Loss

Two days after the Great Salford Swim Benji died. His tumor had been growing, and he was struggling with walking, but we then had an added complication in that he stopped eating. We had arranged to take him to the vet for a check-up, but as he was clearly deteriorating we asked her to come to us. We then had to make the agonising decision to have him put to sleep. The tumour had spread, his liver was swollen, he was clearly struggling and yet it was still so difficult, to have to choose to end his life. We've none of us recovered yet. He was with us for six years and he became part of the fabric of our family life. Everywhere I look in the house there are memories and associations. I'd love to say that I could feel his presence, that I had a sense of him watching over us, but dead is dead and our time together is over.

When a dog dies the loss is so immediate and intense. There are none of the bureaucratic and administrative diversions, death certificates, funerals to arrange etc. There's just an empty space.

It's taken me so long to publish this post. I couldn't bring myself to complete it, to let go and say that he's gone. I've read a lot of philosophy this year, and taken a lot of comfort in others' struggles to make sense of life, and death. I still don't know, and I've realised how much I value not knowing, if there's anything more than this, these few moments we spend living. Benji dying was an awful and inevitable experience, and yet it was worth going through for the 6 years that he chose to spend with us.

Swimming with shopping trollies

I did it! I completed the Great Salford Swim in 53 minutes 44 seconds, breast stroke all the way and pretty much the same time that I've been managing for a mile in the pool. It was an amazing experience. The water was 14 degrees, and it felt refreshingly, rather than numbingly, cold all the way round. What really struck me about it was how clear it was (a bit scary when you can see bike wheels and shopping trollies lying in the silt at the bottom) and how sweet it tasted when I got the inevitable splash in the face. Because the course followed the walls of 2 docks and the narrow canal connecting them our back-up team of family and friends who were spectating were able to keep pace with us and offer encouragement along the route. This meant a lot to me because by 1200 metres I knew I was going to get round, but I felt bored, restricted and contained by the course. I realise now that this was sabotage. I was getting closer to my goal and it was as if I wanted to stop myself from succeeding. I turned for the last stretch to the finish. I could see it in the distance. A voice in my head was saying 'Turn round and swim back, you don't want to finish' and I was beginning to slow up, when I heard my oldest daughter shouting 'Come on Dad!' I looked up and there she was, waving me along. It was just what I needed. I dug in and thought of the people who had inspired me to be there - my wife who, along with our middle daughter and our son had completed the Great North Swim last year and who, in the way she embraces new challenges, inspires and empowers the whole family - my dad, who showed such patience with my fear of water throughout my childhood years - and Pete Kendrew, the former olympic swimmer who looked after the pool at my teacher training college and the man who finally convinced me that I could float.

Since the swim I've lost my way. We've only swum a couple of times in pools, and our wetsuits are hanging like bats on the backs of doors around the house, scaring guests going to the bathroom at night. In writing this post I'm dipping my toe in the water, making a pledge to myself to get back in the swim, to learn front crawl and to prepare myself for the open water challenges to come.

Round the block

So here I am at the end of October and I haven't written anything for a month or so. I've started a few posts and then deleted them, unable to see them as having any worth. Writer's block is a pernicious condition, and today I'm writing my way through/past/around it. I'm determined to get to the end of this post and publish it. I've switched off (well, turned down a bit) my internal perfectionist editor and I'm writing. Why do I let it worry me so much? As I look now at the screen and see the words accumulating, the sentences unfolding, the piece taking shape, I begin to realise that I've been punishing and depriving myself. Writing is a way of reflecting on life, of celebrating and making sense of achievement and loss. In the last couple of months so much has happened and I'm going to post about it all in the next couple of days.

The blank page is here to be filled, not feared. Tally Ho!!

Summer Holiday

The first holiday that I went on was in 1970. It was just after my 14th birthday. We went to Pontin's  holiday camp on Jersey for a week. It was a profound, and emotional, experience. I'm not attempting irony or humour in saying that. My dad had died the previous summer and the only reason we were at last able to afford a holiday was the insurance payout. Thinking about it now, it wasn't the most salubrious set-up. The chalet was a room with 2 sets of bunk beds, and a small bathroom (I think there was a bathroom), and it had to contain my mam and 3 boys. At the time it seemed amazing. We flew there from Newcastle. It was the first time any of us had flown and I remember it as noisy, bouncy and exciting. The holiday camp was actually a pretty quiet place, located on a headland and surrounded by lovely small coves and beaches. In looking for pictures to accompany this post I've found out that it's now abandoned and derelict, and I found this aerial photo.

 It looks a bit grim in the picture, but the sun shone every day when we were there. We made friends with some kids from Essex and I fell in love with a girl called Wendy from Westcliff on Sea. That's probably a bit of an exaggeration, given that the high point of our relationship involved us sitting on the swings at dusk, holding hands and talking. I think it was probably the first time since my dad had died that I talked to somebody detached from that drama, somebody who didn't know the story and who was prepared to listen as I told it.

I hated going home. Whitley Bay seemed drab and grim. Our house, still full of memories, felt claustrophobic. I'd seen the possibilities of a world outside our bubble of grief and then they'd gone. Nothing had changed. I was angry and depressed, and this was compounded by the phalanx of well-meaning adults who guarded my mam and who kept telling me how grateful I should be for having had such a wonderful, and expensive, experience. I realise now that it was life-changing. I didn't suddenly come to terms with the loss of my dad - that would take many more years - but I knew that I wanted to get out into the world, to escape the confines of my family and my home town.

I started this post because I wanted to tell you about the fantastic holiday we had this summer. Funny where your thoughts can take you.

September catch-up

Summer's on its way out, and boxes full of new English apples are appearing at Unicorn, our local Vegan supermarket. Somewhere in August I lost my blogging Mojo, and I've decided that the only way to get it back is to write, write, write my way through the blockage.

The last post I wrote was in the week leading up to the Great North Swim. I was ill, I hadn't been able to practise and as the day drew nearer I was resigning myself to deferring. I didn't feel well enough to drive up to the Lakes, let alone dive into one. Then, on the Thursday evening, a text arrived announcing that the swim had been cancelled due to unsafe levels of blue green algae. I was able to defer to next year, and as my health returned I have picked up my swimming, and I've decided to make use of the practice and preparation by signing up for the Great Salford Swim, taking place at Salford Quays next Sunday. I  was apprehensive about this. After all, a converted dock on the Manchester Ship Canal doesn't sound as appealing as a beautiful lake in Cumbria. Anyway, yesterday I went to a training session in the dock with my wife and we swam 800 metres in our wetsuits at 7.30 in the morning. It was amazing. I know now that I'm going to do it, and I'm going to enjoy it.

The canal in the picture forms part of the course, joining the two dock basins that we swim around. I was amazed at the quality of the water, and I soon overcame my fears about putting my head under. I was able to get my breast stroke rhythm going, which was something else I was anxious about, as I'd been told that breast stroke is difficult when wearing a wetsuit. 

My aim now is to see if I can complete the course within an hour. I usually do a mile in the pool in about 53 minutes, so here's hoping. Roll on next Sunday.

Where do we go from here...

..Is it down to the lake, I fear? Thank you Haircut 100. Next week, I'm taking part in the Great North Swim, and I'm worried. I watched last year as my wife, my son, my daughter and her boyfriend, all took part and made it look, if not easy, then definitely fun. I was inspired. I'm not the most confident swimmer and up to that point the most I'd managed in a pool was between 20 and 30 lengths, not even half a mile.

I didn't learn to swim until I was 19 years old, at teacher training college. I was training to be an English teacher. I had wanted to teach PE but I was turned down because I couldn't swim. I had actually begun swimming when I was 4. I went with my Dad every Saturday to the Northumberland Baths in Newcastle, and I'd just begun to doggy-paddle my way around the shallow end when, one Saturday, I walked in and saw some older boys pretending they were drowning, kicking around and splashing in the water. I'm told that at that point I stopped swimming and became terrified of getting out of my depth. I remember that I struggled with this fear  throughout my childhood. I kept going to the pool, and I convinced myself every week that I would be ok, and as soon as the water came up to the top of my chest, or if I lifted my feet off the bottom and tried to float, I would panic and fight to get out. When we had swimming lessons at school, I had a fight with a lad who jokingly tried to push me in at the deep end. When I finally learned to swim I think I felt relief rather than joy, and I still retain some of that fear and mistrust of water, so resolving to swim a mile in England's largest lake represents a real challenge for me.

A year ago I knew that I wanted to do the swim but I still didn't know if I could cope with the distance, or the depth. I started going swimming regularly with my wife at the Manchester Aquatics Centre. 3 times a week we'd get up at 6am and go down there before work. The depth in the pool is a uniform 2 metres for the lane swimming sessions, so I can't touch the bottom, and 50 metres looks a long way when I first get in, and at the start I felt scared and clumsy in the water. However, by Christmas I was swimming 20 lengths of the 50 metre pool (1km in total) twice a week and 32 lengths (1 mile) on Saturdays, and, most importantly, I looked forward to getting in the water

We managed to maintain that regime until May. Since then I've lost my momentum. I ran the Great Manchester 10k, picked up a nasty calf injury and found it hard to get back into a regular training pattern. As swimmers have to wear wetsuits in the Great North Swim I should have had more practice in open water in a wetsuit. So far, I've only been in twice, once in Rydal Water and once in Lake Bala.

And now I've got a horrible cold. 5 days to go and I feel lousy. I've felt so confident until the last couple of weeks. We went on holiday to Majorca earlier in August and I swam at least 40 lengths of the hotel pool every day. I even swam in the sea, and dived off a pontoon moored out in the bay. That was a major event for a water-wimp like me. I know I've come a long way, and on Saturday I really want to be part of that wave of swimmers splashing their way around the course in Windermere. Time to feel the fear and do it anyway.

The first dog

This is a picture of Moss. He was given to my dad when he was a few months old. He'd been taken from a litter on a farm and given to one of dad's workmates, who was nearing retirement. That was a doomed relationship from the start, given that Moss had a propensity for nipping heels, chewing soft furnishings and scratching deep claw marks in every door he came across. The old guy and his wife figured that Moss needed a livelier pack and that 3 boys under 10 would be the best companions for him. He became our brother and, I now see, our pack leader. Dad was the alpha, and Moss would never mess with him, but with us he was always jostling for position and putting us in our place. And we loved him, played with him, fought with him, and protected him, as brothers. 

In the late 60s and early 70s dog owning was, in many ways, a more casual pursuit than it is now. Although we would take him out for walks, we would also, like all of the other dog-owners on our estate, open the front door in the morning and let him go off on his own. It seems bizarre now to think of that. We'd quite often have packs of dogs, Hairy Maclary style, roaming up and down the street because there was a bitch in heat. Moss would regularly get into fights, especially with a large Alsatian 7or 8 doors down. In those days people didn't seem to have Pitbulls, Rottweilers, or any of the macho status dogs that are around now. However, it wasn't unusual for them to have German Shepherds, or Alsatians, as a guard dog, sending a message out that these were people not to be messed with. Moss's nemesis was a big, mean bugger and he would attack him at any opportunity. We'd usually hear the snarling and barking, and possibly screams and shouts from bystanders and we'd have to charge up the street and try to stop it or, more likely, wait for it to end. The denouement was predictable, and painful. Moss would be left, shivering and bloodied, his back legs unable to move because the big fella would bite his back in a way that caused temporary paralysis, and I'd have to carry him home. He'd recover pretty quickly, and would often be game to go back for more.

When dad died, he grieved, in his own way, with us and maybe for us. He became meaner, his bites more likely to draw blood. We would still occasionally tumble around together, but we'd all been exposed to a horrible truth that meant that we couldn't be pups any more, and maybe the grip of his teeth gave us a way to feel the pain, anger, and resentment of our loss. While we were all adapting to the instructions of well-meaning adults and trying to be good boys for our mam, Moss was taking the occasional lumps out of us, giving substance to something we were all feeling, the shittiness, the unfairness, the hatred. 

I'm reading The Philosopher and The Wolf, By Mark Rowlands at the moment and it's helping me to understand and appreciate what I learned from my brother the dog. I resisted getting another dog for a long time and, although I love Benji, I've not let myself get as close to him and in many ways I'm glad of that.

One of the seven great dogs.

When I finished reading Straw Dogs I did what any man who has been exposed to the wilful hopelessness of the human animal would do. I took the dog for a walk.

Our dog is Benji. As you can see, he’s a handsome character. We got him from a rescue centre 5 years ago and he’s now 13 going on 14, or mid 70s in dog years. He’s completely deaf, but he’s sprightly and affectionate, a good companion. Having him as part of our family has, I think, brought out the best in all of us. It’s put us more in touch with our immediate surroundings because of having to go out for walks. He’s also helped us to brush up on our pack mentality. If we’re all in a room and he’s not there we feel incomplete, and we’ll bring his bed in so that he can lie there, sleeping and twitching and farting. And we feel good, being together, and having him there.

Our walking territory is the Mersey Valley, riverside woods and meadows reclaimed by nature from their former purpose as a sewage works. The area is now an urban country park, bordered on one side by the streets of Chorlton and on the other by the M60 motorway. We’ve now spent 5 years walking its paths in all seasons and all weathers. Although I now see them on a regular basis, I’m still thrilled at the sight of Jays, Herons, the Canada Geese nursery school that appears on the river every spring, and the kingfishers that we very occasionally spot on the brook that feeds into the river. We’ve seen all manner of small, and not so small, rodents, including a mink that stared defiantly at my wife from the opposite bank of the brook one day. We’ve heard, but never seen, woodpeckers. The electricity pylon in the distance in the picture below is a landing point for the Cormorants that frequent the river and the Water Parks, so we've come  to know it as the electric cliff. 

It’s a whole world of nature that Benji, in his understated way, has gifted to us. And now he’s a bit off colour. He’s old, and in many ways content. He has good days when you could easily think of him as a frisky young dog, just past being a pup. And he has the other days, like yesterday, where he’s reluctant to leave the house to go for a walk, and his breathing can be a bit wheezy, and I hate to think of him not lying there in front of the TV, dreaming and whimpering. Our stinky old friend. Our dog.

The title of this post is a reference to a film that came out in 2008, and which has become a family (pack) favourite. It’s called Dean Spanley. Any attempt at a synopsis wouldn’t really do it justice. It’s about life and death, loss and grief, and it’s funny and sad. One of the main characters confidently states, more than once, that there are only ever 7 great dogs. For us, Benji is the greatest of them.   

A thinking chap who's up for a (thinking) scrap

I’ve just finished reading Straw Dogs, by John Gray.  Jim, a friend of mine, told me to buy it and read it and that if I didn’t like it he would pay my money back. His money’s safe. 

I was initially confused because the book shares the same name with the Sam Peckinpah film starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, and I couldn’t see how that linked to the existential meanderings that had led Jim to suggest that I read it. There’s no connection between the two, apart from the fact that they both, each in their own way, address the issue of men as animals.

Gray’s book is disturbing, provocative, insightful and argumentative. When I saw him in discussion with Martin Amis and Blake Morrison, he seemed a thoughtful and cheery bloke, which seemed at odds with the unrelenting and apocalyptic polemicist that he can be on the page. I found reading the book to be a journey, from ‘What’s the point?’ to ‘See the world around you, see what we’re doing and question everything.’ As somebody who values questions more than answers I revelled in Gray’s willingness to see nothing that men pride themselves on as a given. Paradoxically, he seems to be a guy who has an answer, or maybe a response, to everything. One of the notes I made at the end of the Amis event was that John Gray would be a good guy to spend an evening at the pub with.

Rumblings

So, following on from an evening with Messrs Amis, Gray and Morrison talking about violence and death in literature, film and in general, I've spent the day thinking and remembering.

When I was a kid, fighting was something we did a fair bit on our estate, often as play but sometimes becoming more serious. When I was 5, I refused to let the 3 year old across the road drive a pedal car that I was minding. He went around the back of his house, found a broken bottle and stabbed it in my face. I had to have three stitches in a cut just below my right eye. I've told my own kids that story hundreds of times and I don't think I've ever really understood how horrific it is.

There were other crazy incidents. When I was about 7 or 8 there was an older boy around the corner who would bully me. He and his friends once put me on the rocking horse in the park at the end of the street and rocked it so hard that I flew forward, cracking my forehead and the top of my nose on the metal mane of the horse. I remember my mam putting butter on the bruises, and I remember feeling furious and humiliated. One day when my dad was back from work and was washing his hands at the kitchen sink I saw the same lad walking past our house. I ran out of the back gate with a broom handle and whacked him across the back. I dropped the stick and ran back into our back garden with him in pursuit, brandishing my abandoned weapon. Of course my dad saw what was happening and came running out. The other lad legged it. Dad went straight round and had words with his dad and he got a leathering and never came near  me again. Even as I'm typing this I can feel myself hitting the keys with force - 'Serves you right, you bullying bastard!'- and yet I'm writing about an 11 year old getting a beating from his father. Real violence is never anything other than ugly and painful.

I was a prolific reader throughout my childhood. By the time I was 11, I'd read Tarzan, Biggles, G A Henty's historical novels, Tom Brown's Schooldays and, my favourites, Rosemary Sutcliffe's stories about the Romans in Britain. I was into chivalry, stiff upper lips and codes of honour. The Sutcliffe books caught my imagination because the characters were well drawn, the battles were brutal, and people died. At the same time, I remember watching  TV programmes compiled from newsreel footage, much of from the 2nd World War. One Wednesday I watched old film of bulldozers piling up stacks of naked, emaciated bodies. I feel choked writing this now. I was shocked and fascinated. I went through a period of struggling to get to sleep at night. Mam would come and sit by my bed while I worried out loud about the existence of God and the beginnings, and endings, of life. The real horrors began when she left and the lights were out. I'd lie in the dark, wrestling with the dilemma of who I would choose if one of my parents had to die. I was a serious and troubled boy, although on the outside I still did all the rough-and-tumble. However, I introduced a rule that I would only fight if the other guy hit me first.

I stuck with the rule until my world was shattered by the death of my dad a few months after my 13th birthday. He had a brain tumour, and in 1969 there wasn't much on offer in the way of treatment. He weighed around 6 stone when he died, at home, mam having chosen that he should be with us rather than in hospital. His head had been shaved, he couldn't speak, and it was hard to tell if he knew who I was when I went into the room to see him. I remember the guilt and horror that I felt because he looked like the people I'd seen in the newsreels, in the concentration camps. That couldn't be my dad. And now, I'm glad that he was there, at home, and that I could be with him up to the end.

After that I spent the next couple of years engineering and provoking fights. I wanted to hurt and I wanted to cry. If I couldn't get somebody else to hit me, I'd scrape and bash my head and my fists against walls. Football, a girlfriend and the codes of honour and fair play that I'd picked up from my pre-teen reading were the things that saved me. I didn't want to be a bad boy, I knew that this life was it, and I wanted to be around for as long as possible.

What does all this mean? I guess for me it means that my ordinary life has already accumulated its fair share of pain and death, and yet I am a lucky man to have lived in this country at this time in our history. Violence is part of the human animal condition, a drive which needs to be considered and understood. It is complicated and painful and I think it is important that we all know and are prepared to face up to our capacity to take part in it, whether as protagonists, protestors, bystanders or victims. It is ironic that since the Second World War so many of us in the West have been able to avoid a direct involvement in it, while at the same time we humans have managed to efficiently industrialise and commercialise the process of killing and maiming each other in large numbers. To get back to what started this post, we need artists, writers and film-makers to provoke and remind us, to get us to think about and engage with what we'd rather avoid, or deny.

A curmudgeon? I think not.

Three years ago I renewed my passport. This was a blessed relief. My previous passport photograph showed me with a full(ish) head of hair, something I've not had for a number of years, and made me a target for comedy double-takes at border control on the rare occasions that we went abroad. In the time since my previous passport was issued photobooth technology has advanced and, when the time came to renew, I was able to reject images until I got the effect I wanted. In the chosen picture I'm leaning very slightly towards the camera, stony-faced and perhaps a tiny bit menacing. I think I look manly, mysterious, somebody to be taken seriously. My wife and children think I look like a thug, a terrorist, a comedy bad guy. The picture gives no hint of my warm and cuddly side.

My reason for telling you this is that yesterday I went to the Martin Harris Centre at Manchester University to hear Martin Amis talk about literature and violence. He was joined by Blake Morrison and John Gray. I've read a couple of Blake Morrison's books and I'm currently reading John Gray's Straw Dogs, so the opportunity to hear the two of them talk was what attracted me to the event. Amis, on the other hand, was somebody I felt an antipathy towards, based on the maelstrom of controversy that seems to follow his every utterance and, more unreasonably, on the scowl that he always seems to have on his face in photographs.

Do you see what I mean? He looks all moody, middle-aged attitude and
I find myself wanting to give him a slap. So. Literature, violence, Martin-bloody-Amis and his superior, brooding up-yours attitude. I was ready for a full-on rant. 

In fact, in person Professor Amis was warm, thoughtful, considerate and vulnerable. There was nothing macho in the way that he and his fellow panelists considered and analysed violence and the way that it is portrayed. They were stimulating, thought provoking and deeply moral. I came away with a list of books that I wanted to read, films that I wanted to see, and a reminder to myself of the power, and limitations, of the photographic image.

So, what happens now?

This week I've belatedly discovered Elbow's Seldom Seen Kid, introduced myself to the music of The Unthanks, started reading John Gray's Straw Dogs, heard Carol Ann Duffy reading her poems live in a garden in West Didsbury, walked along the beach at Aldeburgh in the sunshine, and watched a good friend, who only moved to the countryside 4 years ago, pen a frisky flock of sheep in partnership with his 2 year old border collie. The world is full of wonderful, beautiful things. Now I have the space to truly appreciate them.

A right, true end.

There are so many things in the world to be interested in, and to enjoy. Music, film, great writing, the everyday beauties of nature, and life. I'm writing this while the English World Cup campaign for 2010 thrashes its way despairingly, like a beached whale, to an undignified and ugly death. It is painful to watch, not so much because the Germans have played well (I would have expected that) but because there is no joy, no spirit in the English team. David James is the only one who looks like he actually cares about the game. He's the only one who ever smiles. I'm past caring about what ails the rest of them. It's a game that can be beautiful, and fun. I don't mind losing. I do mind this bunch of petulant babies spitting their dummies so spectacularly. Whenever we've gone out of tournaments in the past it's been genuinely heartbreaking. This is just pathetic.

'Who are those guys?'

I hadn't intended to revisit football. I was confident England would get through and I'd done my best to ignore the inevitable. The Germans. They're like the posse following Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.   You think you've shaken them off, life has given you a fresh start, an opportunity to go straight (to the final) and then they turn up. I thought Ghana were the ideal trap, a brilliant way to shake them off. I'm a poor deluded, helpless, hopeless English fool. No matter what we do, wherever we turn, they're always there, and you've got to admire that. As Butch says to Sundance in the movie

  'I couldn't do that. Could you do that? Why can they do it? Who are those guys?' 

And we all know how it ends. For Butch and Sundance it was a hail of bullets in Bolivia and for us, if we outrun the Germans, it's Argentina. Argentina, Maradona....oh, bugger..

Wembley Stadium, Whitley Bay

Football continues to occupy me. I can't remember a time when I couldn't, or didn't, kick a ball around. I am the oldest of three brothers, and the house we grew up in has a gable end wall facing on to a sloping grass bank, pavement and a road. It's on a council estate and in the 1960s and 70s there weren't as many cars around as today so the wall and its surroundings became our training ground. The wall was the goal and everything else was the pitch. Rules were few, and were negotiated according to prevailing conditions. Passing cars would enforce a time-out, passing adults could change the course of the game by deciding to join in and blasting in a few goals and heading pubwards, and a passing game involving the ball being played along the ground was nigh on impossible because of the physical conditions. The kerbs, the steps and the slope all came into play.

We all became decent players, not professional standard but able to get a game anywhere we fetched up in life. We could all take, and make, crunching tackles. We could pass the ball long, to head or feet, and control long balls that came our way. And we could SHOOT! There's such a feeling of satisfaction when you hear the whump of a football smacked against a wall, and if nobody else was available to play then you could spend hours with just a ball and the wall, smacking shots in from all angles. It frustrates me when I see professionals miss the target, and I realise that the pressure that they're under is intense, but it's such a straightforward and rewarding skill.

When I was 11 I read a 'Roy of the Rovers' coaching tip saying that it was important to be able to control and pass the ball with both feet, and that therefore more practice time should be devoted to the weaker foot. I was naturally left-footed, which already gave me an advantage in getting selected for teams, so I spent hours hitting the ball at the wall with my right foot, and controlling it as it came back. Within a few months I was two-footed and I had become a utility player, somebody who could be used in pretty much any position except goalkeeper. The time spent kicking a ball at that wall helped me in more than developing ball skills. I was a shy and nervy kid, especially after my dad died, and football gave me a place to mix with people, to make friends and develop confidence.

From Langley Avenue and 2nd Whitley Bay Cubs Under 8s through high school, boys clubs, college and numerous Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday league teams I played football regularly until, at the age of 40, I found out that I was breakable. I was playing in a 7-a-side league on an astroturf pitch and I went into a 50-50 tackle. My foot hit the ball at the same time as the other player's. We were both fully committed, but contact was with the ball and not each other. I felt the force of it and I was surprised by the intense pain around my right ankle. I couldn't understand how the other guy was on his feet while I was rolling around on the floor. The ball had gone out for a throw to us so at least I could take some satisfaction from that. I was in so much pain that I remember thinking that I couldn't have broken my leg  because breaks usually result in people lying still, unable to move. I crawled off the pitch, watched the last ten minutes of the match, and then tried to stand up. The pain was unbearable. Where were those endorphins when I needed them? A friend who had been playing on the next pitch was a doctor. He took my shoe off, smiled, calmly organised a group of fellow players to get me in the back of my car, and told my brother to get me straight to A and E. My leg was broken and I'd suffered ankle ligament damage. More importantly, and more damaging for my lifelong love of football, I'd lost my spirit and belief. When I was fit again I couldn't muster the commitment, the passion or the joy that had always been features of my game. I continued playing 5-a-side for a while, but they were gone.

And now there's not a day goes by that I don't remember what it was like. I loved the physicality, the intensity, the feel of the ball at my feet, the synchronicity between thought and action as I passed it from one side of the pitch to the other. I don't have any of that any more, and I miss it so much. I love so much about my life, but I can't think of many things that have felt as natural to me as the beautiful game, football.

Same old same old.

I'm not surprised. I'm not disappointed. I am experiencing the 4 yearly penance and I'm giving myself a pat on the back for taking it in my stride. Wayne Rooney plays a whole half without ever controlling the ball, and then kicks off at the supporters. It had it all, and it's not over yet. We're still in with a chance of going through, as we usually are at this stage. Playing like drunk men on a beach, and yet still with it all to play for. I suppose a key component of torture is the psychological aspect, knowing what's going to happen and being unable to do anything about it. It's a unique and specifically English combination of hope and misery. The Germans probably have a word for it.

Which brings me on to Schadenfreude, something I was anticipating, had we managed to do the unexpected and beat a team who'd struggle to make the English Championship play-offs. Germany beaten, top goalscorer sent off, and penalty missed. Oh, how sweet it could have been. 

World Cup Willies

I was 10 in 1966, and as a result I am cursed. The first World Cup to be covered comprehensively (mainly highlights with some live games, as I recall, and all in grainy monochrome) and, of course, the one that England won. I watched Bobby Charlton smack in that shot from 30 yards against Mexico and became increasingly more bemused and complacent as England, in my 10-year-old's frame of reference, cruised to the final and won it. It was as easy as that, and I had been programmed to believe that winning the World Cup is something that England just do. A 10 year old's belief system is hard to shake off so for the past 44 years the global footballfest has been a journey of hope, despair and confusion. I know we can win it, I've seen it happen. No matter how lumpen and naive our football is I somehow conjure up the same old winning scenario, and then I die the death of a thousand cuts or, to put it more accurately, the death of a thousand missed tackles, misdirected passes and pathetic penalties. I know what will really happen, but I can't resist that seductive temptress hope and I can't shake off the memory of seeing an England team win a trophy. That's my curse.

And in a strange intergenerational way I've managed to curse my son as well. When he was 8 years old I took him to his first football match. An old boy from the school that I worked in was in the England squad and we got tickets for the final World Cup qualifying match, against Greece at Old Trafford. Our tickets were in the front row of the Stretford End. The atmosphere was amazing, Beckham would not be beaten and scored that free kick, right there in front of us. At the end of the match we didn't know if we'd done enough and then the result came through from Germany. We'd done it, and Germany had to go to the play-offs. Nobody wanted to leave the ground, and I don't think my son heard me when I told him that this was as good as it would get. At that moment he was assimilating the evidence, taking in the message. England would not be beaten. Poor soul.

And so here we are, Dad and lad together, watching another World Cup. Fools for the love of this crazy team and this infuriating game. Maybe this time, maybe..

Homecoming queen...

My previous post left me feeling miserable, so I've turned my thinking chap thoughts to good and hopeful things. Our oldest child flew back from America today. She's been studying for a year at an American university. I know that she has mixed feelings about being back. She loves and appreciates being home, and yet she's had to say goodbye to the other life that she's lived for the past year, with its freedoms and responsibilities and differentness. And that's her life, something that she's done that we, the rest of the family, haven't and I realise that's fine with me. I love knowing she's back under our roof and I'm amazed at the resourcefulness and strength she's shown in completing her year in the USA.

Her return has triggered an automatic appraisal of how we've all changed over the course of the year. My wife has developed as a writer, has completed a postgraduate qualification and, to me, appears to have become a woman confident and comfortable in her own skin. She'd probably say it aint so, but she's grown her hair and she has a purpose and a direction to her life and we're all in awe of her progress as a poet.

Our middle child has completed her second year of working as a teaching assistant in the local high school and is preparing to apply again to drama school. She's still only 19 and she's learned so much. We had a heated debate about education and schools a couple of weeks ago and she showed such passion  and commitment for what she does. I felt so proud of her as she dismantled my arguments.

And our baby, our 15 year old son. When his sister left for America he was smaller than her and there were still echoes of baby roundness to his face. When she stood next to him today he was a good 4 or 5 inches taller than her, still cute but with a deeper voice and a finely attuned wit and charm.

And me? Well, in the past year I've become the thinking chap and the other day I read a holiday diary I'd written 13 years ago to my wife and middle child and they laugh-out-loud loved it, so I'm beginning to think I've got something to say that people might enjoy hearing. You never know.

A matter of life and death

The news today has been dominated by the shootings in West Cumbria yesterday. I was half listening to a radio report involving a correspondent trying to have his cake and eat it as he described the tasteless insensitivity of the media scrummage for stories while at the same time he was clearly rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck in. I don't like the way that horrific incidents like this become so engrossing, creating a feeding frenzy for speculation and eye witness 'exclusives', no matter how tenuous their link to the actual events.

Yet I am also aware that there will be some positive intention to all of this, that as human beings we use stories to make sense or meaning of the extremes of life and death, and some of the accounts that I heard this morning were so shocking in their banal and everyday detail that tabloid hyperbole was unnecessary. People were still struggling to believe what they had seen. They'd assumed the gun was a toy, had struggled to see the gunman as dangerous because he looked so ordinary, so ineffectual. When people fell over and died in front of them they first assumed that the victims were play-acting. I found these accounts chilling because I could understand how unbelievable it would be.

I've not had much experience of guns, but the few that I have seen up close in real life were unprepossessing objects. When I was 13 or 14 I was given a shotgun to hold by a family acquaintance, a gamekeeper. The gun wasn't loaded. He showed me how to hold and aim it, and explained how the kick from it when fired could break shoulders or cheekbones. I wasn't tempted to go further. Many years later, on holiday in Australia, we stayed with friends in a small mining town in the bush. In the corner of a spare bedroom there was a small collection of firearms. They were next to toolboxes, and well-used tools were what they resembled, tubes of dull grey metal with polished and worn wooden handles. The fact that they didn't ooze the glamour that is afforded to guns in films made them more horrific to me. Their owner was a level-headed and personable guy. I enjoyed his company and felt safe with him, and yet I couldn't wait to get away from that house.

Guns are nasty, cowardly, irresponsible objects. They efficiently project pain and death, while allowing their users a choice in terms of how distant and detached they wish to be from the act they are committing. They are also a fact of life. No matter how much I hate them and wish that they did not exist they're still going to be out there. Inevitably, after the horror of yesterday there will be the usual debate about gun laws, responsible gun users will put their case against further regulation, inquiries will look to the character and mental state of the gunman for answers, and we'll learn nothing new. The simple truth about guns is that they are tools for killing, and anybody and everybody who picks one up has the potential to kill. That's the meaning I make of a middle-aged taxi driver with a grudge and a gun license.

Bank Holiday Blues

It's Spring Bank Holiday, and I'm feeling the familiar ambivalence. Bank Holidays have always vexed me. When we were kids they were often days of house arrest. Living in a holiday resort, there was a culture of knowing superiority perpetuated by the grown-ups, mainly my mother, who would insist that only a fool would venture out when the town was invaded by hoi polloi. We were encouraged to pity these sad folk arriving by the coachload, whatever the weather, with their delusions of enjoying a day at the seaside. Our superior alternative, in those days when we didn't have a car, when bank holidays were holidays for everyone and there were no shops open, was to stay 'around the doors'. We'd watch Charlie Chaplin or Mack Sennett compilations which were on TV in the morning (daytime TV was bank holiday only, and seemed to be limited to the silent movie era) and then kick a football against the side of the house. They were days spent in limbo, purposeless and unsatisfactory.

Even when we got our first car, a yellow Morris 1100, it didn't get any better. My parents would question whether it was worth going anywhere because everybody would be out on the roads, and who would want to be stuck in a traffic jam when they could have a nice relaxed time 'around the doors'.  If  we did venture out the spectres of the crowds, the traffic and the weather would be weighing us down with such foreboding that the little Morris, with its cargo of a family of 5 and a border collie, would become a pressure cooker on wheels. Throw into this mix my regular and spectacular car sickness and you can imagine the fun we had.

My life changed in so many ways when I met my wife. In one of those mad, serendipitous, new love moments we shared stories of our childhoods and it emerged that her family had been regular day trippers to Whitley Bay. Much to my mum's bemusement, on our first August bank holiday as a couple we went to the seafront to meet a large gathering of the extended family who were to become my inlaws. I remember I was grouchy as I struggled to cope with the demolition of the bank holiday pillar of family wisdom. People were having a good time. There were crowds, but that added to the atmosphere. There was a bit of a cold wind off the sea, but the sun was shining and the bite of coldness gave an added flavour and warmth to the chips that we ate. This was what I'd been missing for all those years. Bank holidays could be fun.

Of course now a bank holiday is a different proposition. Shops are open, there are leisure and entertainment options a-plenty, and public transport runs as normal. My mum is away on a coach trip. And yet I'm at home, writing this, wondering whether to take the dog for a walk, or to go to the garage for a loaf of bread. We've already jettisoned plans we'd made to go into town, and my family are all dozing. Looks like we're staying around the doors...

Gimme Shelter 2

Another key feature of the Whitley Bay promenade when I was younger was the parade of beach huts north of the Rendezvous Cafe. They were brightly coloured wooden boxes, with sloping roofs and double doors at the front. They seemed to be locked up most of the time, but occasionally on a bank holiday or a sunny summer Sunday one or two of them would have the doors thrown open, with deck chairs, towels, buckets and spades and all the other seaside paraphernalia spilling out on to the concrete deck at the front. As a child I had it drummed into me that it was rude to stare, so I would steal glances at the occupants and at the tardis-like interiors. I have a memory of checked fablon tablecloths, primus stoves and kettles, and pictures on the brightly coloured interior walls. They seemed so exciting, little private spaces where you could be part of, and apart from, the holiday hordes. And they were on turntables so they could be moved around to maximise those rare pockets of sunshine. Unfortunately you couldn't stay in them overnight, which really spoiled the whole concept for me. I wanted to live in one. I wanted to sit in it in the middle of winter looking out at the wild grey sea, wrapped in a cosy blanket drinking hot chocolate made on the primus and toasting my feet on the paraffin stove in the corner. Maybe the fact that their use was so limited was the reason that they fell into disrepair and were demolished, leaving only the circular footprints of the turntables.

If only the Whitley Bay town planners, a notoriously unimaginative and conservative shower, had consulted 10 year old me.

And there is hope. In the last couple of years plans have been put forward to build some new beach huts that can be slept in. If that happens, I'll be there. In January.