REAL MADRID 4 - FISH SURREAL MADRID
I was thinking of starting this post by acknowledging that it, like oh so many of its predecessors, is late because the weekend has already passed. Then I decided, 'No! fuck that' and chose to accept that this is not a blog that I post every weekend, it's just a weekly blog, at some point during each week. (plus I figure the unreliable nature of publication will give it more of an edge, make it feel exciting and... edgy, not to mention that 'just whenever' fits better with my ramshackle life)
I also realised that I forgot to actually tell anyone about the post I put up a couple of weeks ago (actually I wrote it ages ago and set it to publish on the right day and subsequently totally forgot about it) with the fourth page of my comic, The Girl Who Makes It Rain, so please look at that. If not you might someday look back and regret your whole life, who can say?
And so to the actual topic of this post. Football. The first thing I want to say is it's shit. Now I know that's not most people's opinion but it's mine. When I was a kid, my dad (his name's Arthur, I always called him Arthur, never Dad, not once, he was all about using names as much as possible so in any future blog posts I'll just be calling him Arthur). So, Arthur had no interest in football, the only sport we ever watched much was tennis. When I went to school I was rigorously quizzed about what team I supported. I ended up choosing to say Dundee United, partly because I had a friend who supported them (I think), partly because Dundee was only 20 miles away, but mostly because their strip was bright orange and I was a very ginger wee boy (mostly the same reason I claimed for years that lasagne was my favourite food). Not that my professed support went any further, I never bought a strip, or went to a game, or even looked at what they scored. In fact the only reason I've ever paid attention to football results is to find out if I can mock friends for their team losing, safe in the knowledge that they'll never be able to do the same to me.
I tried to play, during lunch at school (and, of course, I was forced to play in P.E.) and I feel like the thing that put me off most was how worked up and aggressive everyone else seemed to get by kicking a ball around. I often ended up as goalie, thanks to my relative size at that age (I wasn't a svelte child), and during the winter we weren't allowed on the grass so we played on concrete. It'll come as no shock to anyone that knows me that the chances of me diving to save a ball under such conditions were slim at best (especially after the day I kicked the ball out from the goal, accidentally into the path of one of my classmates running across the playground. She tripped, and fell, and broke her arm and I'm pretty sure she held a grudge about it for nearly 10 years).
I've only ever been to a couple of games, and I did enjoy the atmosphere (and the pie, but we had to STAND for the whole fucking thing, because Falkirk. Thanks very much Gav!), and I can see there is an enormous amount of skill on display (I'm tempted to spraff on here about how the skill doesn't come close to justifying some of the insane pay packets that are handed out, but I feel like most people with an opinion worth caring about would agree the sport has it's flaws [that and the whole 'nobody in here is gay, honest' thing, jesus fucking christ they need to sort that out!]) but the game itself is just so. Fucking. Boring!
For the most part I don't have to deal with much football chat. The industry I work in doesn't tend to attract the kind of passionate supporters that I just can't understand. And my friends that follow the sport are well aware of how little interest I have. But for some reason, every four years, some people just won't shut up about it. I've learned to sort of passively float through it all but some days it feels like this (DISCLAIMER: I did some digging and I can't find where this came from, if anyone can tell me who wrote it let me know):