We love United, we do...
Well, respect to Billy for
that post. Little did I know what I was going to unleash on the world. Proper (ie Manchester) United fans aren't all glory hunters. I am from Manchester and when I started supporting them City were arguably more successful. I'd love to know why glory hunting is regarded as such a big thing - I think that those of us who are prepared to commit ourselves get the best of it. These people who are always changing allegiances don't really have it in them. After Saturday there are times I wish I could stop supporting United but I can't lose the passion, be it for good or bad. Don't get me wrong, there are people who are more insane in their dedication to the cause then me but Saturday school just doesn't fit with going to Old Trafford any more regularly than once or twice a year. I have been lucky though. I have been to some great games, like the time United beat Sheffield Wednesday 2-1 in the longest extra-time ever. Or the time I saw Peter Schmeichel make a truly amazing save against Rapid Vienna in the Ernst Happfel Stadion. Or the time United beat Newcastle 2-0 at Old Trafford the season Kevin Keegan didn't love it as much as he'd hoped.
Billy's story about the Charlton lover reminded me of my old form master who was a raging Toon fan and in my first year at secondary school he gave us homework in proportion to the quality of the team's performance. This was 1983-4 and Newcastle got relegated. We were gutted!
Jaws was non-fiction!
I have always been fascinated by this crazy world in which we are living in and the other animals to be found here. When I was a kid I used to read non-fiction books quite a lot, mostly to fuel my interest in drawing at that stage - I used to love drawing trains and planes, but not cars because we didn't have one and they never seemed desirable. I remember I used to comb my way through my Dad's books about the sea with all the pictures of weird looking fish, mostly so I could use their names for fictional planes which I would draw.
In time I moved on. My Dad read me the Hobbit in bed and that really turned me on to Tolkien and pretty much since then I have geared all of my imagination to that kind of fantasy world - comics, roleplaying games etc. Where's this going with a title like this? Well, when I saw
Jaws for the first time, at least partially from behind the sofa or a cushion, I had no idea that it was based in fact, but it is!
How do I know this? Well, yesterday lunchtime I was stuffing my face, as usual, when I happened to stumble on a documentary about
the real events which it was based on. This was a real series of attacks by Great Whites on bathers on the coast of New Jersey and even up a river there in July of 1916. There were obvious echoes of the film in the real things that happened.
Why does this interest me so much? I suppose this relates back to my interest in nature, as described at the beginning of this post. These days any programme about sharks, birds of prey or big cats is guaranteed to grab my attention. That's why I was so pleased when Witho got me a day
here for my birthday, even if we haven't done it yet. Anyway it should be great when we go.
20 years on from Heysel
I have just been watching Liverpool v Juventus in the quarter final of the Champions' League and found myself supporting the Scousers, in spite of my United allegiances. In spite of all that stick from Birkenhead scallies I still feel like I should be supporting any English team left in the competition. I think that UEFA's decision to ban English teams after Heysel was ultimately wrong and unfair. Could even they have got away with such an arbitrary decision under the new Europe?
I did see a guy on TV today saying that it was really UEFA's fault because the stadium wasn't up to the job of hosting such a big event. Certainly it put English clubs back a long way in Europe, as I saw over the long period of readjustment for United after readmittance, though it does seem to have coincided with a sea change in football support. I wonder how much of this was really down to Heysel and how much down to Sky and the massive injection of cash they put into football.
I know a lot of people go on about how football is such a big business these days and how it has lost its soul, but when its soul in England at least was a hooligan, isn't it better to have got away from it? I suppose United have seen both sides of it, from the bad times when a large section of the supporters were violent lunatics to the good when United has replaced the idiots with 'prawn sandwich eaters', and I am sure that the way things are now is better.
Anyway I was really pleased with the Scousers' first half performance, when they came out all fired up and played really well for half an hour, but ultimately they gave Juve a goal to get themselves back into the tie. The ITV commentators blamed the mistake on a goalkeeping error, referring to a series of high-profile mistakes by Premiership keepers. I can't help wondering how Shilton, Jennings and Banks would have coped with the new balls which swerve more than the old fashioned lumps of leather which they had to deal with. It was a bit unlucky for them really because it looked exactly as if they would get the fairy tale ending during that first half, but now it looks like The Old Lady will do exactly enough to get through, again.
School dinners, schooled inners
After Swiss posted on this topic, Witho and I recorded Jamie Oliver's School Dinners last night. I watched a bit of it and it looked really interesting for a number of reasons. I was one of the few people I know who liked school dinners. My friends all seemed to think they were 'processed plastic piss' (their words not mine)which made it hard for me to resist the urge to try to eat theirs too, when allowed. Two particular friends of mine, H and K, went over to having something from the chippy just outside school every day instead of having to put up with it. However that wasn't going to stop me. It led to a new form of entertainment over lunch time - any leftovers from H's lunch became the prize in a 'Chiprace' around the old form room. The other reason for my interest in this programme is that it centres around a part of London which was very close to my last neck of the woods, even if it is just in the wrong borough to affect my old school directly. I was really interested to see that Jamie did not come across as the transparent Mockney he often does and indeed some of the impact of it came from the way he interacted with one of the dinner-ladies in this episode. Good luck to him - I just hope that people will learn to love school dinners as much as I did!
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