Defeat at the Hands of Bristol's Pirate Kings

"Proper Cornish" fare in Proper Bristol

Almost a week ago now I faithfully promised two friends and fellow City fans that, in their absence at the Bristol Rovers game, I would post a match report on here. I didn't, partly because life got in the way, and partly because actually the performance was more than a little lacklustre, with none of the heroics we saw at Swindon early in the season, and none of the flare that increased our confidence so much before Christmas.

The game, at the somewhat underwhelming Memorial Stadium on the edge of Bristol, was a test for even the hardest of City fans. Despite bright sunshine the biting wind swept through the seated area, leaving even those of us with the most Northern genes too numb with cold even to shiver, and the terrace was only marginally better. Unprepared for the 500-odd visitors, the queue for the snack bar lasted for the entirety of half time, and by the time you finally got to the counter they'd run out of pies (I have no evidence that Mark Lawn was at the front of the queue, either.) The one benefit of being a woman at football, of course, is that there is never a queue for the toilets, but here there was no hot water either, nor any paper.

Comfort aside, the activity on the pitch did little to raise the mood, either. A Rovers goal in the 6th minute seemed to signal that they had started as they meant to go on, and City looked a combination of desperate and ill-prepared. A partly unfamiliar squad can't have helped, with some bigger names having left in the previous weeks, and with Syers back after a long absence from injury then suspension, they just didn't seem to gel. There was none of the seamless passing that looked so hopeful earlier on in the season, little risk-taking, and the players seemed to be largely relying on good luck, which was notable by its absence when both Atkinson then Fagan made sterling efforts to score, but without success.

The second half opened much like the first, with a second Bristol Rovers goal two minutes in, after which all seemed to be lost. But whatever they'd been told, or whatever rocket had been put up their arses in the dressing room at half time, had clearly had an impact: we started to attack more as well as defend; suddenly players had others to pass to, rather than kicking the ball into a general scrum and hoping for the best; Kyle Reid came on and added a flash of brilliance from that moment on. Then, in the 65th minute, Kozluk was controversially sent off for a second offence. With only ten men, you would almost forgive them for giving up, but this blow was almost instantly followed by a fantastic Syers goal, reminding us all why we'd missed him so badly. From that point, we positively sparkled. An equalizer looked almost certain, with Reid running everyone ragged, and two successive attempts at goal from Hanson. We felt sure that we would do to Bristol Rovers what Morcambe and then Burton had so cruelly done to us.

Perhaps that's why I felt such crushing disappointment when the whistle blew and this hadn't happened. If the second half was anything to go by we should be feeling a new wave of optimism, but the fact is that as a result of that game we dropped down to 20th in the league, still perilously close to relegation and an increasingly unattainable distance from the play-offs. Even the normal exhuberance and passion of the City fans present was notably muted, and mutterings of discontent on the forums and an progressively bleak atmosphere, tinged with the violent negativity and viciousness that the likes of Boy From Brazil so beautifully tried to counteract, makes this one of the most depressing seasons I can remember. The excitement of early cup wins is becoming a distant memory, and my City experience is more and more one of overwhelming disenchantment.

I was amused, then, by this bit of light relief: a group of Bristol fans inexplicably dressed as reindeer and looking puzzlingly bleak as they left the ground, given they'd just earned three points. Not all the loonies have been locked up yet.

Capital Networking

I read an article the other day about Social Capital and social networking. I'd reproduce it here if only I could remember where I'd got it from, but I can't, and so I won't. To some extent, the whole thing made me shudder a little, reminding me of windowless, basement classrooms and monotonal lecturers droning on about social capital, in spurious connection with some tedious passage of Edith Wharton or some other cheerless tract. On the other, it set my mind wandering to my own increasingly and persistently paranoid use of the internet. You see, in between occasional references to De Tocqueville (a sort of gently firm reminder that the author knew what she was talking about) she asserted that social networks are basically jolly good, because they allow us to connect in lots of ways with lots more people, which in turn leads to lots of nice reciprocal behaviour (chatting, "liking", commenting, sharing pictures et cetera) whilst we all bond over shared interests and ideals. She also reckons we're all more confident online, can create online personas etc and present the people we would like to be to the outside world. She's probably right.

I'm not going to talk about social capital. For one thing, this is a blog and not an academic essay; I shall probably get it wrong, and there are people who read this blog who will take pleasure in mocking me for my idiocy. And that is the crux of what I AM going to write about: social media and increased online presence may well have all the positive benefits and happy outcomes beloved of the (slightly smug) columnist, but they in turn come with downsides. Aside from the ever-present danger of being sued (remember this?) there is an ever-present chance/fear of being humiliated, ridiculed, rejected, and simply ignored. In short, the likes of Facebook and Twitter expose one constantly to the threat of public failure.

One good example is the relative ease to humilate people in front of an audience. Social networking sites and even emails are informal yet safely distant. There's no chance the person you're mocking will burst into tears in front of you, or give you the good slap you might well deserve. Even if they retaliate, it's erasable at the touch of a button. In this sense we all have more power than perhaps we can really handle. In turn, it's so instant that it's easy to tap in something without really thinking it over first. Last term a colleague of mine sent a "reply all" email to the whole of our team putting me well and truly in my place (I won't go into the reasons why, which are relatively dull, not to say innocuous). Everyone I know seems to have an example of this happening in a work context: in another instance, a relatively senior staff member sent an email to a friend of mine telling her she had done her job incorrectly. Among the host of people she had copied into this correspondance (and to whom, for the most part, the matter was wholly irrelevant) was my friend's boss. When it turned out that actually the person who'd sent the email was wrong, and not my friend, she sent a terse yet private email to my friend which basically said "You were right after all". She did not, as I believe she should have done, send an email to the various senior people involved the first time around apologising. Ultimately, she could have been accused of trying to destroy my friend's reputation. In fact, Unison now lists copying people into emails in this way as a form of bullying. In my case, I went home, fretted, and sobbed a little on my long-suffering husband. My colleague was probably oblivious to this, and probably didn't intend this to be the outcome, her email most likely being no more than a little strop at the end of a busy day.

And so to Facebook. My husband thinks I am becoming obsessed with the internet, in fact, I am rather constantly afraid of my presence on it backfiring on me. I will readily admit I'm a sensitive person, and take things to heart that should really be shrugged off, and yet I was hurt when a friend mocked me the other day for misunderstanding a joke someone had made, the implication being that I was a bit slow on the uptake. Another friend replied, himself laughing at my stupdity. When I finally rejoined the fray and wrote "aw not fair, you're all teasing me now *goes and hides under rock and cries*" both "Liked" the comment, presumably assuming I too was laughing at myself, and not slowly tearing myself to pieces.

I am, more worryingly, increasingly agonising about how I come across, convincing myself in my more anxious moments that many people simply humour me, and secretly think I'm a complete idiot, bordering on a nuisance that they'd like to shake off if only they could. I worry about why someone likes all the posts everyone else puts on their wall, but not mine; I feel almost offended when I comment on a thread and people reply to all the other posts but seem to be tactfully ignoring mine; I feel pretty peeved when I message someone and they never reply, particularly if I've gone out of my way to say or send something nice or personal to them; I live in terror that someone will expose something I've said or done somewhere public, even though I can't honestly think of anything worth exposing.

In short, social networking and accompanying media have probably not had much of an impact on me in terms of social capital (unless joining a Dean Windass support page and setting up a new Bradford City page which hardly anyone has joined counts) but it has served to emphasise some of the worst and most niggling aspects of self-obsession, introspection and even paranoia.

And now, of course, I'm going to post this and, in doing so, throw myself to the proverbial lions, rendering all I've said above somewhat ironic. So while I go and wring my hands and fret myself into oblivion over yet another Facebook chat which clearly has far more significance for me than for the person with whom I'm chatting I shall leave you with this last intellectual thought: Social Capital my arse.

The Midlife Crisis begins

My other half looks unimpressed with our latest foray into retro gaming.

There's nothing quite like the unadulterated joy of holding a joystick in your hand and figuring out how to make it do exactly what you want - and that isn't even some kind of euphemism. As a kid I dreamed of owning a "proper" games console, like some of my friends had - a C64 or an Atari - complete with proper games rather than games with unconvincing names like "Let's Play Maths!", complete with redundant exclamation marks in an attempt to make them sound enjoyable, that you could play in school for ten minutes every other week. Instead, I made do with a borrowed BBC micro every holiday (plus side: better graphics, relatively speaking, and short loading times, but no joystick) then, a few years later, a borrowed Acorn (plus side: Lemmings!) Now, more than two decades on, as I approach my mid-life crisis, I finally have my Atari.

The Atari flashback comes with 2 joysticks and 60 pre-loaded games which, according to one of the websites "defined a generation". This seems needlessly hyperbolic: I don't think anyone would claim that the likes of Human Canonball and Nightdriver defined a generation. Pacman or, say, Space Invaders possibly did, but they're not on there. Instead you get an eclectic collection of games that range from the gloriously addictive to the comedically unfathomable. The result of this combination is hours of pure pleasure.

The Atari flashback had mixed reviews. Some criticise it for its "basic" graphics and clunky gameplay, which begs the question: "what did you expect?" Others wax lyrical about the simplicity of the games, which strikes me as missplaced nostalgia, because some of the games are positively crap, even by early 80s standards. The reality is somewhere in between: some of the games are genuinely fun, and don't require the ostentatiously high-tech spangliness of their modern counterparts. Others look laughably amateurish and are, by today's standards, just plain dull: "adventure" games where your pixellated alter ego totters from "room" to "room", symbolised by different coloured squares with gaps for doors, just don't cut it if you've ever played on anything developed since.

As ever, the guide which comes with it is at times as enjoyable as the product t accompanies. It doesn't actually perform any useful function, like tell you what the heck you're meant to be doing when confronted with an unidentifiable shape on the screen which doesn't seem to actually move anywhere but seems to be being shot at (we also gave up on "Miniature Golf", which consists of several squares of various sizes which don't appear to do anything). Instead, its contents are a colletion of factual descriptions interspersed with statements of the blindingly obvious with a smattering of wistful geekery. "Now this is an interesting concept for a game", says the writer at one point, raising our expectations until we discover that it isn't. "The aim of this game is to score as many points as you can", he says at superfluously at another (really?) "Collect as many dots as possible to win points", begins a third. Dots? Really? Surely they symbolise something - coins, perhaps? Treasure? Some life-saving elixir or weapon you can use later on to destroy your enemy? Apparently not: they are just dots. The description of "Wizard" is delightfully baffling: "Get hit by an imp's magical bolt or touched by an imp and your damage goes up by 2 points. Hit an imp with your own magical bolt and their damage goes up by 2. However the Flame seems to have a mind of its own and goes deeper into the catacombs with each confrontation." Good. Glad we cleared that up. As for "Fun With Numbers", someone should report the name to advertising standards: the aforementioned "fun" is simply a series of sums, but at least you get to "choose" from addition, subtraction, division AND multiplication. Get in! I bet that was well worth your hard-saved twenty quid back in 1981.

As usual I've rambled on for far too long, but I will at least pick a couple of games that I and my trusty gaming sidekick have singled out for special praise.

Frog Pond: This. Is. Brilliant. A two-player game, you are a frog (inexplicably pink or luminous green) and you get points by catching flies on your tongue. The flies look uncannily like birds, but hey. Detail.

Bowling: Who needs the Wii when you can bowl on an Atari? AND you get to see your character perform a nice little dance to the accompaniment of some marvellous sound effects and epilepsy-inducing flashing lights when you get a strike.

Circus Atari: I have no idea what the significance of the dots at the top of the screen are, except that you get points for hitting them. You basically have to catapult a stick man on and off a deceptively difficult-to-move see-saw, but there's something sadistically pleasing about the underwhelming splat when you miss.

Soccer: Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful! Table football on a screen, with a square ball and no concept of the offside rule and no ability to move the goalkeeper on his own. Great stuff.

You probably have better things to do and far superior technology with which to do them, but if you fancy a bit of untainted enjoyment do pop round some time.

The Best Cake in the World...Ever!

Of all the cakes you will see throughout your lifetime, I'm pretty confident I can guarantee you will never see one as fine as this. The friend who made it for me wanted to combine the two things I love, namely Space Invaders and Bradford City FC. I'm not sure what this says about me, though looking back at recent blog posts I can't deny that she got it spot on. I'm particularly impressed that she managed to get the shades of claret and amber so perfect.

Out on the Wiley, Windy Moors...

Before I embark on the following I should probably declare an interest or two. Firstly, I do have a favourite Bronte sister, and it isn’t Emily. In much the same way as George Harrison was my favourite Beatle, I always felt that Anne, an eloquent feminist ahead of her time, was the sister with probably the most profound contribution to make, and a mass of undervalued talent with which to make it, and who often goes sadly neglected in the shadow of her more crowd-pleasing big sisters. Secondly, I should admit that I’m actually not all that keen on Wuthering Heights which I always felt, though this sounds something of an oxymoron, managed against all odds to combine the eyebrow-raising, dramatic improbability of a Mills and Boon novel with the tedium of Jane Austen (sorry, Austen fans.) At the same time, though, the Yorkshire-bred, English graduate geek inside me was still intrigued by the hype of yet anothe Bronte adaptation, and eager to see if it worked.

Given my introduction above, perhaps it did, being every bit as tedious, far-fetched and unrelentingly bleak as the original. As far as the tedium is concerned, I was actually rather pleased that Andrea Arnold decided to sacrifice loyalty to the original and call it a day soon after Cathy’s untimely death, rather than several chapters and a few more births and deaths later, as Emily did. In terms of the story, then, it’s something of a disappointment if you’re a literary purist: aside from only including half the plot, it doesn’t actually include the character of Lockwood, which means it doesn’t include the ghost, which means, ultimately, it isn’t a ghost story, just a miserable and depressing one. It also does little to explore Heathcliff’s character. I assume this is a deliberate attempt to make him enigmatic, as he is in the book, but it doesn’t work: he comes across as resentful, hateful, and ultimately a bit of a fruitcake.

The main “character” in the film, according to some of the reviews, is the "landscape". This immediately put me off a bit, having endured endless lectures about “pathetic fallacy” throughout school and university – the Disneyfication of the landscape, where it is inevitably dark and stormy at key moments of drama, only for the sunshine to come out after the goodies win the day. Except that in Wuthering Heights, of course, the goodies never win, and consequently you’re treated to two hours of windswept desolation filmed at funny angles in bad light, Arnold presumably being one of those directors who thinks that constant semi-darkness somehow makes it all a bit more arty, whereas in fact it just means you can’t really make out what’s going on. I’m not trying to claim that Yorkshire is generally basking in a warm glow of sunbeams – I don’t think I’ve ever been to Haworth when it wasn’t drizzling – but a bit of seasonal let-up would’ve been nice. It’s implied that Cathy and Heathcliff, admittedly odd though they are, bonded over the awesomeness of their surroundings, and it makes sense that they would have thus bonded in a variety of weathers.
Yorkshire, looking characteristically gloomy. Pathetic fallacy, that.

Arnold takes other liberties, too. Most notably, she makes Heathcliff black. Much has been made of this, which is wholly plausible, and as far as I’m concerned really doesn’t matter much as the point is that Heathcliff is somehow "other", though the book seems to imply he is Asian or Middle Eastern (it’s claimed that his mother could have been an Indian Princess). It does however allow Arnold to chuck in some gratuitously racist terms which aren’t in the book, possibly for shock value more than anything else, accompanied as they are by several “fucks” and even the occasional “cunt”. Again, this isn’t implausible – both are good, old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon words and probably as common then as they still are on the football terraces of West Yorkshire – but whether it’s entirely necessary is a matter of opinion. While we’re on language, though, I was satisfied by the Yorkshire accents and (nerd alert) some of the language structure: devotees of Emily Bronte will note she writes in (to a reader often incomprehensibly phonetically-spelt) dialect with a pronounced West Yorkshire inflection, yet you’d be both amazed and amused by the clipped BBC radio announcer voices of the early adaptations, whose speakers have clearly never been any further north than Watford.

So, was there anything else I liked? Well, frankly, no, but as I’ve said that could partly be down to personal taste. For me the only moment of light relief came after a particularly jaw-dropping few moments of necrophilia, where Heathcliff breaks into Cathy’s room after she has apparently pined herself to death, and appears to have sex with her corpse. The lady in the seat next to me, who’d looked pretty unimpressed for the previous 90 minutes and had already expressed dismay a few minutes earlier when Heathcliff rather over-graphically hanged a puppy from a gatepost, turned to her companion in horror and exclaimed, perhaps louder than she intended: “That wasn’t in the book!”

Indeed it wasn’t. She left then and there, and a gruelling 30 minutes later so did everyone else, possibly toying with the idea of going to the screen next door to watch “We Need to Talk About Kevin” for a bit of light relief. I in turn went home and listened to Kate Bush, whose version of Wuthering Heights is about as accurate as the film while being mercifully briefer, and whose dancing and astounding vocal range are far more chilling than anything a backdrop of Yorkshire moorland could ever offer.

And finally, if you got to the end of this clunky review, here is your reward: (about a minute in) Monty Python's "Wuthering Heights in Semaphore"

We All Stand Together

A friend of mine has just made a list of 'Things to Do Before I Die'. I don't plan on dying any time soon, nor do I intend to make a list, not least because I'm not much good at following them. If I did have such a list, though, then last week's bit of excitement might well have been on it.

I've actually done quite a few things that might constitute "exciting". I've sung n the Albert Hall (my dad didn't come, his assessment of Walton's "Belshazzar's Feast" being "a load of bloody bollocks".) I was an extra in a film - sort of - although only my pony tail made the final cut, and only for a couple of seconds. I've played at a folk festival, I've met a few of my heros including Alan Bennett and, somewhat disappointingly as it turned out, Dean Windass (he talked in a series of grunts), and I've travelled to places as diverse as the West Bank, Malaysia and Quebec. And now I can add "singing on a charity single" to my list.

In case I haven't slammed home my lefty credentials enough on here, I should mention that I'm a Unison rep at work. You may also know that the TUC have recorded a cover of Canned Heat's "Let's Work Together", ahead of the Day of Action on 30th November, featuring a diverse group of public sector workers from across the UK. The single was released today, and you can buy it on itunes, Amazon and at various other online stores. Around 40p from each sale goes towards Age UK, so i's all in a good cause!

The aim of the single, really, is to celebrate public sector workers and what they do. There's been, predictably, a lot of negative coverage of the strike over pensions that will be going ahead on 30th, slating public sector workers, saying that it's just not the right time to go on strike, that we're fortunate to have jobs at all, that many private sector people don't have pensions so we should count ourselves lucky, we're all in this together, et cetera et cetera. Aware that most people who read this blog are probably the very "converted" to whom I shouldn't preach, here are just a few remarks on such criticism:
- Yes, many private sector workers don't have adequate pensions. That's wrong, too. Cutting public sector pensions isn't going to remedy this in any way. Everyone should get a decent pension, so once we've safeguarded our own we should also campaign for our private sector colleagues to get a good deal too.
- A pension is part of someone's pay package. Suddenly the government is asking workers to make larger contributions, work longer, then get less at the end of it. Why should someone's work conditions change like that? If you have, say, 25 days' holiday a year and your boss suddenly told you that, from now on, you'd only be getting 15, wouldn't you be a bit miffed? It's not all that different: this was in our contracts, and suddenly somebody moved the goalposts.
- Higher contributions are going to mean that more people will pull out of their pension schemes. Aside from the fact that this will jeopardise the schemes, in the long run this will cost us more as these people will then be replying on more support from taxpayers in the future when they have retired and don't have enough money to live on. Unless of course the government plans to let older people starve and freeze to death... (I wouldn't be surprised...)
- Higher contributions are neither appropriate nor practical for many people at the moment, even those who do not object in principle to the proposals, as many people (in both the private and public sectors) have faced pay freezes recently. Even those who have had pay rises have not received rises in line with inflation, so have faced a paycut in real terms. The cost of living has risen, and salaries have fallen.
- We are not "all in this together". The average pension of a FTSE 100 director is around £178,000 per year; the average public sector pension is less than £8000. This isn't exactly a fortune. While we're in the subject...
- I don't recall nurses, teachers, firemen, careers advisers, social workers, probation officers and university administrators causing the current financial crisis.
- Contrary to popular opinion, most people don't want to go on strike. Remember, you lose a day's pay when you do. It's just that it seems like the last resort. It's also a right people fought and died for in the past. Actually, many workers - including those who sang on the single - will be working on 30th, because they are nurses, midwives and those in other professions who fear that not going into work could put lives at risk. They will be supporting the strike, attending rallies and events and helping to publicise action, but not actually walking out of work.

Were my thoughts this coherent when I did an interview for Pulse Radio last week? Um, no. A clip of me saying "pensions aren't sexy, but the song is good" is currently being broadcast throughout West Yorkshire. This is why I'm sticking with the public sector and not going into the media any time soon.

Anyway. Buy the record. This will make you a good person.

Bye Bye BfB

Before I climb up onto my high horse, which I intend to do in just a moment, I'd just like to make it clear that what follows is not going to be a side-taking rant against Mark Lawn - Bradford City's chairman - because, much as I may have opinions about him, I don't know enough about what's been going on to make some grand public statement about it, nor do I especially want to. This is, however, a bit of a plea for proportionality, and a battle cry in favour of the underdog.

Yesterday my favourite website closed, its excellent content replaced by a euphemistic statement about personal decisions, apologies for distress caused etc. For a bit of context, Boy from Brazil was a thoughtful, incisive, sometimes even witty blog-cum-fanzine for Bradford City fans, which featured a glorious balance of match reports, previews, comment pieces, news flashes - pretty much everything. It found just the right balance, avoiding the sometimes thuggish comments you find on so many chat forums whilst also steering away from the geekiness of some match reviews (you know the ones - those sport journos who write things like "the penalty took me back to Beagrie's missed penalty in the second half of the away game at Bristol City in 1999...") whilst retaining a bit of emotion and opinion, unlike the purely factual recounting of an afternoon's play ('x hit the bar in the 76th minute, y was substituted in the 84th minute...") It was, in short, a brilliant read and its absence will create a genuine gap in my life which can't be filled by the PR-led content of City's own site (nothing wrong with that, but it serves a different purpose), the ploddingly factual reporting on the BBC and the post-match verbal brawls in the T&A comments section.

But why has it gone? Well, that's what has worried me. Apparently, it's all due to an article that was posted on the website after a youth game, presumably in good faith, claiming that much-criticised chairman Lawn made disparaging remarks about the team's performance, and possibly even cheered for the opposition (though the actual article stated that this was meant "sarcastically".) It seems that Lawn took umbridge at this - and who wouldn't? - and then, suddenly, the website was gone. The Telegraph and Argus explains this in more detail (see what I mean about the comments section?)

Reading between the all-too-clear lines, the Powers That Be probbaly threatend to sue. Now, I can see why Lawn would be pissed off: to be accused of behaviour like that, whether it's true or not, is pretty damning and as such doesn't help the club, either. It also feeds into the general discontent felt by so many fans at the moment, and so was perhaps a little ill-judged, true or not. And yet, at the same time, is it really the end of the world? If it was wrong - and Hendrie says it is (and who are we to argue?) but at the same time, the BfB writers must have got it from somewhere and can't have just made up something like that out of thin air - then why would an apology and a retraction not suffice? Newspapers in this country make derogatory, sweeping statements all the time, often with no basis in fact but merely in speculation presented as such, and sometimes not even that. A couple of years ago, a student in his first week at university died in a nighclub. The very next day, for all including his grieving relatives to see, his face was splashed across the front of a local rag read by countless commuters, accompanying an article condeming a drink and drug-fuelled night of hedonism at the university-run event. Weeks later, when the autopsy results were released, the article was not formally retracted in an equally-large front-page spread, nor was an apology made. There was merely a "clarification" deep inside the paper on around page 18, I think, confirming that no illegal substances were found in the student's blood, and actually he'd died from an undiagnosed heart complaint. Given the hurt this must have caused to his friends and family, and the damage to the poor young man's reputation, was the paper shut down? Was it bollocks. The journalist removed? I don't think so. Was The Sun shut down after it made unsubstantiated and deeply wounding claims about the behaviour of Liverpool fans at Hillsborough? Nope. It's still the biggest-selling paper in the UK (though not, notably, in Liverpool.) Now, on this occasion, a fat man's pride has been dented. Quick, call in the lawyers!

The debate about the libel laws in this country is too big and complex for me to start creating a pointless scuffle on a little-read personal blog, and yet they do seem to work disproportionately in favour of the powerful, the ones who can afford to sue or at least make life very unconfortable for anyone who crosses them, and they do, on occasions, seem to go too far. We live in an age where anybody can publish anything at the click of a button, and this can be dangerous. People do need to exercise a bit of care about what they say and how they say it. But at the same time, people should not be made to feel afraid of voicing an opinion, recounting an event or, in this case, bullied out of it altogether, and though rules is rules, to apply the same force - or, as seems to be the case give the example above, MORE force - to a group of unpaid volunteers writing for fellow fans who share the same passion as to overpaid gutter press, "professional" journalists who should know better seems more than a little unfair.

We live in a free country, and, I'd like to think, a sensible society. In a sensible society, I would hope that those with the power and the money should expect to take a bit of flack, and occasionally, to be misinterpreted and even misrepresented. It's a hazard of the job, and it happens in the real world all the time, Mark - the "I heard so-and-so said this about so-and-so" conversations round the water coolers in countless offices across the land every single day. We don't all threaten legal action. If BfB did say something wrong (and they may well have done), they should be made to apologise and retract it publicly, perhaps in a more overt way than the half-arsed attempt of that London rag I mentioned earlier, or, if they don't want to do that, put up a new article clarifying where they got the story from in the first place. Then we can let it all blow over, like the grown-ups we're meant to be, and I can continue to enjoy my favourite website (did I mention this is actually all about me?) Instead, the two journalists have been left upset and threatened, and lost their hobby as a result; countless fans have lost access to a very good source of news and opinion; Lawn has been vindicated but as a result looks like a bit of a dick, which is ironic as this is presumably why the website came down in the first place. The whole response seems to me massively disproportonate, a storm in a teacup has been transformed into a typhoon in an industrial tea urn by unnecessarily litigious and bullying behaviour, and the mutterings of discontent on the various chat forums are growing out of control as a result.

In the meantime, I almost forgot we have a game to try and win today. All of you, just grow up, move on and focus on the job at hand, which, in case you've forgotten, is to play some football. And give me my website back.

Girl Writes About Football Again

I've not blogged about football for a long time. Admittedly this is probably something of a relief to most of you, but the truth is that, after several years languishing at the bottom of the football league, with the genuine prospect of dropping out of it altogether a constant threat, I've lost the ability to try and make such posts funny. To a non-City fan there probably are endless areas for potential humour: when Ian Holloway resigned recently, a friend of mine suggested we might like to employ him, since we hadn't had a new manager in over three weeks. Instead though we hung on to one Phil Parkinson, of whom another friend and Hull fan (thus in a position to comment on his appointment) remarked "Don't worry, maybe he does well for teams whose names start with the first three letters of the alphabet. Except Charlton."

For the first few weeks, the various negative sentiments expressed in newspaper articles and social networking fansites seemed well-founded: Parkinson favours dull football. The team that very nearly beat Leeds in their Carling Cup draw (we were winning for a while) and came out with 2 goals and several more attempts to show for it, followed up with a huge 4-2 defeat against Barnet, slunk back into defensive play only after his appointment, with a run of draws and losses against a series of mediocre teams, and only a smattering of goals to show for them. This culminated in a loss against Hereford - one of the lowest-scoring teams in the division for several years - not as the result of a fluke, or a mistake, or a bad referee decision (which, to be fair, can go some way to explain Macclesfield), but conceding not one but two goals and scoring not a single one ourselves. On top of this, our top scorer from last season - David Syers - was out with an injury and not due back for a couple of months.

And then, yesteray, we went to Swindon. I wasn't expecting a lot to come out of this. I was prepared for the long, despondent train journey home in gloomy silence, while my husband told me it was "only a game", the slating of James "He Used To Work At The Co-op" Hanson on the Facebook group afterwards, no matter how much effort he'd put in. I last saw Swindon play against Fulham, at Craven Cottage, in the FA Cup, on a freezing cold December day when every other London game was postponed due to frozen pitches. Although they lost as expected, it was by no means a foregone conclusion. They were not bad, and I'm constantly surprised that they're in League 2.

The atmosphere was as expected: an amusing smattering of casual racism in the form of ice-cream jokes ("I'LL HAVE TWO 99s WITH A FLAKE!") directed at histrionic Swindon manager Paolo Di Canio, accompanied by choruses of "Fuck off Di Canio / Fuck off Di Canio" to a popular opera tune I can't remember the name of, on account of being far too common for that sort of thing (they didn't get any further than that, having presumably had difficulty in finding a rhyme for "Di Canio".) The rest of our crowd amused themselves making "wanker" gestures at the opposing fans, who responded in kind, whilst security staff looked on with a sort of grim resignation.

The performance, though, I'm happy to say, was not as expected. In short: City. Were. Brilliant. If ever defensive play were needed, it was against a team like this: Swindon had 3 shots on target (beautifully saved by Duke - I feel bad now for having so little faith in him) and 8 off target. The match stats don't do justice to those 94 minutes at all - 33% possession doesn't sound impressive, and a measley 2 attempts at goal sounds positively rubbish. But we were down to 10 men less than half way through the second half, with Davies questionably dismissed for a foul that, from where we were sitting and, reading the reviews, from where everyone else was sitting too, didn't look too bad. This I think skewed the stats, and we abandoned the attacking play I'd been so pleased to see early in the first half and herorically defended our goal against an increasingly desperate Swindon onslaught. The lovely James Hanson was left up front all on his own and must have been exhausted by the end of it all; Luke O'Brien replaced the injured Threlfall, and Luke Oliver brought the benefit of height (he's 6ft 7!) to the side to pull off some crucial headers, getting the ball safely out of the way on several occasions. When the inevitable 4 minutes of extra time were annouced (it's ALWAYS 4 minutes!) even the most vociferous, neanderthal of the away fans held their breath, fully expecting a last-minute defeat. Hands were clasped seemingly in prayer (mine included - I have no reason to believe God doesn't like football). When the final whistle blew, you'd think from the cheers we'd won 6-0.

So the train journey home was celebratory. We got an all-important point and edged our way ahead of our nearest rivals, a single win away from moving a place or two up the table and further away from relegation, and I got to natter to a very nice chap on the Facebook page later - me, the token girl, as usual, with 5 blokes "liking" my comments on the day's match (the gist of which were just "we were proper good") probably purely because of this. OK, so I still haven't managed to make this a funny post, but it is, at least, a very happy one.

My Retrotastic Other Life

I’ve fallen in love. In the space of an hour, confined in bed with my laptop and a mug of Lemsip, I’ve fallen head over heels in love for this website, and with it for an engaging geek and his informed yet pithy game reviews, written in a delightfully colloquial style (“Pretty weird game, this. Can anyone explain this to me?” “I think this one is smashing, and has lots of great puzzles.”) I’ve called him Paul, and his strengths are enough for me to forgive his persistent use of an apostrophe in “80’s”. Endearingly shy without being too socially awkward, intelligent without being arrogant, gently witty and on the admirable rather than the creepy side of geeky, Paul is from some much-maligned town – from Rotherham, maybe, or Preston – and is bashfully proud of his impressive video game-based oeuvre without being obsessive. Nowadays he probably dabbles in a world of Wiis and DSes without feeling he’s sold out, but his passion still lies on the retro side of things. We day trip over to Bradford in the Micra with “Best of the 80s" playing on the stereo and spend far too long in the Media Museum’s games exhibition before proper fish and chips and then, on the back seat overlooking Baildon Moor...Oops, sorry, got a bit carried away there.
National Media Museum, Bradford

I know deep down that he probably isn’t Paul at all, but more likely a collective of single, embittered, midlife-crisissing civil servants from Purley with hygiene issues who spend their evenings and weekends clad in sweaty, unwashed global hypercolour t-shirts ,eating ready meals directly from the carton and tetchily deriding one another’s opinions on the relative merits of the various Repton sequels with “The First Cut is the Deepest” playing on repeat in the background.

I was more than a little obsessed with BBC computer games as a child. My mum was a teacher and used to “borrow” a computer and a stash of games every holiday in the hope that I would then leave her alone for the duration, which I invariably did. I must have spent literally weeks of my childhood hunched in front of those computers doggedly perfecting my Chuckie Egg score whilst everyone else did sensible things, like shopping. Hours and hours spent staring fixedly at implausible birds climbing improbable ladders probably explains my now-poor eyesight. Over time I perfected routes through the various platform-based games, learned which direction all the unlikely causes of death went so I could go the other way (games being more predictable and limited in those days that they are now.) Before I even got to secondary school I could effortlessly breeze my way to level 8 on Chuckie Egg and smash the high score of anyone foolish enough to challenge me on any of the many takes on Space Invaders, though I never did find those Flowers of Crystal. Looking back, it probably amounted to an addiction. Then, at the age of ten and a full year after some of my wealthier, trendier contemporaries, I eventually got a Game Boy, and this fickle, disloyal child traded Dare Devil Denis for Balloon Kid. Where the wart on the end of a witch’s nose in Granny’s Garden once epitomised for me the height of cutting-edge graphics, I now wanted walking mushrooms and jumping fish corpses (huh?!) I can still complete Super Mario Land and still have eighteen lives to spare, and of this I am (I think justifiably) proud.

Recently though someone sent me a web version of Chuckie Egg, and, to my dismay, I can’t even get past level 6. Once so adept at arrow key-based manoeuvres, I now find myself giving up and making a cup of tea after a mere hour or so. You can get Repton on the same site, and I can only marvel at the patience I must have had as a child to doggedly play such a grindingly irritating game, with its gratingly chirpy Scott Joplin soundtrack and its smug-looking lead character which is to all intents and purposes some sort of upright reptile in a jump-suit. As for Flowers of Crystal, I don’t believe it even had an end, and you certainly wouldn’t get away with a game that involved typing “yes” and “no” to a series of inane questions (“Would you like to use a spell?”) nowadays.

But Paul, as ever, is a little more balanced on these matters. So here are a few of the games I used to play, along with Paul’s descriptions (*sigh*).

Arcadians: “One of my favourite games, it is really just a Galaxians clone, but it is especially well done. It has two minor gripes, the ship is a bit out of proportion to the invaders, and they tend to get you into a corner all the time. Cool things include the neat explosion sequence.” (The ship is out of proportion? Wow. That's proper analysis for you.)

BMX on the Moon: “The original game of riding along in a moon buggy, dodgin the ships overhead, shooting them, and jumping over craters on the moon. You have to be very two minded in this game, I suppose if you were good at rubbing your tummy whilst patting your head then you would be good at this! It has a nice sound when you shoot the aliens, sort of a coughing sound!”

Chuckie Egg: “The ORIGINAL platform game on the Beeb. This was a great game, I hope you have it in your collection! The aim was simple, collect the eggs and bird seed, whilst dodging the ostriches! Also, you had to negotiate gaps, holes, ladders and lifts (very awkward to use). If you got far enough, I seem to remember the ostriches being replaced by a giant bird which roamed around the screen. A true classic.” (Your memory serves you correctly, Paul. Level 9 goes back to level one, except with a giant bird that seems to be magnetically attracted to you. I wonder what they were taking when they designed it?)

Firebug: Paul says: “A really original game, this one puts you in the character of a Fireman, putting out little fires on the different platforms, whilst dodging the baddies. Highly original gameplay and great for a quick burst everyday. One of my favourites, although I can't seem to find it anymore!” (Quick! Someone find it for me now! I’ll send it to Paul, win his heart and we will drive off into the sunset in his Micra in a sort of 80s version of a fairytale...)

Repton: “Probably THE most famous game ever done by Superior, it was the Super Mario of the BBC world, this is an all-time classic. You play the part of Repton, the humanised reptile, with a zest for life, and probably (by now) one hell of a diamond collection. The idea is simple, collect all the diamonds, avoiding the rocks, and dodging the evil monsters which hatch from eggs. One of my all-time favourites.” (Ahhh, Paul, you and I will have to just differ on this one.)

Wallaby: “I think this is a cute little game, you are in control of mummy wallaby, whose baby has just been kidnapped by monkeys. You have to go through the level, punching all the monkeys (somehow the wallaby is a boxer!) and collecting the fruit, climbing ladders and trees. It is great fun, and the boxing part is great, it is a little repetitive though.”

It really is a fabulous website. Do look at it, and pine for those days when not only did we have floppy discs, but they were genuinely floppy. Meanwhile, it’s been so long since I went in the Wii Fit that I think it thinks my Mii has died.

Don't Push It

It’s a species well-known the world over. Articles have been written about its members, debating their methods, their long-term effects both good and bad; people have given advice on how to handle them, better still, how to defeat them. They are, of course, pushy parents.

I’ve lived in a few places, and nowhere has this species honed itself to quite such ruthless, determined, annihilating perfection as in Guernsey. Perhaps this is because I spent my teenage years here, thus attending the sort of musical andd sporting activities that attracted mid-lifers bubbling with thwarted ambitions and broken dreams desperately displaced onto their hapless offspring. Perhaps there are other explanations, to do with money and expectation (where there is pressure on said offspring to become the CEO of a major company whilst winning an Olympic gold in some sort of yacht-based activity, rather than just a vain hope that he won’t end up nicking cars and spraying graffiti tags onto footbridges). Or perhaps Guernsey just attracts a certain type of prick.

I can understand the need to some sort of pushiness. I can understand that, if you’ve splashed out a not inconsiderable amount of money on a ‘cello and numerous lessons for Little Sebastian, it’s not unreasonable to expect the little brat to practise it once in a while. What I find harder to deal with is when every single activity a child undertakes is seen as an opportunity to crush the opposition – through any means necessary – even at the expense of fun. In fact, if these people suspect their children are having any fun at all I suspect there are sharp words as soon as they get home.

Take Rocquaine Regatta. Now, just to give you a bit of background, this is a local event which takes place on and around a beach on the west coast of Guernsey every year, and features such intellectual pursuits as Hurling the Welly and Tossing the Rolling Pin, a sandcastle competition, and a contest to see who can stay on a pole greased with soap for the longest period of time. In the old days it also featured Piano Smashing and Tomato Throwing, but these have apparently been deemed too dangerous/messy by the organisers. You’d think such an event would be just the place to let kids be kids, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong.

Crowds gather for one of the day's highlights: the annual Hurling the Welly Competition.

So great has the influence of parents been in the past that the annual programme now “respectfully asks parents not to help their children in the building of sandcastles” for the competition. But their power is still very much in evidence. Take the bay swim, the first event of the day where hardy people – or nutters, as I prefer to call them – launch themselves off one beach into the freezing cold sea and peg it across a distance of almost a kilometre to the other beach, rather than use the perfectly adequate, tried and tested method of walking along the road, which would take a fraction of the time. Due to the intensity of this event, only children over the age of 12, with parental consent, and adults can enter. Cue Pushy parent, who thrusts a shivering youth forward.

“How old are you?” I ask the tiny creature, who is nervously chewing his goggles.

“Ten.”

His mother pokes him from behind. “Don’t be so silly. You’re twelve.”

“I’m twelve,” says the child unconvincingly, with a sort of bleak resignation. “Sorry. I forgot.”

“You can’t swim if you’re under twelve,” I tell him.

“He’s an excellent swimmer,” his mother interjects, tut-tutting at my stupidity and whipping the consent form out of my hand, “and his dad’s in one of the guard boats.”

And that, apparently, is that. I continue to give out forms and swimming caps while a middle-aged man jumps the queue and proceeds to stand at my arm criticising me for the next ten minutes, demanding I give him the forms, since he could do the whole thing far more efficiently and swiftly, and “without all this nonsense about rules and insurance.”

I see the small child again at the other end. He hauls himself out of the water absolutely shaking with cold and exhaustion, and his mother congratulates him... after she’s checked his time with me, and confirmed that he did it faster than his brother did the previous year. I wouldn’t like to have been his brother when he got home.

The ordinary swimming races are even worse. They start with a spotty lad of about ten announcing that he’s the best swimmer in the whole island his age group, then demanding I high five him in recognition of this great feat. In the under 9s race a mother is seen physically pushing her tiny daughter towards the uninviting sea. The tiny daughter proceeds to come last and cries. I tell her she did really well, at which point her mother demands angrily, “can’t you at least give her a medal? She’s only 5.” Um, no. Because she didn’t win. And she’s five?! In the Tug of War, a mother is seen balling at the Under 10s team, screaming “One, Two, Three, PULL!!!!” In the talent contest, I hear a mother say “if you don’t want to go onstage that’s fine, but just remember, you won’t get an ice cream.” (She did go up, but was beaten by a child whose talent consisted of “making my arm make a fart noise”.)

Worst of all, though, has to be the Mini Macho competition. I’d previously thought of this as one of the cuter stalwart events, where boys of all shapes and sizes are almost guaranteed to have in common the fact that none really attracts the description “macho”. (“What’s your name?” “Julian”. “What’s your favourite subject at school, Julian?” “Art.") They are told to show their muscles, walk around the “stage” (this is basically the back of a trailer) for a bit then the tallest gets a medal and the gawky kid with the glasses and the blonde curls gets a “special” rosette. Yesterday, though, as the enthusiastic youngsters bounded up on stage, I heard one mother saying “right, Harvey, now remember what we practiced. Show me your muscles” Harvey obediently flexed a puny arm. “Now your routine”. The boy jumped up and down like someone trying to do the Haka. “Did you do your push-ups this morning?”

He lost. And he was 8. I didn’t see him after that, so can only assume his mother took him round the back of the stage and shot him.