11.11.2011
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From Monday the splendid BBC Radio 4 Extra will be broadcasting the Book Of The Week recording of Attention All Shipping that first went out on Radio 4 in 2004. I know, it does sound a long time ago, doesn’t it? Charlton were in the Premiership and everything.
I’ve been lucky to have two of my books selected as Book Of the Week as well as there being abridged and unabridged audio versions of four of them (one was even voted the second best audiobook ever, deauntcha kneau*). This means that I’ve heard my words read by several different voices which, when you write first person books like I do, is a strange experience.
There’s as much, no, there’s more reading than writing involved when you turn out a book. The constant revising, tinkering and smoothing means that by the time you’re ready to submit it to the publisher you can practically recite the thing off by heart.
Naturally, the voice that you hear reciting those words in your head is your own. Well, I mean, who else’s would you expect? Leonard Rossiter? Brian Sewell? Snagglepuss?** But I think it’s especially true of first person non-fiction because you’re telling the story in your own voice.
When I’m writing I try not to be clever with words. Mainly because I don’t know many clever words, but I think that if I can keep it simple and clear with a rhythm that I’m happy with – and I believe rhythm to be an underrated, vital consideration ....
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27.07.2011
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Recently I was interviewed for Wanderlust by the splendid Peter Moore.
Would you like to see it? What's that? You would?
Well, as you've been very good, you can read it here.
Note how the words 'incredibly stupid' appear very subtly in the subheading. No coincidence that. ....
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25.07.2011
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St Patrick’s Athletic v Shakhter Karagandy, Europa League Second Qualifying Round, Second Leg, 21 July 2011.
The car door creaked open and a hat emerged. A small, dark, pillbox hat embroidered with colourful sequins and beads; the kind that’s piled high in the street markets all along the Silk Road.
Further vertical progress revealed that it was perched atop the shoulder-length grey hair of a large, middle-aged man wearing a St Patrick’s Athletic replica shirt. He closed the car door, stretched and swung a jacket around his shoulders.
A woman got out of the passenger seat and slammed the door. She looked across the roof of the car.
“Would you ever just take that hat off?”
“No, I’m wearing me hat. That’s the end of it.”
It’s probably safe to say that the paths of Inchicore and Kazakhstan have rarely crossed, but such idiosyncratic cultural fusions are part of what make the recondite early rounds of European competitions so enchanting. This couple had clearly been to the first leg of the tie in Karaganda, the capital city of the central Kazakh province that gives the Shakhter Karagandy club its name, and the male half of the duo wanted everyone at the return leg at Richmond Park last night to know, even at the expense of domestic harmony.
Saints trailed 1-2 going into last night’s game and the talk in the club shop and ticket office next to the funeral parlour was that their away goal could well prov ....
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22.04.2011
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This time twenty years ago it’s safe to say that I stank.
I was coming to the end of an Interrailing trip around Europe with my friend Paul, a trip so low budget that we only spent three nights in hostels: the rest of the time we slept on overnight trains to save what little money we had. We were like the boxcar hobos crisscrossing America only we actually had tickets. We were effectively temporary tramps.
Paul was from Sheffield and we’d shared a flat in our first year at university. In fact he was the first person I met after I arrived and we became good friends. I’d attempted to buy in to what I thought was the whole student vibe, wearing big black jumpers, listening to Bob Dylan, hanging around the Student Union and pretending I knew who Gramsci was. Paul wore British Knights shellsuits and big clumping trainers with tongues up to his knees, listened to Public Enemy and only got out of bed to watch Neighbours at lunchtime.
We shouldn’t have got on, but we did. So much so that we hatched a plan to travel around Europe in the Easter break of our second year that turned into an exercise in advanced vagrancy. We survived on crisps, milk and cheap pizza slices from dubious roadside vendors. We became adept at getting train compartments to ourselves for the night at first by behaving in an anti-social manner (as students this wasn’t such a great leap of the imagination) and eventually by just smelling really bad. We ....
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19.03.2011
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As I write these words Charlton Athletic are 0-2 down at Dagenham & Redbridge in League One.
Ten years ago – almost to the day - we played Dagenham & Redbridge in the third round of the FA Cup. It was the season I was writing my book Many Miles: A Season In The Life of Charlton Athletic. We were in the top half of the Premiership, beating the likes of Chelsea and Arsenal. Dagenham & Redbridge were way down the divisions in the Conference; a semi-professional league. Playing us in the cup was arguably the biggest day in their history and they should have beaten us, truth be told. It took an equaliser – a deflected shot by John Salako at that – in the sixth minute of injury time to earn us a draw that we didn’t really deserve. It was almost the classic fairytale football story of David slaying Goliath but football can be cruelly parsimonious when it comes to fairytales.
Ours certainly came to an end, although it did last for the best part of a decade. Even so nobody, not even the most gloating Palace or Millwall fan, expected that fairytale to implode in quite the way it has since we lost our Premiship place in 2007.
Today over there in east London we are the diddy team. Dagenham have come up steadily through the divisions as we’ve lurched haplessly down them. By the sound of things, we should be a lot more than two goals behind and today’s defeat, for defeat is inevitable, puts us nearer relegation to the fourth ....
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05.02.2011
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This morning I saw a picture on the internet of Grove Park Library. I’m sure you wouldn’t know it; it’s a little local library in the London Borough of Lewisham where I grew up. I’d not seen it for years until this morning - we moved away from Grove Park when I was fifteen – but when I looked at it earlier on this day of campaigns to save Britain’s libraries I realised what an ugly building it is. A one-story box of a prefab thrown up as a temporary measure on a street corner forty years or more ago with metal cages over its windows and mildew seeping through the whitewash.
It’s only now that its ugliness has struck me because as a child the library’s appearance made no impression on me whatsoever. I knew every crack in the plasterwork, every sliver of flaking paint on every windowsill, but none of it registered. It didn’t matter what Grove Park Library looked like because its only function for me was as a gateway to magical places.
On most Saturday mornings of childhood my sister and I would be walked round to the library by our parents to return the three books we’d withdrawn the previous Saturday and, the highlight of my week, choose three more. I remember the librarian but I can’t remember his name. Was it John? A hangdog-faced but kindly man with thick-lensed glasses and a tweed jacket. I can still hear the thump-click of his date stamp before the hardback cover snapped shut on each book and he h ....
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25.01.2011
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So, Andy Gray has been fired as a result of his remarks about the assistant referee Sian Massey when he thought the microphones were off during this week’s Premiership match between Wolverhampton Wanderers and Liverpool. As things stand Richard Keys is still in a job – some cynics point out that unlike Gray he is not suing News International title the News Of The World over the phone-hacking scandal.
Yet for me Keys should be as much in the firing line, if not directly in front of the crosshairs for his role in the affair. What makes Keys’ comments in particular even more crass is his own position compared to Sian Massey’s.
You don’t just walk in off the street and run the line at a Premiership match. Sian Massey will have started in parks football – thankless freezing weekends at municipal sports grounds, probably having to deal with changing blocks with no women’s facilities, maybe having to change in the car.
From there she’ll have worked her way up through county and semi-professional football, passing exams and passing them well, keeping at it until she reached the highest possible standard that qualifies her to run the line in the Premiership. Very few make it this far. She didn’t just turn up at Molineux that day and ask if she could have a go with the flag, she was there entirely on professional merit. She knows the mechanics and nuances of the game better than pretty much everyone reading this.
....
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09.12.2010
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Lines composed on learning of the appointment of Alan Pardew as manager of Newcastle United
Pffft
Pfff-ffff-fffffff
Mmm hmm, mmm hmm
Muh-heh
Muh-heh heh heh heh heh.
Hurhurhurhur.
Her hoo hah
Her hoo hahahahahahahaaa
Ahhhh-HAHAHAHAHAAAA
A-HAHAHAHAHAAA
HAHA NEW GEORDIE MESSIAH HAHAHAHAAA
HOO HOO HOOOOOOO
HEE HEE HEE OH STOBBIT STOBBIT HEE HEE
OOHOO OOHOO oohoo oohooo
Oohoo
Oohoo
Hoo.
Hoo.
Hoo.
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11.11.2010
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Ninety-two years ago last Thursday, on November 4th 1918, Private Edward Connelly of the 10th Battalion Queen’s West Surrey Regiment was killed in Flanders. He was barely nineteen years old. A week after his death the Armistice was signed and the ‘war to end all wars’ was over.
Edward Connelly was my grand-uncle; my grandfather’s brother. We don’t know much about him; until a year or so ago we hadn’t even known he’d existed. My grandfather had joined up underage and for the rest of his life never spoke about what he’d seen and never mentioned the elder brother who never came home. My father and his generation grew up completely unaware of Edward Connelly.
I don’t know when or where it was taken but this picture is part of a group shot and is of Edward Connelly. He looks awkward. His uniform doesn’t sit right. His collar is a bit askew. The way he’s sitting isn’t natural, as if he’s trying to affect something, as if he’s thinking this is how I’m supposed to sit, isn’t it? He’s trying to look confident and relaxed but instead looks ill-at-ease; it's a photograph of a boy trying to look grown up. Look at his face: he isn’t a soldier, he's just a boy.
Edward Connelly wasn’t a hero. ‘Hero’ is a word so crassly overused these days it’s becoming meaningless. Edward Connelly won no medals beyond the basic campaign ones issued to every soldier so it seems he performed no particu ....
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08.09.2010
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Last night Liechtenstein came within a whisker of pulling off one of their greatest ever results, falling to a 97th minute goal against Scotland at Hampden. It's always good to see plucky no-hopers upset the odds, especially when they grab an injury-time winner. Ha! See what I did there?
I couldn't get to the match as I had a book event in Dublin, but I did have a piece in the programme. And, hey, whaddaya know, here it is.
Eight years ago tomorrow a knot of blue-shirted players stood over a football among lengthening shadows at the end of a hot alpine day at the beautifully situated Rheinpark Stadion in Vaduz debating what to do at a free-kick some twenty-five yards from goal. Liechtenstein were coming to the end of their opening Euro 2004 qualifying tie against Macedonia, a game that was following a familiar pattern. Despite fighting hard and playing well Liechtenstein were a goal down: Macedonia had scored early and settled back to see out the rest of the game with minimal exertion. It was three weeks shy of four years since Liechtenstein had last scored a competitive goal and the visitors justifiably felt their work in Vaduz was done.
By the third minute of injury time many in the crowd of 1,500 were beginning to make their way to the exits when Martin Stocklasa was fouled outside the area, convening the gathering of players over the ball discussing their options.
Shielding my eyes from the low sun I saw that every ....
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