Football Avoidance (Again)

This is a theme I have written about before. I make no apologies for returning to it because I'm still not a happy bunny!

Yesterday I attended the Barrow Hill Roundhouse Beer Festival. It is a very popular event and the beers were running out very quickly through the afternoon. I have no wish to carp about this or, for that matter, about anything else that didn't quite go according to plan. The lesson to be learned, of course, is that if you want to be able choose from the full range of beers, go on the Friday. I knew this already - I've been before and exactly the same thing has happened - and there was nothing, either, preventing me from making the trip on Friday. But Barrow Hill Roundhouse has no television, big screen or otherwise, and was, therefore, guaranteed to be a football free zone on the afternoon of the 2007 FA Cup Final.

You may be aware that, at the start of this season, I renounced football.

I can, nevertheless, look back with some nostalgia to a different world where the FA Cup Final was the highlight of the sporting year, perhaps of the year - full stop. Come what may, whatever other attractions there may have been, whichever teams were playing, not watching the Cup Final was inconceivable. If, for any reason, you hadn't been able to find a way of watching it, never mind if you'd chosen not to, you would have been a social outcast for weeks afterwards. At least in boy-world, anyway.

Not having had television at home now for some years, watching televised sport means going to the pub for it and I do recall a time when watching football communally in this way was actually a pleasurable activity.

Not any more. It may, of course, just be me getting old or going a bit soft but I really cannot abide the hostile, intimidatory atmosphere that is now an almost universal accompaniment to televised football in pubs, especially, it seems to me, if it involves Ing-er-land or that team down the road in Trafford Borough. Hence my decision, this weekend, to avoid it at all costs.

Nevertheless, I feel most resentful that these mindless cretins, pandered to by rapacious drinks and media industries, should be able to dictate my social calendar. < Insert profanities to taste. >

And the result? Something inside me just can't help but feel rather pleased at the outcome of the match. I fear, however, that such feelings are nothing more than my own expression of the very hostility and pointless animosity I am so decrying in others. The official line, therefore, is that, quite frankly, I don't give a damn.

If I say it often enough I will, hopefully, begin to believe it. I'm sure it will make me feel a better person.

If I'd known ten years ago what I know now...

...I would have stayed in bed on Thursday, 1 May 1997. Frankly, if I'd known sooner what I knew on 2 May 1997 I certainly would have done a lot of things very differently. I don't suppose it would have actually changed anything but at least I wouldn't have had to carry around the burden of knowing that I helped bring Tony Blair to power with such an uncompromisingly huge majority. I am very sorry.

Trials and Tribulations

Twice more this week the Marvellous Road Improvement Works (© 2006 Bolton Metropolitan Borough Council) have made me late for trains off Trinity Street station.

As luck would have it on one occasion the train was late anyway (the previously mentioned 09:30 to Manchester Victoria) and I didn't miss it after all. It was, to be precise, seventeen minutes late leaving Bolton. Seventeen minutes, quite honestly, is nothing and for me it was three minutes earlier than I would have been had it been on time and I'd missed it. It would hardly have merited a second thought had it not been for the profusion of mobile phones the delay produced. To hear some of the desperate conversations you'd have thought these peoples' entire lives were being torn apart.

No doubt each could have told their own tale of woe but, FFS, it was only seventeen minutes. Seventeen minutes is hardly enough time to cook breakfast - certainly not enough time for a decent breakfast. It isn't going to bring the world to an end being seventeen minutes late and if only some of those people could see themselves as I saw them: most of them, all of them probably, were just not so important that anyone else would give a shit if they never arrived where they were going at all.

I sort of get the feeling that left on their own, most of these people would have acted entirely rationally and would have been as unconcerned as I was about what was happening, or not happening, as the case may be. But they weren't left on their own, were they? They all had one of those pernicious little cell phones putting them at the beck and call of all and sundry.

It seems to me that so many of us have become slaves to these things. At one and the same time they seem to imbue their owners with a false sense of their own importance while robbing them totally of any independence - the freedom, for example, to be stuck on a train going nowhere and not give a damn.

I'm sorry if I've gone on about this before; no doubt I will again. It's just that in my search for positive life changes, one possibility is to take my work life more seriously. But if it's at the cost of starting to worry myself to death about being seventeen minutes late then the answer to taking that avenue must be thanks but no thanks. Not for all the tea in China.

Now for some breakfast and then another attempt to catch a train from Bolton! If I miss it today...

Well, I guess I'll just have to wait for the next one, or catch a bus.

Written while listening to...

Panufnik : Sinfonia Mistica

In an Earlier Installment of Natasha's Burble...

...you may recall that I'd been ill - a bit. I'm happy to tell you that I had, indeed, made a full recovery and, despite having tested things to the limit, there have been no repeat performances. More than one heavy beer outing has gone surprisingly well and surprisingly uneventfully. I put this down to having had a 'clarity of purpose' - knowing what I wanted to achieve, having a plan and, perhaps more importantly, not losing sight of the fact that there are limits to how much beer a girl can drink before judgement and coordination start to fail and trouble starts.

There is, nevertheless, something not quite right. Somehow, I don't know, being too careful sort of takes the fun out of it all; it becomes just a little too routine and predictable - and I shall come back to this in a moment. The other thing is that this 'clarity of purpose' only works when I'm left to my own devices. Having to accommodate other people into any plans inevitably means extending my plans rather than adapting them and then I'm back to overdoing it and then things start to go awry again. The moral, of course, is that I should make more time for other people and cut out some of the 'me time' and perhaps make some of the 'me time' a little less centred on beer all the time. I should, perhaps, write a little more often in this blog or put a bit more into my half finished web site.

Another thing is that these instances clarity of purpose begin and end with the beer trip - just the getting there, the beer and the getting home. Which is great if that's all I want to do with every minute of my free time - but it isn't. I feel I need to, I don't know, spread out a little. It's not just that, from time to time, I'd like to come home sober and wake up the morning after bright as a button (I believe some people do), it's that I feel I've got into a routine that makes one beer trip follow another like night follows day. There's an inevitability about it. The one day recently I'd set aside a day for a non-beer trip, I managed to oversleep (yes, for the obvious reason) and ended up not having time to go.

But there is more to it than even that. I've almost completely lost sight of the bigger picture. Rather than the big life changes that I have talked about here before, I seem to be digging myself deeper into the rut that I was supposed to be using this year to climb out of. The clarity of purpose that's needed to put together a new 'big picture' is totally lacking. It might be that I don't see enough of the big picture to have a clear purpose about it, maybe I'm still too afraid of taking that road less travelled or maybe just too bone idle to get myself out of the comfort of the familiar. I don't know.

And guess what I'll be doing tomorrow...

Natasha, you need to get a grip.

Written while listening to...

Frederic Chopin : Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor

Serendipity

It's been a while since I've written anything here; it's been a while since I did anything out of the ordinary enough that seemed worth the while finding the time to write about. More about that later.

I'm not sure I fully understand the meaning of the word serendipity. Something that happened this morning occurred to me as being serendipitous but on reflection, is serendipity not more in the way of repeatedly making lucky finds, rather than just a one-off bit of good fortune? I don't know.

Anyhow, there was me making my way to work with every prospect of making the 09:30 train from Bolton to Manchester Victoria, when the bus got stuck in traffic. The cause of the traffic jam - road works for what, no doubt, Bolton's Borough Engineer regards as the dog's bollocks of road widening schemes. Consequently I missed the 09:30. As luck would have it the 09:50 was cancelled, leaving me having to wait for the 10:02. All in all that means Mr Borough Engineer's road works cost me 32 minutes of my life. No big deal, I guess, though I suppose not everyone would see it like that. What I would like to know, though, is how bloody good this new road layout will have to be for me to ever get those 32 minutes back? Let's face it, Mr Borough Engineer, you're a wanker because every inch of your new road will be as full of fucking cars, within months, as it is now - long before I've ever got my 32 minutes back. But I guess you know that already, don't you. It's just that you'd be out of a job if you ever admitted it.

While I was quietly (I hope) ranting away to myself about that, something most unusual came into view heading north towards the station...

31 233 light engine at Bolton

It's many a long year since I've seen a class 31 in Trinity Street station. That's what I call serendipity.

Damage Limitation

I thought today was never going to end or at least it seemed for much too long that getting back to the sanctuary of home in more or less the same state I left it would be beyond me.

I have, you see, been a little poorly over the weekend and I do not think it would have been unreasonable, under the circumstances, to have had the day of work sick. Except that, even at the best of times, I prefer not to have to admit such weakness and certainly not on a Monday morning when the obvious conclusion, that I would hardly blame anyone from drawing, is that Natasha had been a little overindulgent again.

True, I did have my usual Friday session but nothing untoward by my standards. Indeed, had I not fallen asleep on the bus, I would have been home unusually early. As it was, I managed to get a last slurp before ambling home but still quite early for me. I made some supper, briefly surfed the net, went to bed and, so far as I recall, went to sleep.

By around two thirty on Saturday morning, thought, I was awake with that sure and certain knowledge I was about to be sick. You may be aware, if you have noticed my recently published Beer Scooping Rules, that being ill has implications and this, even in the urgency of the moment, did not entirely escape my attention. One good thing, however. about being halfway to ninety instead of only halfway to thirty is that you know, come what may, resistence is futile. Unless, of course, you are prepared to spend the next morning, feeling like shit, on your hands and kness cleaning up misdirected waste product from impossible nooks and crannies, not to mention hair, clothes and treasured possessions. Damage limitation is the first order of business.

Without, however, going into any more graphic detail, it soon became clear - to me - that this was not normal "overindulgence re-balancing"; I was really ill!

Although by this morning the worst symptoms of my mystery illness had stabilized to the point where I judged it safe to venture out for an indefinite period, two days without proper food or sleep had certainly taken their toll.

Still, the main thing is that I survived. Something inoffensive to eat now and an early night should just about see me back to firing on all cylinders tomorrow, so no harm done, hopefully.

Am I right in believing, though, that I just happened, by total coincidence, to have picked up a "tummy bug" on a beer night or am I in denial of an obvious truth? Who knows? Anyway, don't be rushing out to buy any get well cards.

Written while listening to...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart : Mass in C major, K317 ('Coronation')

What a pity that about the only decent period of sleep I managed over the weekend was during a broadcast recording of Bruckner Seven. When it's not your day, it's not your day.

South

Looking South from Lancaster station

I've been meaning to offer an explanation for this seemingly pointless photograph for a while. It has been suggested that perhaps there was an ‘invisible' locomotive at the end of the platform that only I could see! I did, however, take it with this very blog entry in mind; it just took a while to get round to writing it.

In fact, this picture had its origins in a conversation I had with a dear friend who, shall we say, doesn't share my enthusiasm for the escape of travel. He'd been away for a few days on a trip somewhere t'other side o' Pennines. He told me that, while he'd enjoyed it, he was always glad to get back home and that he always felt a sort of reassurance when familiar landmarks come into view. Like this one, I guess...

Holcombe Hill and Peel Tower

I sort of understand where he's coming from. That view of Peel Tower is one that has been familiar to me for as long as I can remember and has always been a sign of getting near to Bury. Except that for me Bury was a very long way from home when I first knew this view.

As you may have gathered, I like to get out and about; home, as cosy as my little abode is, is not somewhere I have any desire to spend a great deal of time. It is always with heavy heart that I turn for home wherever I may have been and it was in such spirit that South was taken - a melancholic view of the homeward road because, while there may be places to call at on the way, the train south out of Lancaster is inevitably the beginning of the end of a journey.

Perhaps next time I go I should take a happy photograph from the other end of the platform and call it North.

Enough's Enough

Another eminently satisfying trip to the Prince of Wales draws to a close as Class 142 unit, 142 054, bound for Preston approaches Foxfield station in South Cumbria.

My recollections of what actually happened on this journey are, well, to say the least, unclear. Anyhow, my local football team, Bury, were, by coincidence, playing a pre-season friendly at Barrow and the faithful followers of the mighty Shakers staggered their way onto the train. They were drunk as I don't know what (yes, I know, the pot calling the kettle...) and they were some of the most pig ignorant, boorish scum it's been my misfortune to come across for a long time. Whatever was said or done, I don't recall, though I don't think any of it actually involved me. Suffice to say, by the time the train arrived at Lancaster, I'd had enough and bailed out. Even one of Mr Branson's Virmin Pandemonium units had to be better than putting up with that all the way back to Bolton.

I dare say this human trash is not representative of the majority of Bury FC supporters or football supporters in general. Nevertheless, it's all rather helped reinforce my rather jaundiced view of modern football and I'm afraid that after some forty years of following the game, you can shove it. I have renounced football once and for all.