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.