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
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Her hoo hah
Her hoo hahahahahahahaaa
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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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how to get norco Some of the 11 recommendations are: The AUST R designation means the TGA ....
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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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05.09.2010
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Against all advice to the contrary from various quarters my new book Our Man In Hibernia: Ireland, The Irish And Me is launched onto an unsuspecting world this week. It's a cracking read - you're all in it - and available from all good bookshops and probably a few dodgy ones as well.
Should you care to order it via Amazon you can do so here.
Website updates are a little slower than I'd like at the moment so the best way to keep up with news and information that doesn't date back to the middle of the last decade is to follow me on Twitter. You can do that right here.
In addition I've started a blog around the new book. Guess where that is? Why, it's right here.
The book also has its own Facebook page which can be found around here somewhere. Hang on. Oh that's right, it's here.
Essentially, it's pretty hard to avoid so you may as well give in.
....
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25.05.2010
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I love books, me. I don’t mean literature as such, I mean books, the tangible cover-and-pages product. There are many reasons why I won’t be buying an e-reader and the main one is that I think they depersonalise the relationship between books and readers; the very thing that makes books what they are.
And books are magical. Old books in particular. I’ve got one in front of me now and it contains a mystery as beguiling as the book itself is wonderful.
Many of you will already know that I am a massive fan of H.V. Morton. I try to pick up first editions of his books where I can, or at least the earliest edition I can find. Hence I picked up a copy of his In Search Of Scotland (in the bockety old shop in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight that I mentioned in Attention All Shipping) that dates back to 1930, a year after it was first published and such was Morton’s popularity at the time that this is already the ninth edition.
Two things make this particular book special though, beyond Morton’s work itself. Next to the title page there is an old sepia photograph of two young boys standing by a tree in what appears to be a walled garden. I can’t say for sure but the architecture of the houses behind looks to me like that of any number of Scottish towns I’ve visited. The photograph has been carefully and deliberately pasted onto the page and I’ve no idea why. Here it is:
It took me a while, but eventually I ....
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15.04.2010
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It hardly seems possible for a day still lodged so vividly in the memory but it’s now twenty-one years since ninety-six people went to a football match on a warm spring day at Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield and never came home.
Many of you reading this will have made hundreds of similar journeys, so many that you barely give them a thought any more. Waking on matchday morning with that warm sense of anticipation, the regular routine, leaving the house, coat, keys, money, closing the front door, heading for the ground and spotting fellow travellers by their scarves or replica shirts, the anticipation and excitement building steadily even for the most humdrum of games.
Then the final walk to the stadium, tens, then hundreds, then thousands of people falling into line, the drumming of footsteps, ordinary streets becoming conduits of conversation and nervous tension, playful rivers of humanity, the thunder of thousands of footsoles in unison as the crowd becomes one entity. The shouts of the programme sellers, the smell of frying onions, the queues snaking out of the chip shops and the drinkers spilling onto the street outside the pubs.
The stadium comes into view, you rummage in your pocket for your ticket, hail friends and nod at familiar faces, join the queue, hear the tannoy announcements from inside muffled on the breeze, the occasional communal song drifts over. The turnstile clicks and you’re onto a cool concret ....
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04.03.2010
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It's World Book Day today. Recently I've finally managed to put up bookcases in my office and am hence able to haul out the books that have been in archive boxes clogging up nearly every wardrobe and cupboard in the place since I moved to Ireland. Now that they're all lined up neatly on the shelves at last, I can swivel my chair around from this keyboard and look along the rows at, in a way, the story of my life. There are books of research for work, novels, poetry, nearly three shelves of Wisden Cricketers' Almanacks and a surprisingly large number of showbiz biographies and autobiographies that I've accumulated over more than two decades of book buying.
Many books, more than I'd like to even think about, have fallen victim to numerous culls over the years for reasons of space and now emigration, so what I have left is arguably my lifetime's 'greatest hits' collection; the real, genuine keepers.
Which led me to think, if the place was on fire and I could only save a handful, what would I do? Bearing in mind it can often take me twenty minutes just to pick a volume for the fifteen-minute bus journey into town, this is something I should probably nail down: something to confirm every time I give the smoke alarm its monthly check.
So, after much thought this World Book Day, here's what would be in my arms when I emerged coughing and sooty from the conflagration.
1) Down Tops'l: The Story Of The East Coast Sailing Barge by ....
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21.02.2010
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The Guardian has been publishing writers’ tips for fiction lately, and most of them are spot on. There’s some great advice there. Being a fan of making lists, here are a few things that I’ve said to people over the years when they have, for some inexplicable reason, solicited my advice.
1 Don’t try and be too clever with words. Keep it simple. Using fancy words that don’t come naturally to you doesn’t make you sound more like a writer; it makes you sound like a pompous arse.
2 Read other writers but don’t imitate them. An aspiring writer said to me once that they’d been ‘studying’ certain writers which made me let out a strange high-pitched strangled noise I’d never made before. Don’t study, just read - there is no template, no alchemy behind writing. Read for pleasure, absorb things: your subconscious will sort out your influences and use them to enhance your writing where necessary. Allow yourself to be influenced, don’t copy. If you force it, you’ll sound false.
3 Never, ever use the word 'somewhat' to qualify anything. It's the last refuge of people trying to sound more intelligent than they actually are. Actually, no, it's the first. If you ever use the word 'somewhat', I promise that I'll be chasing you through the streets with a blunderbuss emptying volleys of grapeshot into your backside within minutes of finding out.
4 If you feel truly pleased with what you’ve written, worry. There ....
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03.02.2010
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I have just sent off the last couple of chapters of the next book (which you're the first to know will be called Our Man In Hibernia: Ireland, The Irish And Me and is due out in September).
Ah, the sense of accomplishment! The pride! The feeling of elated release and excited anticipation!
Nope, as usual there's been none of that.
There's a real sense of anticlimax when you finish a book. It's partly because there's no ceremony in this new-fangled modern age. In the olden days I'd take my floppy disk to a print shop and print out the entire manuscript (my old printer would never have coped) put the whole thing into a massive jiffy bag, march into the post office, buy a sheaf of stamps, stick them all on and hand it over the counter like the Archbishop of Canterbury approaching a new monarch with the crown on a cushion. Then I'd go and get roaring drunk. And still have change from a farthing.
These days I sit here in front of the PC same as usual. I read through the final chapter for the nth time until I can practically recite it. I spot a typo I've missed. I cut out a line that was even more flabby than the rest of the chapter. Does the last line have a tantalising open-ended feel? Or does it read as if I'd suddenly dropped dead at the keyboard with half a chapter still to write? I still have that school essay internal programming where I think the last paragraph should always begin, "In conclusion, we have seen. ....
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