Tag Archives: football

Memory and the Mum-Bum Conundrum

Posted on by

My partner Kate and I were discussing parenting and parental influence, and segued off into how our reading habits had been shaped by our families. As for me, I’ve been a big reader for the entirety of my adult life, but I only really became a voracious reader in my late teens, despite growing up in a house literally festooned with books. My lack of enthusiasm for the family library, though, was entirely explainable by its content, all of which was a reflection of my step-dad’s passions for ornithology and antique trains. These were subjects too arcane and remote to be of any interest to my pre-pubescent self, and my teenage self leaned towards rather different iterations of birds and steaming (and having much more success with the latter than with the former) (and, yes, I know that using ‘birds’ in that context in 2023 basically constitutes a hate crime, but I’m hoping that I’ll get off with it on the grounds that I’m a big sexy Himbo with eyes that could slacken even Anne Widdecombe’s iron-fortressed loins).

So how come I liked reading fiction so much? How come I was so fascinated by stories? Where did that passion come from? When I was reunited with my father, after being apart from him between the ages of 4 and 21, I was delighted and amazed to discover not only that he was as big a reader as I was, but also that he enjoyed most of the same authors and genres. This was no lightning-in-a-bottle similarity, either. The coincidences just kept coming: I spoke just like him; we shared the same wry, but twinkle-eyed sense of humour, with a very similar style of delivery; we looked at religion in the same way (equal parts suspicion to derision); we both thought The Sopranos was the greatest TV show ever made. How could we have so much in common when we’d spent so long apart, and after only such a short time together? If none of these things were coincidences, then it began to make sense that I must have absorbed a great deal of information at an incredibly young age that had managed to shape the person I was at my core, before slithering down into the abyss at the edge of my consciousness, never to be seen again. That’s the cruel paradox, I think, at the very heart of our existence: that if only we could retrieve that treasure trove of memories from the abyss then we would be within touching distance of finally understanding both who we are as individuals, and who we are as a species. But those memories are forever lost to us, leaving part of us forever unsolvable. A little unsolvable person trapped inside a giant unsolvable puzzle just waiting for the random anvil of death to crush them into oblivion. Still, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?

I called my eight-year-old son, Jack, through to the kitchen, and asked him what memories of me stood out from his formative years. What a boon it was for my self-esteem to hear him utter those four most beautiful words ever to be delivered sequentially: “Um… I don’t know?” I consoled myself that his memory, along with all other mental processing systems, had probably ceased functioning at the very second I’d interrupted his game of Minecraft to call him into into kitchen.  Jack funnelled all CPU run-time into solving the one problem he had in life: of getting the fuck out that kitchen, and back to building an underwater palace for his pet goats, or whatever bollocks he was up to. Sensing his reluctance to talk, I did what any compassionate and understanding father would do: I just kept on talking. And then talking some more. See how he likes it, eh? I talked right over that non-plussed little face until it was so non-plussed it was basically The Anti-Pluss.

I recounted to Jack what I could remember of my own father, a twofer I hoped would tell him more about me as a person, and give him a snapshot of the grandfather he’d never meet. I shared a few memories with him, but one of the most vivid in my thoughts and in the re-telling was the time my father took me to my first football match. It wasn’t quite the father-and-son bonding experience he’d been expecting. In fact it stands as proof that our relationship was far from a happy hotbed of coincidences and parallels.

Football bored -and still largely bores – me on a primal level. For this reason I spent the duration of that long-ago match amusing myself – and irritating others – by crafting a narrative around my own hands, and then acting it out. I turned those hands into two Punch-and-Judy-style characters, and wasted no time setting them in conflict.

I gave my performance my all – The Guardian said of it in its review: ‘A brave, raw and powerful experience. You will want to put yourself in Jamie Andrew’s hands time and again’. Coincidentally, I also used this as the intro for my Tinder profile.

Anyway, the giant bearded man sitting immediately to my left turned out to be something of a philistine, and gave my performance zero stars. His ratings system was his own face, which he kept swivelling round to, well, face me, adorned with tightly pursed lips and a grave stare. It was a face that seemed to say: ‘How dare you bring live theatre into the middle of my football game, tiny Frasier Crane!’ I remember seeing pleas bobbing like boats in the eddying whirlpools of his eyes, as he jabbed urgently in the direction of the pitch with his immense sausage finger, perhaps hoping that the motion of his quick-swishing digit would be powerful enough to make me suddenly give a shit about football. Like his finger was a magic wand, or I was an imbecile. “Perhaps the laddie hasn’t noticed the grass out there and all the people running on it and kicking that ball. Maybe if I keep pointing and pointing at the pitch, it’ll eventually sink in and he’ll ken he’s at a football match. He’s probably one of those daft wee weins from the yellow bus.”

Big Beardy’s efforts were in vain. In the end, he saw a lot more of my puppet show than I saw of his poxy football match. Needless to say, though, at the end of the day, and while it was a game of two halves, and the boys done well, my football fan of a father wasn’t much impressed by my snub of the beautiful game, either. He vowed angrily to my mother that he would never, ever again take me to a football match. There was very little need for righteous anger. Mainly because that’s not really a punishment when the person you’re supposedly punishing doesn’t like football, is it?

“So you don’t like doing your homework do you, boy? Well, how do you feel about NO HOMEWORK AT ALL?!!”

“That’s… that’s great actually.”

“Oh. I…eh… didn’t really think that one through, did I?”

“No. No you didn’t.”

So, Jack could bring very few memories of our time together to the forefront of his mind, and I only write ‘very few’ because it’s less hurtful to me than writing ‘no’ – NO memories –even though it’s the truth. The petty side of me wanted to bring out all the physical photo albums, and the digital photos on Facebook, and make him sift through every damn one of them. “Ah, now. See this day here? That was a bloody expensive day, son. All that money, do you remember? Just to put a bloody smile on your ungrateful little face. Mind you said it was the best day you’d ever had in your life? Well, it must’ve been a real belter, son. A proper belter. So good you cannae remember a thing about it. It’s like it never even happened. Well, if it never happened, THEN I’D LIKE MY FUCKING MONEY BACK.”

Jack could remember my mum, though. Instantly. Vividly. His exact words to me were: “I remember something about Granny two-cats.”

My kids have three grandmothers. One they call gran, one they call grandma, and one they called granny – my mum. I added a further layer of clarification to this Grandmama Da Vinci Code by referring to my mum as ‘granny two-cats and a flag’, on account of her having a flag-pole in the back garden, and two cats in the house. We continued to call her ‘granny two-cats and a flag’ even after the flag had been taken down, and one of the cats had perished in a drive-by; the main reason being that ‘Granny one-cat and a flag-pole’ sounds like something a pervert would type into Pornhub.

Granny two-cats and a flag died more than a year ago. She loved her grandchildren – all of them – and it was more than mutual. She left a big, big hole in their hearts when she went.

“What do you remember about her?”

“That she’d get her bum out,” he said, with a big, big grin.

And I started to cry. Not big wracking sobs, mind. Just a single solitary tear, like the one cried by Rutger Hauer at the end of Blade Runner. “Your gran would have loved to have heard you say that,” I said, my eyes now properly misting over, the lump in my throat throttling the final few words of the sentence. “For that to be your memory of her.” It’s a strange thing to be brought to tears over an arse.

But I think it speaks to something at my mum’s core. Something I sometimes missed because I was too blinded by the machinery of our historic and ongoing conflicts, the big booms and crashes that formed the percussive rhythm of our fiercely loving but heated relationship. Her inner child. Her need to entertain, her need to be noticed, yes, but also her need to set people at ease. To make them laugh. To make them feel good.

When I think of my own grandparents, I think of loving but emotionally distant people dressed in greys and beiges, sitting in chairs drinking tea, or sitting in seats eating soup. When Jack and his brother think of their granny, they’ll think of an old woman in a pink fluffy oodie pressing her septuagenarian arse-cheeks up against the glass door of the hall, chuckling as she does it. And they’ll smile. And they’ll nod. Because they’ll remember that they live in a world where you don’t have to lay down and die when you get to a certain age. That you can retain a connection to your inner child, no matter how old you are. That you have permission to poke your tongue out at the world. At least every once in a while. Embrace life’s oddities and weirdnesses and weirdos and absurdities. Make them a part of you. Hell, throw your head back and laugh once in a while. One day you won’t be able to.

And forget books, forget football, forget fathers. That’s a real legacy right there: my mum’s legacy. That it’s a bum is immaterial. It’s a legacy that each and every one of us would count ourselves lucky to leave behind. Because life, my dear friends, is over in a flash, and we can’t ever allow ourselves to forget the most important about it: living the fucking thing.

And doing it with both an unflinching glint in your eye, and your fingers ever-ready at your waistband.

1998: One World Cup and Poo Hurled Floors

Posted on by

I’ll never forget where I was in the summer of 1998 as Scotland participated in the football World Cup: I was busy shitting myself to death. That’s a memory that tends to stick.

Now, if I were to equate the horrendous gastric issues my 18-year-old self suffered that summer with the horrors of war that my grandfathers faced at a similar age, then it would paint me in a very poor light indeed, so please look away now because that’s exactly what I’m about to do in the next two paragraphs.

Before you judge me, just think about it for a moment, alright? Did my grandfathers take a bullet? No. Did they have dysentery? No. Did they violently shit themselves in-front of their mates – many, many times – during a lads’ holiday to Magaluf? No. No, they didn’t. Quite frankly, they don’t know they’re born. Well, they don’t know anything at all, really, because they’re dead. But you get my point.

I mean, okay, okay, yes, yes: Hitler; war; mass genocide; being locked in a perpetual state of dread and terror; seeing friends die; having half the male population of your town wiped out; a world on the brink of Nazi enslavement, yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah. But did their giggling mates put their shitted pants on a stick and then fling them out the window? DID THEY FUCK!

The first lads’ holiday abroad is supposed to be filled with clumsy, meaningless sex, or at least the endless and pathetic pursuit of it. It’s supposed to be about drinking until you’ve got less of a grasp on time and reality than the dude from Memento; about narrowly avoiding being evicted from your hotel for pissing in the pool or scanting the manager. And it’s most definitely about childish intra-group pranks ranging from the dangerous to the borderline homo-erotic.

I was denied all of this, having bought the business end of a disease-ridden chicken-and-egg salad on the very first day of the holiday. A little tip for all you first-time travellers out there: if you’re lucky enough to avoid Covid, don’t go and ruin things by selecting as your maiden meal the combo voted: ‘Most Likely to Be Infested with Salmonella’. Because I ran that gauntlet and lost. I guess you could say I tripped over at the starting line, covered in my own fetid, liquid excrement.

Waking up on day two, after a hefty drinking session, I thought I was in the grip of nothing more bothersome than a hangover. I think it was somewhere between the fifteenth and sixteenth violent spew-poo (arse on toilet seat, head in bucket) that it dawned on me I was in the grip of something far worse. There were little hints everywhere. For instance, your brain usually gives your body ample warning of an impending eruption from Mount Ve-Poo-sius. Typically, you get anywhere between five and thirty-five minutes to find a toilet. When you’ve got salmonella, however, that message arrives by email rather than post, with the warning, more often than not, arriving in tandem with the shit itself. It’s the superpower nobody wanted: the power to summon diarrhoea with your mind.

Farts, of course, cease to exist; a dead concept; a literal blast from the past. You can’t risk them now. They lurk in your intestines, whispering falsehoods in your gut, but you must never listen to them. Not that it matters all that much anyway, because the decision is out of your hands – or anus, if you like. The dial on your arse has been turned from MANUAL to AUTOMATIC, and jammed in place. Your sphincter will spend many weeks propelling curried slurry from your arsehole with the speed of a pro-tennis serve, both when you least expect it, and also exactly when you expect it. All the time, in other words. Sometimes it feels like a malevolent elf is camped inside your rectum firing a staple gun out your bumhole.

On day three I went to hospital, a malnourished, raw-arsed wreck. I was no longer a man: merely a conduit through which myriad foul hues of excrement ripped and splashed their way into the world. A sip of water could see me stuck on the toilet bowl for twenty minutes. Mind you, not taking a sip of water could do that, too. Looking at water could do it. To make sure I stayed hydrated and, well, generally alive, I was hooked up to an IV drip, which was connected to what looked like a mobile hat-stand. I had to wheel it with me everywhere I went, even to the bathroom.

Outside, the hot Balearic sun beat down upon my room’s balcony. On it there were two chairs and a small table, upon which was perched a glass ashtray. It must be for visitors, I thought. I know the Spanish are quite liberal and lackadaisical when it comes to lifestyle matters, but even they wouldn’t let ill people smoke inside a hospital… would they? I wheeled my hat-stand into the corridor and aimed a croaky ‘Excuse-me’ at the retreating back of a doctor, who turned casually to face me.

‘Erm, there’s an ashtray on my balcony. Can I… smoke here?’ I asked, apologetically.

‘Are you in here with something to do with your lungs?’

‘No.’

He shrugged. ‘Then smoke!’

He sauntered off down the corridor.

Excellent. I wondered if that would work with alcohol. ‘My liver is top-notch, doc, mind if I get battered in to a bottle of Buckfast while you’re X-Raying my leg?’

During times such as these it’s tempting to speak out loud that infamous provocation to the universe: ‘At least things can’t get any worse.’ But don’t ever do that. Because they can. And they will. And they invariably do. In my case, I was about to witness the marriage of two of my least favourite things: shitting myself to death, and football.

In my room were two beds, one toilet, and a wall-mounted TV with satellite reception. For the first day or so I was alone, free to sit outside burning my pale Scottish skin on the balcony while reading a book on the horrors of Belsen, which – while not exactly cheering me up – managed to take my mind off of my own suffering. I was quite content to be alone, as I often am. Misery, I can assure you, does not like company, especially when that misery springs from one of the yukkiest and most humiliating ailments known to man. But misery got company anyway. A man soon arrived to occupy the vacant bed. What could I do to stop him? This wasn’t a hotel. I couldn’t exactly complain to the manager. Now, this is where the universe started to play real dirty. It was bad enough that my holiday had been ruined; bad enough that my friends had blamed me for an ant infestation following my explosive and uncontrollable bouts of diarrhoea in the hotel room, and bad enough that I had to share my shameful suffering with another mortal soul, but it was horror incarnate that I had to share it with another man who was also suffering with salmonella. Allow me to refer you to back to the first sentence of this paragraph: two beds… one toilet.

What the fuck was this? Some horrific Spanish game-show? Were there hidden cameras in the room? ‘Place your bets at home, signore. Whicha one of these British bastardos isa gonna be the first one to shit themselves? Let’s find out, when we play another exciting round of: THE UNITED STING-DOM!‘.

Any time that man so much as repositioned his foot, twitched his torso, or raised an eyebrow, I was out of that bed and clattering towards the toilet like a, well, like a man who was in imminent danger of shitting his breeks. As I’ve already established, when you’re operating on a one-to-five-second warning system, you can’t afford to have the only toilet in your immediate vicinity bagsied by the bumhole of another. It was dog-eat-dog. It was dog-shit-on-dog. Dear reader? I shat myself an ungodly amount of times.

And still the universe wasn’t finished with me. The man’s name was Trevor. He hailed from somewhere in the north of England. He was a very nice man, actually. I really quite liked him. It wasn’t his fault we’d been forced to compete for the same precious resource. If there was one thing I would have changed about Trevor, though, one teeny, tiny, teensy wee thing, it would probably be his social class. Not because I consider myself above anyone else, or believe myself to occupy a high social strata, because neither of those things is true. But if Trevor had been upper middle-class or aristocratic there would have existed a favourable statistical likelihood that he wouldn’t have liked fucking football.

But he did like football. He bloody well loved football. And it was the World Cup. And Trevor wanted to watch every single fucking game – plus after-match analysis. It got to the stage where I very much looked forward to those twenty to thirty times a day when I was painfully slithering volcanic green shit out of my aching bumhole. It came as something of a relief, actually. Was I dead? Was that the game? Was I dead and in hell? Is it because I lied when I was 17?

Trevor left, and I was blissfully happy for a day or two. My friends made the long journey to the hospital to visit, and left me a sneaky joint to enjoy on my sunny balcony. I shared it with the German fella who took Trevor’s place. The new guy didn’t speak any English, so communicating was a challenge. He readily understood ‘Do you want to share this joint?’ but not much else. He was good at miming though. I felt a new kinship between us when he successfully mimed how much he’d love to execute the stray cats that were prowling the hospital grounds many floors below us. Lovely fella. He liked football, too, because of course he fucking did.

I was discharged from hospital on the second to last day of the holiday, just in time to shock my friends with my uncanny impersonation of someone who’d spent six months in Belsen. I really rocked that skeletal chic. Truth be told, I could do with a bit of salmonella these days, in lieu of an exercise program and sensible diet.

There was just enough time to return to the restaurant that had served me the shonky chicken-and-egg salad, this time armed with a video camera, wielded by one of my friends. When the waitress came round for our order, we all requested ‘the salmonella’. To our amusement, she said, ‘We don’t have that’, perhaps not realising the satirical direction the evening was taking due to our impenetrable Scottish brogues. I snapped back, ‘Well, you don’t have it on the menu, but I believe you offer it as a special.’ Our amusement turned to astonishment when – camera still rolling – having made our meaning clear, the waitress proceeded to confess that there had been a number of cases of salmonella among the staff, not just at her branch, but at quite a few of them in the vicinity. Her candour won me the sympathy of Thomas Cook, who months later agreed to refund the cost of my holiday even though they had no affiliation or connection with the restaurant in question (I’m obviously not going to name the restaurant here, but suffice to say it’s my friend Tom Brown’s favourite place to eat in Spain).

Our plane touched down on Scottish soil, and my distraught mother – who’d been calling the hospital every day, and had been close to flying out to be with me – was waiting at the airport. She rushed to hug me. I was surrounded by my friends. So I did what any son would do in those circumstances. I physically blocked her from hugging me, said, ‘Don’t even think about it,’ and then walked away scowling. I know that makes me look awful, but I’d already lost a stone-and-a-half and about a million tonnes of my insides. I didn’t feel like parting with what little scrap of manliness I still believed myself to possess. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my mother still brings that up to this day.

I was relieved to be going home. And do you know the first thing I did when I got there?

That’s right.

Not watch football.

And I’ve tried to keep it that way ever since.

Alone in Europe: Hating Football

Posted on by

It’s that time again: the biennial international football tournament.

For the next few months every man I meet, or even pass within 600 metres of, will automatically assume that I have football fever burning through my terraced soul like Bovril magma; especially since this is the first time that Scotland has qualified for a major tournament since 1998. Ah, I remember those days. Not in a tremendously detailed way, of course, because it was fucking ages ago and my brain is now a misted, hiccuping wreck. But I remember the times well enough to state with some certainty that in 1998 I certainly wasn’t sporting a subtle pair of breasts like I am now, or housing a set of lungs like a couple of burned bean-bags.

One important thing hasn’t changed since 1998: I’m still utterly indifferent to football. How I dread that conversational opener: ‘You watching the game tonight?’ It’s not really a question though. It’s a statement; one that doesn’t so much militarise itself against contradiction as exist blissfully unaware of the faintest possibility of contradiction. So when I respond ‘No’ something dulls and sinks in the asker’s eyes, like they’ve just found out their favourite Muppet from childhood is a serial killer. They back away from my potentially contagious apathy and ignorance, perhaps imagining that even thirty-seconds in my company could transform them from burly football fanatics into springy-legged ballet enthusiasts. Sometimes they’ll probe for a reassuring sporting corollary, refusing to believe that there isn’t at least a kernel of testosterone swimming somewhere in my feminised bloodstream, however far or faint:

“Ah, so you’re a rugby man, then?”

“Nope.”

“Cricket?”

“Nope.”

“Tennis?”

“Nope.”

Panic clouds their eyes.

“Darts?”

“Nope.”

At this point I can see that I’ve almost destroyed them, along with their fragile sense of the world.

“Tiddlywinks???”

I used to lie. I’d wade in to a conversation armed only with my baseline knowledge of football (which largely consisted of knowing that people kicked a ball about a bit of grass, and tried to put it in a goal), and, over the course of the day – speaking to many people – would accrue details of past games and future fixtures, nurturing a conversational snowball that gained in size and speed with every meeting, that I could roll throughout the day until, finally, I was a walking avalanche of footballing punditry.

I’d casually freestyle about how the star striker fared in a cup final eight years previously, or angrily decry the manager’s lousy tactics. I’d even cite the offside rule apropos of nothing, simply to cement my status as Jimmy Hill incarnate. At that stage of glorious metamorphosis I wouldn’t wait to have my input requested. I’d actively hunt people with whom to talk about football:

“You, boy! Yes, you! You’re gonna listen up here, because Christie shouldn’t have played the 4-4-2 formation, he should’ve favoured a more defensive 5-3-2 formation, especially since the other side were fielding Juarez, and as we all know he’s scored an average of 33 goals a year for his club side over the past three years, well worth his fucking asking price of £14million if you ask me, lovely chap, he got married last year, I believe it was a Tuesday in Shrewsbury, left-handed he is, used to play for… ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME??”

“Sorry, I …eh… I don’t really follow football?”

“YOU DON’T FOLLOW??…. YOU FUCKING FAIRY!…

…How do you feel about tiddlywinks?”

I’m often envious of the passion and camaraderie that swirls around football; that tribal feeling of belonging to a shared universe – with its own unique history, language, struggles and victories – the membership of which has always eluded me. But I just can’t get myself worked up about 22 strangers houfing a sphere of inflated leather up and down a bit of grass for 90 minutes, however much I try. And I certainly don’t understand how it is that the sight of 11 strangers wearing the team colours of Scotland is supposed to fill me with patriotic fervour, or how the performance of said players should in any way affect my self-esteem.

English football-loving friends and acquaintances love to ramp up the banter on occasions such as these, hoping I’ll bite, but I never do, simply because I couldn’t give a flying bag of fucks about the outcome. Whether Scotland wins 10-nil, are defeated 10-nil, or they all ride out onto the field on ostrich-back dressed as pirates while ritually sacrificing mice to a Babylonian god, my psyche remains unmoved and intact.

In saying that, I’m not entirely immune to being stirred by the fortunes of my ball-kicking countrymen, even if all I feel is a pre-programmed twitch of investment; an echo of give-a-fuck-iness. I’ll admit to a mild twinge of relief and comfort when Scotland drew with England, but I think that was probably down to a sense of happiness that millions of English people would be disappointed.

I didn’t watch Scotland’s final game in the Euros, but I did keep checking the score on my phone, at first finding myself relieved, then despondent. For a moment I worried I might be developing some rudimentary form of misguided patriotism, but, luckily, roughly 3.5 seconds after clocking the end result – a drubbing, predictably – I realised I still didn’t really give a fuck, and what fuck I did give was so tiny it wasn’t worth worrying about: a baby Fuck; Fuck Jnr.; Tyrion Fuckister; a miniscule, microscopic mote of a fuck that was already dead; the ghost of a fuck.

Renton from Trainspotting once said: “It’s shite being Scottish.”

To which I would respond: “Only if you let it be.”

Anyway, I can’t sit here professing dislike for football all day. I’m off to see how big Tam McGlintoch gets on in the International Tiddlywinks Olympics.

READ ABOUT HOW FOOTBALL RUINED MY HOLIDAY HERE

Next time: Football and salmonella.

On being a Dad who sucks at sports

Posted on by

My son can throw a ball. Big whoop, right? Well, it’s a big whoop for me, you poo-pooing, party-pooping, poopy-pants, because it’s a god damned miracle that I’ve managed to sire a child who can run more than 100 yards without falling over and smashing his teeth out, much less demonstrate a modicum of sporting prowess.

I was – and very much still am – a handless, footless bastard: as graceful as a new-born calf trying to roller-skate on unset jelly; as co-ordinated as a one-armed man with a dagger jammed in each eye. My playground contemporaries oft remarked that I ‘threw like a girl’. If only I’d been born a couple of decades later, I could’ve had the little bastards prosecuted for gender-based hate-crimes. As it stands, I had to follow the old sticks-and-stones adage, and throw sticks and stones at them, which of course missed them, because I threw like a girl.

Most Scottish dads are expected to inculcate their sons into the ancient, dark arts of football, readying them for an adult life of meat-pies of dubious origin, strong lager, weak bladders and soul-shredding disappointment. Well, I don’t have any football-related skills or passion for the so-called beautiful game to pass on to my two boys. The reason? There are many factors, but I suppose the key ones are that a) I’m shite at football, and b) I think football is shite.

These things usually reach you by osmosis. My father was a football fanatic, but he was largely absent from my childhood, so he couldn’t pass on or light the torch. My uncle was a football fanatic, too, but he lived quite far away, and worked abroad most of the time. My grandfathers were both footballing men, but their footballing days were far behind them by the time I came along, and they certainly didn’t go to any matches. What avenues did that leave? Outwith the ball-kicking bosom of their families, Scottish kids tend to learn the bulk of their fleet-footed craft in the streets and parks of their neighbourhoods, playing kerbie, keepie-uppy, and world cuppy with their friends – jumpers for goal-posts and all that jazz – but I grew up in a semi-rural area, far outside the comfortable door-knocking range of my peers.

I was always picked last when football teams were being assembled in the playground. I was usually put in goal, the rationale being: ‘He’s tall. That’ll make it easier for him to stop things going past him.’ Well, the joke was on them, because everything got past me. Well, everything except their cruel – though admittedly accurate – jibes about how shite I was at football.

But was I bad at football because I never played it, or did I never play football because I was so bad at it? Nobody cared, least of all me. After a while I stopped lining up for draft, and went off to play ‘Japs and Commandos’ instead. Js & Cs is one of the many playground games we Scottish school-boys loved to play in the days before we realised just how massively racist we all were. PC notwithstanding, I was pretty good at the old Js & Cs: miming machine-guns, diving about, doing commando rolls. Perhaps I shouldn’t be too proud of that, though, given that the only real skill involved in the ‘game’ is the ability to mimic the noise of an old, fat Englishman with a stammer having an asthma attack as he falls down a hill.

The power of the ‘He’s tall’ principle extended beyond football into other ball-based sports. It was also responsible for encouraging the belief that I might be good at basketball. Unfortunately, height alone is no indicator of prowess, otherwise an electricity pylon and the Eiffel Tower would be among the best basketball players of our time. That being said, I’m painfully aware that both of those inanimate structures are almost definitely better at basketball than me.

The ineptitude doesn’t stop there. In my early twenties I went with a group of friends to the local pitch and putt. The pros went first, whacking their balls with poise and precision (settle down!), sending them arcing and speeding into the grey sky like reverse hailstones. I decided to go last. You know what they say about saving the best, right? (coughs)

I was a little apprehensive, but only a very little, because – seriously – how wrong could it go? Swinging a bit of metal behind your head and thwacking a ball? Easy. My confidence reigned supreme, even when I adopted a teeing off stance that was so low to the ground it looked like I was about to take a shit. I concentrated hard, and started to swing. Just as the club reached its apex above my shoulder, a chorus of laughs erupted behind me. I froze mid-swing, like a statue of a really bad golfer. ‘Fuck it,’ I said, dropping the club to the ground. ‘I’ll just watch.’

Christ I’m awful. I even suck at darts. Not much of a tiddlywink player, either.

Sport was never my thing, but that’s okay, because growing up I had plenty of other things in my life to occupy my time. I would explore the countryside: roaming through forests, chasing badgers with sticks, jumping over burns and streams pretending I was some famous Peruvian explorer. I would stroll into the middle of farmers’ fields and sit down in the grass, waiting to be encircled by a herd of cows, who’d come up and sniff and lick my shoes as I sang to them, usually a song by the Righteous Brothers (good job I never chose Phil Collins else they might have stampeded me to death). I grew into an almost evangelical atheist, but as a young nipper I’d stick a sign on my door that said ‘Do not disturb – playing for God’, and I’d spend long hours entertaining the big man with snippets of off-the-cuff theatre. I wasn’t religious. Just lonely. I’d write comics and stories; I’d record little sketches on my cassette player. I guess what I’m trying to say is: I was an absolute fucking weirdo.

I don’t want my sons to be weirdos like me. Well, not entirely. Perhaps just weird enough to be compelling; just weird enough to be able to peer through a dark mirror of imagination into a world of beautiful and terrible possibilities. Weird, but not cows-licking-your-shoes weird. I want them to be ‘regular’ to the degree that they participate in physical pursuits that will help them stay happy and healthy throughout their lives.They’re Scottish. They need all the help they can get.

I’d rather they side-swiped football, though. Sectarianism and tribalism are potent forces in Central and western Scotland; states of mind and ways of life that football often serves to magnify. That’s why I bought my eldest son, Jack, a baseball when he turned two. And it’s why both brothers will be encouraged to take up sports like badminton, skiing, swimming and Taekwondo. In the time honoured tradition of contrary children, this probably means they’ll become world-class footballers.

Jack’s four now, and after a few years of playing catch with his baseball he’s got pretty sharp hand-eye co-ordination. He hasn’t quite mastered the catching part yet, but when it comes to pitching he’s consistent, powerful and accurate. Pitch perfect, if you like. From near, from far, he sends that ball spinning straight to your hands like a spherical homing missile, time, after time, after time.

I guess you could say he throws like a girl. Because that’s a compliment now.

I hope they continue to be more girl-like as they get older, mainly because their mother likes to run and work-out, and I like to sit down and write about how awful I am at not getting any exercise.

I’m probably going to die a fat, awkward bastard, but I’m glad my kids have got a sporting chance.

Still… it could be worse…

I Hate Football. I Hate Football So Much.

Posted on by

Imagine an eerie, post-apocalyptic landscape. Sheets of newspaper crinkle in the wind, blowing down streets and beaches untrammelled by human feet. There are no people here. None at all. Nature’s sound-track falls and rises in roars and whispers across the deserted shop-fronts and smooth-as-silk sands. There’s definitely no football. Do you know where we are? We’re on my perfect holiday.

Not for me the hordes of scarlet hedonists scuttling over beach-towels like migrating crabs : the kind of hideous families who look like they’ve been created by Mr Blobby fucking a pot of lobsters. Or families from Paisley asking for directions to the nearest fish-and-chip shop – in Turkey. Or being surrounded by the sort of quasi-racist holidaymakers who insist on calling every foreigner they see ‘Manuel’, even if they’re on holiday in Norway. If the word ‘Uncovered’ can be tagged on to the name of my holiday destination for the purposes of a SKY1 documentary series, then you can count me out. And did I mention definitely no football?

So when my (now ex) girlfriend announced that our first holiday together – and my first trip abroad for seven years – would be to Salou – a Spanish resort town seen as a more exotic Blackpool by British boozehounds  – my heart didn’t so much sink as plummet through the earth’s molten core. She detected some of this in my facial expressions: ‘I know you’re disappointed, with it being so late in the year,’ she said, ‘but just because the place will be a ghost town doesn’t mean we won’t have fun.’

If I’d been a cartoon character, that would have been my cue for a double-take. I asked her to repeat the words ‘ghost town’. ‘Ghost town,’ she said again, puzzlement ruffling her brow. Ghost town: my kind of town.

We arrived at Edinburgh airport minus the baggage of life’s interruptions, looking forward to an undisturbed, relaxing week of each other’s company. I looked around the departure gate. Bald-spots, beer bellies and football strips abounded.

“Why are there so many Rangers supporters boarding this flight?” I asked her.

She shrugged.

Football’s supposed to be in my blood, but it isn’t. I go out of my way to avoid it; unfortunately, being male and Scottish love of the sport is seen as a non-negotiable prerequisite for ownership of a penis. Not liking football doesn’t compute. It leads people to suspect you’re one of ‘them’ they’ve read about in the Daily Mail.

“I don’t like football”, I tell them.

“Then…” they start to stammer, “what do you and your boyfriend do on a Saturday then?”

Strangers strike up intense, football-related conversations with me without ever assuming a lack of passion on my part, and then act appalled when I don’t know who scored the winning goal in last season’s Cup play-off. The way I see it, if I want to feel part of a feral, noisy, and violent tribe, I’ll visit my family. Football is nothing less than a stadium-sized distraction from the finer things in life.

And there I was, about to board a plane alongside scores of drunken zealots, the harbingers of doom now revealed in the shiny blue sea of their strips. The whole of Ibrox, Rangers’ spiritual home, was following me abroad.

“What’s going on?” I demanded of one of them.

“Rangers”, he slurred, “are playing Barcelona. You going to the game, mate?”

No, not THOSE Rangers.

If – as the old saying goes − ‘War is how the Americans teach themselves geography’, then football is the Scots’ method; although in Scotland war and football are never mutually exclusive. The flight certainly wasn’t a dull one. Cabaret was provided by the Rangers’ fans; those maestros of the music of hate. The hairy gentleman seated behind me was responsible for percussion accompaniment, which involved using the back of my seat as a drum-kit. He gleefully kicked and thumped his approval to the sectarian songs that were filling the cabin like nerve-gas.

“One more thump and I’m saying something”, I said to my girlfriend, after the one-hundred and seventieth thump. I said it again thirty thumps later. The stewardess thundered down the aisle. Now they’d be sorry. She surveyed the army of tattooed tub-thumpers surrounding her on each side of the plane and decided that a genial “Come on, boys, be nice”, would do the trick. It didn’t. Off she swished, leaving us at their mercy once more.

By the end of the flight they’d turned the air as blue as their shirts. The stewardess, whose smile had been worn down to a hyphen, raised a conspiratorial eyebrow at me. I raised two in reply, as if to say ‘All evil needs to prevail is for good women to do nothing.’ I figured that was too verbose a message to be conveyed by brow, so followed up with a less-ambiguous scowl.

In the airport terminal I ranted like a half-mad savant, prophesying pain and torment for the duration of the holiday.

“Calm down, honey”, said my girlfriend. “The fans will be staying in Barcelona; they won’t come near Salou. It’ll be fine, OK?”

We greeted our airport transfer driver. It was a long journey from Barcelona’s airport to Salou. The background thrum of the road was all we felt able to process after our airborne aural assault, so we said nothing to each other, dreaming of cocktails on empty beach-fronts.

“I think it’s going to be OK”, I said as we pulled up outside the hotel.

“Me, too”, she trilled.

The smile I’d allowed to pull my cheeks apart slammed shut like a leather-bound book. There it stood, like a brothel in a monastery, the letters of its neon sign pulsing like poisoned veins: ‘The Ibrox Bar’. I gaped up at it: “Please tell me Ibrox is Spanish for ‘cocktail’.” Raucous laughter boomed from the bar’s open door, so loud it was almost visible. The advance party was already encamped. Reinforcements would surely follow. Shell-shocked, I stood on our hotel balcony. I lit a cigarette and gazed up into the cool night air. Draped over one of the top-floor balconies was a flag depicting the red-hand of Ulster. The hotel had been compromised, too.

“Let’s just go to that nice Italian restaurant across the street and forget about it for now, shall we?” she asked, not really asking. Over a civilised meal I chewed over some uncivilised sentiments.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll all die”, I said, stabbing my fork into a fat slice of chicken.

She pushed a piece of pizza to the back of her plate. “I’m here to have a nice, relaxing time, OK?”

I wondered how long my wine glass had been empty. “It’s not my fault we brought hundreds of marauding Vikings with us. I knew I should have paid more attention to football fixtures.”

Her hand slapped down on mine, a gesture of stern affection. She dared me to look at her. “Let’s just have a nice time. OK?”

I nodded, knowing she was scouring my features for any residual sulk. “OK.” In my head I pictured a Rangers’ fan burning in Hell.

“That’s what I mean”, she said. “Keep smiling like that.”

The scene outside the restaurant was like one from a zombie movie. Drunken, blue-clad louts staggered and zig-zagged up the street. “WE ARE THE PEO-PLE!” came the chorused cry. I felt like crying myself.

“Let’s go somewhere for a nice walk”, she said, emphasising the word ‘nice’ with a hiss.

“OK”, I agreed. “How about France?”

Palm trees were silhouettes against the purple-tipped sky. At the horizon the sky was alive with brilliant hues of yellow and orange, like flames cast from a furnace, or light thrown from a far-off nebula. The promenade was deserted, the only sounds our steady footfalls on the pavings. A soft sea-breeze teased our bare arms. We sat by the marina, legs dangling above the water. Boats whished and creaked against their moorings, gentle movements lulling in the darkness.

“You’re quiet”, she said, gently squeezing my fingers.

My eyes were fixed on the endless expanse of ocean: dark, deep, silent and eternal. “Yes”, I said, feeling a smile on my lips. “Yes, I am.”

The next day the blue-shirts took their battle to Barca stadium, leaving the sun-kist streets of Salou deserted. Only the odd sheet of newspaper dancing in the wind disturbed the calm. And I smiled. I am the people. One-nil to me, football.

One-nil.

I originally wrote this article for Scottish Comedy FC, where it appeared a few years ago.

If you like football and funny things combined, check it out. Blog and fortnightly podcast: http://scottishcomedyfc.com/

 

Say What, Momma?

Posted on by

mawOf all the things you might expect to hear your mum say to you as you walk into her house, this probably isn’t even in the top 500: ‘Are you here because of the murder?’

I had no idea what she was talking about. It was rather easier to predict what she would say next, and indeed she didn’t disappoint my expectations: ‘There’s been a murrrrdddeeeeerrrrrrr,’ she said, followed by a chuckle; a chuckle that seemed to say, ‘That’s a cracker, that one. Bet no-one’s ever said that after a murder before.’

According to my mum, a man had been stabbed to death in a local pub a mere mile from her house and had then staggered a few hundred yards down the road to his house, whereupon he promptly died. Her source for this information? Twitter: the cyberspace equivalent of a gossiping conga line stretching across a billion tenement back-fences. Fuck you, Reuters! By the time the story had been banded about the kitchen a few times, the villages of Polmont and Brightons were on lock-down, armed coppers were perched in sentry towers, people were being detained and then airlifted for extraordinary rendition in Germany, helicopters were commanding the skies like a swarm of angry wasps, and martial law had been declared. In addition, six old ladies were shot coming out of the butchers, which at least spared them the horror of the nuclear blast that erupted from ‘Auld Nessie’s Cat Charity Shop’ across the road.

My mate and I did some car-based reconnaissance. One tiny street with a pub in it was cordoned off, and two coppers were standing outside of a house. Miami Vice, motherfuckers. As we drove past the first cordon, my mate clocked the police tape and asked thoughtfully, ‘What do you think the police would do if we just ran through that tape like we’d finished a marathon?’ A tenner for anybody who does that at the next murder scene they stumble across. Twenty quid if they’re a copper (thirty if they’re the suspect). Do it in slow motion, though, yeah?

taggWe rounded the corner from the pub, past the local Spar, and clocked a heavy-set man coming out of the store wearing a fleece that said ‘NYPD’. We couldn’t help but share a giggle. ‘Jesus,’ said my mate. ‘They’re really taking this case seriously.’ Well played, NYPD guy. Well played.

Back at my mum’s house, we sat down to watch Scotland Today on STV. A murder in a sleepy hamlet in Falkirk? There’s no way that won’t feature on the news, even if it only merits a few solemn sentences. So we watched. And waited. Yadda yadda yadda underage drinking. Yadda yadda yadda kids voting. And then we were treated to approximately twelve minutes – TWELVE MINUTES of a twenty-seven minute news show covering all of Scotland – about tonight’s Celtic vs Barcelona football match. TWELVE MINUTES of interviewing Celtic’s coaches, directors and managers, where we gleaned such insights as: ‘It should be a good game,’ ‘I hope we win,’ and ‘The players just need to go out there and play the game.’ Fuck me. Then a woman in a near-empty stadium told us how exciting it was to be standing in that near-empty stadium, just knowing a football match was about to happen. Then we were treated to an ‘interview’ with some young Barcelona fans who were enjoying a couple of pre-match pints in Glasgow city centre. Shockingly, they hoped Barcelona would win, but whatever happened they thought it should be a good game, and urged the players to just get out there and play the game. They were then asked to sing a typical Barcelona terrace song – in Spanish obviously – which I can only hope was about shagging the bodies of their dead foes.

What a coincidence that STV had the broadcast rights to the same football match it plugged for twelve minutes during its own fucking news programme.

I get that it’s a Champions’ League match, and that the event has great cultural significance and entertainment value, but surely if the story’s featured in THE FUCKING NEWS it should be covered thusly: ‘Celtic are playing Barcelona at home tonight.’ What more is there to say? SPORT is not NEWS! Was there nothing else of any significance happening elsewhere in the country? No bribery, corruption, controversial legislation, or, oh I don’t know… MURDER??

dugWell, yes, there was something better than all of that, actually (but not as good as football, obviously). Some fat guy with long hair was so angry about tourists rubbing the nose of Edinburgh’s Greyfriars’ Bobby statue  that he went on TV to complain about it. They captioned him as a ‘Campaigner’. A campaigner for what? A blacker nose on a pretend dog? Bono’ll be in touch soon, my man.

The fat guy went on to tell us that his mate’s been putting shoe polish on the dog’s nose to dispense some rough justice to the tourists. Tourists? TERRORISTS more like! (impulse to write ‘ruff’ instead of ‘rough’ resisted)

Here’s a genuine quote from that news story:

‘It’s amazing how the tourists feel when they come away with a slightly grubby, waxy hand after doing something they shouldn’t be doing.’

So said the fat man, with a proud, steely look in his eyes as if he’d just participated in the vigilante murder of a child killer – instead of what he’d actually done, which was to over-see the repainting of a statue’s nose. Pulitzer’s all round.

(another tenner’s going spare for anyone who paints a big cock on Greyfriar’s Bobby)

And still no murder. Does nobody give a shit? Why is this not deemed important enough to share news space with a rubbed statue? So we switched to Reporting Scotland on BBC1. The headline? The murder rate in Scotland has dropped by 32 per cent. What? Not only was there nothing about the murder, BBC1 was actually reporting the absence of murders (Admittedly, if the news editor had already decided to lead with a story about how there’s no murder in Scotland  – possibly at the behest of the police and government – then they wouldn’t allow a pesky little thing like a fresh murder to come along and waste the composition of the news bulletin)

Now I’m not even sure if there’s been a murder at all. It’s funny how the rumour mill goes into meltdown when something horrid happens on your doorstep. Anyway, a man has died, and it’s a horrible tragedy, whatever the circumstances. Of that I’m sure, at least. I just thought the news – the Scottish news at least – would tell us more about this, and rather less about a man getting angry about a statue.

I’m off to not watch the football.