s girlfriend (now wife) Angela was beside herself with anger at having to stay in such squalor. It was horrible, but young males ride such storms.

Martin gave me my first recipe, for spaghetti bolognaise. Up until then, I could muster little more than an omelette, sausage and bacon, and all sorts of toasted stuff. I have never been hugely interested in cooking, but Martin’s notes started off slightly more thoughtful efforts to prepare my own food.

 

 

 

 

 

I try and keep the blog positive. Dollops of grease to the wheels of life, which can be a tough gig.

But Tom Bradby drives me mad. He cannot seem to read the news without letting his views creep in. Has somebody given the ITV news anchor the idea that viewers need a nudge to see where their best interests lay?

Not a newswatcher at the best of times, I came across Tom just a couple of years ago, shortly after Donald Trump came to power. Trump had done something or other – again – that didn’t fit with the established idea of how US Presidents should behave. Tom opened by providing context, rather than news. “Now if you think United States political protocol is being turned on its head, wait until you see this!”

Tom, tell me the news please. I will then make my own mind up.

His rendering of news from Syria was usually a disgrace. So often letting leak his starting position that President Assad is an evil tyrant. Just the word Assad makes Tom’s eyebrows lift and he lets out a little sigh, hardly perceptible.

Tom, you stupid cunt, tell me the news please. Then I can make my own mind up.

Mr Bradby even tries to whet our appetite with a pre-news trailer. He leans nonchalantly in front of his desk, papers in hand, lips pursed. Head slightly cocked. “Wait and see what we’ve got for you tonight.” News as entertainment, as frisson. Tom as the circus MC.

This silly fucker gets £500,000 a year for his efforts. It’s not just me. Maureen, who is far less cynical, gets him now. “I can see why you dislike him so much,” she offered the other night.

Obviously he reads a prepared script, but he could deliver that in ways that are less patronising, and that do not craftily lecture his audience. Given that he used to be a royal correspondent, perhaps that is a vain hope.

In the end, it matters little. His style may be more irksome but he is no different to all of the other journalists who give a free pass to systems that favour an elite minority, and where the impact of wars, economic extortion, debt and assaults on civil liberties are felt down the chain.

Micky Flanagan and Maureen’s mum, Iris, don’t go together. Not on first impressions.

Micky made me laugh last night until the tears were running, lifting the ‘Black Dog’ that had started to hang over me. In the course of one hour, the TV highlights from his Out Out tour lifted me from a numbed low to a welcome feeling that all was well again with myself and the world.

Iris Mannix, God bless her, died on this day 18 years ago. I cannot say that we were ever close, but she carried herself with an unmistakable dignity during the two decades in which I knew her. She was deeply influenced by the Catholicism of her childhood, and found new faith in the Roman church later in life, when she undertook a trip to Lourdes. Her time was often not easy, including spells looking after her wheelchair-bound mother and then battling cancer in her later years.

Her lineage included Daniel Patrick Mannix, an Irish-born Catholic bishop who served as Archbishop of Melbourne for 46 years and was “one of the most influential public figures in 20th-century Australia”, Wikipedia tells me. He was Iris’ great uncle. Her grandmother was a suffragette, while Iris’ dad George almost achieved fame as the cook on the Shackleton expedition to the South Pole. He had to pull out at the last minute through a leg injury. Good DNA running through my wife.

I can remember Iris laughing with great gusto on certain occasions, but she had an in-built decency that would have ruled out any amusement at Micky’s “fingering” theory. Mr Flanagan advocates the notion that teenage pregnancies would be reduced if only young lads courting would spend the first year kissing and “titting up” their belle, before moving on to a good many “fingering” sessions as a prelude to full sex. The girls’ parents would know what she was up to, the lad would be thinking of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, everybody wins, says Micky.

But I do reckon Iris – who was born in Rainham, Essex, and then moved to East Ham – would have enjoyed his cockney persona and strutting bravado. And I think she would have seen the humour of his recounting of “having the shits” in India. Universal stuff that can happen to us all. “I went to the toilet, and with the gentlest of pushes, the world fell out of my arse…it was like emptying an old radiator.” His mate also fell victim. “I just farted”, he tells Micky on the phone, “and some of it sprayed on me pillow…..a bit like the Kennedy assassination – they could never work out why that bullet ended where it did.”

Definitely up her street, I venture, would have been Micky’s take on spying on your neighbours. In East Ham Crescent, Brentwood, where Maureen lived until age 24, tiny breezes floated across the road as curtains twitched constantly.

“I’m peeping out of my own curtains”, he tells the audience, to check if he can go to the shops without bumping into a particular neighbour. “And I’m enjoying the clandestine nature of it – you’re in a powerful position. People don’t know.”

Somebody sees him. “The real fun starts when you are caught. You are then duty bound to do one of two things. Come out of the peep and start messing about with the window. Most people take the second option, the good old fashioned hide. But I did neither. I pushed on and made the ultimate discovery – the maximum fun at that point is you maintain the peep….It’s not for everyone, I know……I was telling the wife about it –she said are you fucking backward or something?”

Maureen and I were falling about. I quite literally felt joy return to my head and heart, and cannot praise Micky highly enough.

I didn’t pay enough attention to Iris while she was around, but hope she will have witnessed my love for her daughter. If she is looking in, we are thinking of her today.

Our road is meta-dark. It has two streetlights along its five or six hundred yards. So, although I’m not much of a Christmas fan, the seasonal lights decorating a few of the houses provide a welcome set of illuminations at night. This one belongs to our next-door neighbours Dean and Danielle.

The ones below are scattered along the length of Cherry Garden Road. Their disappearance in January plunges the street into a black, beaconless gloom.

I like this ghostly shot of the village as you approach from Chelmsford. The star above the tree sits atop the local church.

These houses are also on the main road.

The Beehive pub is another fifty yards along.

It’s a full moon on Saturday 22^nd. While my overall SAD has been quite muted this autumn, the current waxing phase has stirred up feelings of gloom and being slightly out of control. Roll on the 23^rd.

 

Light thinks it travels faster than anything, but it is wrong…..it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

Terry Pratchett

 

My memory of the late summer 1977 barge trip with the Geordie lads is frustratingly poor.

I arrived back in Birmingham without a place to stay. Although the milk bottle incident was never officially pinned on me, I was told unofficially that it prevented my return to Maple Bank in year three.

Nonetheless that was where I hung out, for a couple of weeks, in Andy’s bedroom, while looking for accommodation. Finally, I bought the long, black leather coat long promised to self, using the Ford leftovers. And, amazingly, played squash one lunchtime with Bernie, the Stoke psychopath whose boot had teased my scrotum, before partaking of a pint with him. An OK sort of bloke until the lust for combat overcame him. It was rumoured that fighting gave him a hard-on. I stayed flaccid in his company.

Shaun persuaded me that it would be worth a couple of days with his Newcastle mates on a longboat trip planned along the Oxford Union Canal, from somewhere near Rugby.

Couldn’t afford a full week so jumped at the offer. Steve Smith, who was studying forestry at Aberdeen University, was the general pilot and plotter, whose common sense ensured that reason prevailed sufficiently for nobody to drown or drink themselves to death. The minute we set off, beers were inevitably broken open. The canal was beautiful. The landscape, alcohol and the company smashed me open with utter joy as the boat pottered along through the quiet Warwickshire countryside.

I have a vague recollection of lads jumping pissed into the water.

There was something very special about this group. I’m not sure that a group of males has ever made me feel so relaxed and welcome. Shaun, Steve, Gav, Mac, Ken and Sel were there, and possibly Michael. Maybe others. We enjoyed a wonderful drinking session on the first night, after mooring just across a small field from the pub in question. These fine males were kind enough to listen to, and laugh at, a shed load of my jokes, most of which might now be classified as non-PC. Mac regaled us with a tale of a sexual encounter where he was “magnificent”.

The phantasmagorical recollection later that night is of being woken up because the lad nicknamed ‘Maggot’ was inserting a cucumber into his anus. Who knows why? I have a feeling that the item was soft, and partially disintegrated on its entry. Maggot loved Debbie Harry of Blondie fame. Maybe he was thinking of her as he self-fruited?

The next night we sat in another pub. It was related that I had eyed a girl at the bar so persistently across the evening that she left her boyfriend and sat with me. Wish I remembered, and apologies to the bloke concerned.

I am guessing that we set off on a Saturday and I jumped board, sadly, on the Monday morning, at Banbury. Then a train back to Birmingham, where the search for new digs accelerated. Martin Dyer was also back early, on a similar quest. So we looked together.

 

 

 

 

 

That’s the question that Maureen often asks, very sincerely. I can see why. Like the Yellow Vests, she wants a more equitable world.

This is a snapshot of where we stand.

*A huge chunk of the British adult population is just one monthly pay packet away from running out of money, including Kev and Maureen.

*Nearly one in three children live in poverty and the use of food banks is rising.

*An estimated 320,000 people, according to Shelter, are homeless in Britain, including those living on the streets, sleeping in cars, trains, and tents, or living in temporary accommodation.

*Over 100,000 desperate debtors contemplate or attempt suicide each year, according to the Money and Mental Health Institute.

*Looking ahead, the House of Commons reckons that, by 2030, the richest 1% will own two-thirds of global wealth.

*Tony Blair and George Bush are still walking around freely, seemingly without fear, after having transparently committed huge war crimes that decimated Iraq. There is a stack of evidence that US forces used white phosphorus and depleted uranium in their attacks on Fallujah in 2004. Quoting from Out of Essex: “Subsequent birth defects in the city included babies born without parts of their skulls; missing genitalia, limbs and eyes; severe brain damage; unusual rates of paralysing spina bifida; and encephalocele, marked by swollen sac-like protusions from the head.”

*The UK and the US continue to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, which continues to wreak a humanitarian crisis in Yemen. Children dying by the thousands.

*The oceans are filled with trillions of plastic particles that are killing marine and bird life.

And so on. We could all sit around for hours and expand this list. I get it that individual free will is at the heart of human life, but a civilised society does not allow these miseries and injustices to accumulate. Does it?

The Yellow Vests symbolise how some French people are beginning to react to slowly becoming more powerless, as the financial and political systems have slowly squeezed national wealth towards the top parts of the toothpaste tube. And then out into offshore corporate jurisdictions where it becomes untraceable.

The spirit of the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ is inspiring. The poll tax riots in Britain back in 1990 showed that violent civil disobedience can be effective, and just. I really have no idea whether the Yellow Vest movement has stamina. I suspect there are surprises in store.

I asked John Madden what we can do, to play a part in benevolent change. “Meditate, be kind and stop buying crap,” he advised.

I would add a couple of things. Firstly, stop voting until meaningful choices are offered. Voting Liberal to try and stop the Conservatives, or Labour, is like offering to have three fingers cut off so that your foot is not amputated. How about voting Green or just not bothering? Keep all of your limbs, while letting those in power know that they are on short notice.

Secondly, have nothing more to do with the largest banking groups. The power of these organisations, and their ability to quite literally create money out of thin air and then ask for interest back on it is a key explanation behind the structure of wealth distribution.

Growing your own vegetables is a great way to cut food bills.

Buying locally is a great way to counter globalisation, while bartering brings back the art of negotiation to transactions. Trading your homegrown carrots and potatoes for a neighbour’s goods brings a satisfaction that no shop purchase can ever provide – and denies an audit trail to those who might seek to tax personal transactions.

Finally, talk to your friends, family and workmates, without thumping the table. Carefully respecting the fact that they may not share your views, but knowing that change is usually incremental, even if it sometimes seems to suddenly explode out of nothing.

A couple of summers ago, I was chatting over the fence to my neighbour Dean. Until then, our intercourse chiefly concerned football (Arsenal v West Ham), mowing the lawn and other practical issues. But one day he revealed that he was driven to look behind the news headlines, due to his maverick nature. He danced around with his words for a minute or so, before letting me know that he believed that it was rarely in any government interest to tell the truth.

9/11 is always my starting point when the conversation takes this turn. Whatever did happen did not look like what we were told (Blog 14). Dean agreed, and off we went, chatting for about two hours that produced a real deepening of our relationship. I could equally have cited the Iraqi ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ nonsense promulgated by M16.

Something else that I am doing off my own bat is to look at the legality of the various taxes levied upon me. That’s a slow job, to be detailed at some stage next year. It’s just my opinion, but a mass withholding of taxes would surely hit a systemic Achilles Heel. The powers that be would have no choice but to listen.

If none of these tactics appeal, nature always works for me to restore equilibrium. Sunshine, fresh air and a little exercise is my great holding place, where recuperation kicks in, and new ideas spring into life.