Football and the Faustian Pact

There have been several events in the world of football this week that have increasingly worried me. I have come to the realisation that I am a human being first, probably a Birmingham City supporter second, and that being a 'football fan' comes somewhere between 'one-time fruit picker' and 'Year 8 B-Team leg-spinner' in my personal identity.

Before you reach for the 'New Tab' button, let me offer a disclaimer: this will not be an #AgainstModernFootball rant. For a start, 'Modern Football' is the only thing I've ever known, being born in 1993. Secondly, most people who go under that banner do so whilst tweeting in front of Sky Sports' Super Sunday.

I'm still enthralled by the game itself. The ninety minutes of football still holds me in my armchair in a way that a film or TV show rarely can. Forget the moans about diving and play-acting; that's just 1970s leg-breaking tackles in a different guise, branded by the same motif of a natural urge to cheat. It was ever thus.

But that magic is leaving us romantics behind. Football is a sport increasingly played behind closed doors, in the boardrooms and corridors of power.Last week, I went to a Sports Journalism course down in Wimbledon. First up, there was a sports quiz. It was telling of the modern media that most of the questions revolved around chief executives, directors and chairmen. It was perhaps even more telling that I knew almost all the answers.

Which brings me neatly onto the events of the week. I consider myself to be very knowledgeable about the sport, and yet, there have been two players signed this summer, for a combined fee of £60m, that I have never heard of. One is Fernandinho, the other is Soldado. Irrelevant to an extent, but just to give you some sort of context.

Recognise this man? He cost £34m.
http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article8648505.ece/ALTERNATES/w460/62-Fernandinho-mcpa.jpg

Meanwhile, Coventry City are going to the wall. The football club has been put into liquidation, and the future looks extremely bleak. A club that has won the FA Cup more recently than West Ham, Newcastle, and Aston Villa, a proper, one-team footballing city, bang-smack in the middle of the country. I really wonder how many people knew, or even cared. To discover the ins and outs, I had to watch the local news. Not Sky Sports News. The top story, if Sky was even capable of introspection, should have been how anyone can justify paying such money for the above players, when a club such as Coventry, part of the fabric of English football, have been left to rot? For Sky, and their assorted minions of supporters, it barely registers on their radar.

We used to say it would take a club- any club- to go to the wall to make the clubs and owners sit up and take notice. You think that will happen now? No chance. Now it seems it will take, naturally, one of the Sky Power Elite, to go bust. Perhaps, in 2050, we can have Liquidation Sunday, presented by Jim White's grandson, whereby Ray Winstone offers us odds on which of Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City will be wound up first?

It was symptomatic of the media that when I found out the news about Coventry at the course, on a corner of the BBC Sport website, I announced it to the rest of the room. The man taking the class, not much older than us, and a fan of one of the Power Elite, exclaimed 'Oh my god really?! Oh no, wait, actually I don't care'. And so the talk turned back to the Premier League.

Up in Doncaster, a member of One Direction now has a contract. I'm not joking. So what, you might say? If it brings in extra revenue, then maybe Coventry should have wised-up earlier and signed Gary Barlow back in the early 2000s? This move surely signifies the final nail in the coffin of football's meritocracy, the spit-and-sawdust, flat caps and whippets of football's School of Hard Knocks. Think of the young Doncaster trainee, who, following the announcement of the mandatory 25-man-squads, turns on Sky Sports News and sees that Louis Tomlinson has been selected ahead of him. The trainee is forced to move on and disappears into non-league obscurity, whilst everyone laughs at how silly Tomlinson looks trying to play professional football, and the gimmick is over. Unfortunately, so is the young trainee's career. Such is the knife-edge for young players.

Doncaster Rovers' new gimmick- er, signing.
Pic: http://www.calcioweb.eu/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/tomlinson.jpg

Across Yorkshire, Hull City have hammered the final nail into any sort of identity coffin with their re-branding as 'Hull City Tigers'. Their Egyptian owner deemed the suffix 'City' as 'too common'. Imagine! Formed in 1904, but forget it, some bloke passing through in 2013 doesn't like that, so you're Tigers lads, or we're going to the wall. Don't make me sell you to Coventry.

As supporters, if we choose to buy into anything other than the team and the ninety minute experience, are just play-things, or, at the very least, waiting to become play-things. We're kidding ourselves otherwise. And don't worry, there's nothing wrong with a bit of self-delusion. Football is built on such glorious imagination. I'm deceiving myself every day as a Blues fan that we'll retain our identity forever more. And there definitely are teams who still keep their dignity, for now, anyway. But who's to say what's next? Blues will likely have new owners within the next year, and who knows what crackpot scheme will evolve? Merger with Coventry? Don't forget lads, before our rich owner arrived, we were going to the wall. So you'll play as West Mercia FC or I'll sell you to Hull City Raccoons.

It is, of course, easier to whinge from the outside looking in. I can moan about the MCC being an old-fashioned, archaic Old Boys' Club, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't jump at the chance to have steak and chips in the Long Room. I think of the Premier League as a glass prism. Once inside, everything is distorted, phantasmagorical, the light is colourful and magical, and you forget there's a whole world outside. It takes a few years outside the glass prism to really appreciate the ninety minutes for what they are.

Every football fan.
http://www.empowernetwork.com/empowerednetworker/files/2012/08/Devil-and-Angel-Homer-New-300x205.jpg

I would take being in the Premier League in an instant and all it entails, on the pitch at least. And that, I guess, is why Sky Sports and its riches is such a powerful, Faustian drug, and why, for as far as I can see into the future, clubs will sell their souls to eat at the top table.

There's a little bit of the Devil in all of us.

Cricket Pundits vs Football Pundits- A Game of Two Halves

This summer, with no full-time job, I've treated myself to wall-to-wall Ashes coverage. Whilst watching I've wondered out loud, on Twitter and the like, how cricket punditry came to be so thoroughly excellent. At first I attribute it, as I do most things, to Sky Sports, but then I remember the ways that football punditry has stood still for the last twenty years, and I think again, desperately searching for reasons and for mitigation for football.

It is, admittedly, fashionable to knock football in the summer months, especially when every other British sport is excelling. The same arguments resurface about wages, laziness, and celebrity lifestyle, and it's easy to lump in punditry, particularly considering some of the fees that the Match of the Day talking heads command.

Football pundits- bad.
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/06/11/article-1025830-017D09EC00000578-572_468x370.jpg

But I've learned so much from watching The Ashes this summer, and I was hardly a novice in my knowledge of the sport to begin with. I've learned how Shane Watson is consistently a target for LBW decisions because of the way his front leg comes across his stumps; I've learned that Jonathan Bairstow is predominantly a bottom hand player, and as such, his technique lends itself to wayward, rash shots; and I've realised that Phil Hughes doesn't use his feet. Admittedly, you don't need Geoffrey Boycott to tell you the last fact in that little list, but the point still remains.

Then I try to remember what I learned from football's pundits last year. Not a lot. Strikers who score goals 'need to be watched', defenders who make mistakes 'get punished', and big strikers 'are a handful'.

But why? Why, with so much to talk about, are football pundits getting left behind? At first I put it down to the pace of the respective sports. Cricket ebbs and flows, it has natural lulls that need to be filled, whereas football, with its frenetic pace, lends itself more to description. Yet how do you explain fifteen minutes of platitudes in between halves on Super Sunday, or an hour and a half of matey generalisations on Match of the Day?

Cricket pundits- good.
http://www4.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/Nasser+Hussain+England+v+New+Zealand+pi1ezlr8d1Zl.jpg

Is it, akin to the desire to knock football at every turn, that we want to hate the football pundits? Is it that Alan Shearer is a sad Geordie *******, Stan Collymore played for the Villa, and Alan Hansen is a dour Scot that shouldn't be commenting on England anyway? Is it a partisanship that doesn't really exist in cricket? Sure, Geoffrey Boycott is synonymous with Yorkshire, but nobody really hates another county, not unless you've got a bit-part in Richard III, anyway.

Again, partisanship is fairly irrelevant. Take Gary Neville. An immensely divisive figure whilst playing for Manchester United, he has completely altered many people's opinions with his analytical punditry. Other football pundits are loved, relics of a bygone era like Barry Davies, but this is more for their lyrical qualities than their analysis of an offside trap. Pundits have to prove themselves in whatever sport, and Shearer, Hansen and Collymore have only reinforced the negative perceptions.

A touchy subject, but is it to do with education? Messrs Hussain and Atherton achieved degrees at Durham and Cambridge respectively, and are two of the more articulate commentators on our screens. On the other hand, I'm reminded of a quote from Mike Bassett: England Manager, where we learn that winger Alan Massey 'is not stupid. He's got five O-Levels,you know, including a D in Technical Drawing'. It is harder, and a bit of a silly decision, to marry a football career with a university degree. Why, therefore, is there a reluctance to use non-footballers as anything other than the Village Idiot, a sounding-board for the 'proper' pundits? I know that Adrian Chiles has knowledge of football, so why this bizarre deference to Roy Keane? I learn more from reading the views of 'ordinary' people on forums than I do from the apparent demi-gods of ITV Sport. Alas, it was ever thus. When an analyst from the Football Manager computer game series had the temerity to put his opinions across on Twitter, Stan Collymore, that oracle of football knowledge, went off on a rant about 'playing at the highest level'. Articulate you may be, possessing a degree in Classics having studied Aristotle and James Joyce, but until you've put Des Walker on his arse, you're nobody in football punditry, says Stan.

To continue along the theme of Stan and the Stats Man, there seems to be a perception that to analyse football to an acute degree is somehow geeky and weird, something to be left to the boffins, whilst MoTD chuckle about what a 'big unit' Christian Benteke is. This Luddism has spilled over into goal-line technology- for many years, something to be feared. Cricket, thankfully, got over that many years ago, and its punditry is better for it.

Why not have a Simon Hughes prototype statistician? Why do, for example, Tottenham struggle without Gareth Bale? Why did Stoke get so much joy from utilising height at set pieces, when the LA Lakers are rubbish at football? When Cristiano Ronaldo's weird bendy free-kick stance was analysed, it was like Man had discovered fire. I want more of that.

Perhaps there is just more to analyse in cricket. Yet people get a genuine joy out of listening to the raconteurs on Test Match Special, whereas I'd have probably got more out of listening to Showaddywaddy's Greatest Hits than hearing Shearer talk about how 'he's passed it, he's shot, and he's scored'.

Catharsis Cricket

One of the joys of the newly re-branded Sky Sports Ashes channel is the ubiquitous nature of the shows entitled 'Australia/England's Best Days'. One, as anyone who followed cricket in the mid-90s and early 2000s will testify, is far more frequent than the other. It's comical, in a way that only self-deprecating English cricket fans will find funny, to imagine archivists and producers rooting around amongst video tapes, frantically searching for England highlights, until they stumble upon that most dead of dead day's cricket, Day Five of the Fifth Ashes Test, where England's Andy Caddick took a few wickets and avoided a whitewash.

Soon, the boot will almost certainly be on the other foot. In one of the few rivalries where it is still acceptable to shout the opposition's nationality in a derogatory fashion (see 'you English bastard!' or, 'you Aussie convict!' for examples), Australia's class of 2013 are doing their best to turn this Ashes series into an anodyne walkover.

When a leading cricket betting writer is advocating a five-nil whitewash before the start of August as the best value punt, you know that the series is on its knees in terms of gambling profitability. As a sporting contest, the death knell is never far behind.

A notable sea-change to the Sky Sports Ashes schedule is when they get round to showing Edgbaston 2005. Glorious, glorious Edgbaston. I was there in that bear-pit of a Saturday Edgbaston crowd, and it remains one of the finest day's sport I've ever witnessed. That day, each Australian wicket was treated with a jubilant, mischievous roar, yet undoubtedly tinted with a hint of genuine tribal glee. There was a sense of 'eighteen years of hurt', and Fatty Warne, Trampy Gillespie and Little Man Syndrome Ponting were going to get it in the neck.

Fast-forward eight years to now, and England fans are sighing disappointedly, sympathetically, when Ashton Agar, the Australian debutant number eleven, gets out on 98. Have they forgotten all those years of misery? Or are the Australians just too bad to even bother getting worked up about? Too nice, even?

06-07 Ashes- tell me that doesn't make your blood boil.
http://www.mbennettphoto.co.uk/pictures/DEFAULT/Ashes%20Win%2006_07.jpg

I've tried my best to hate this current crop, but it's just too difficult. Shane Watson, if you look at his face, should be immediately dislikeable, but he seems intent on bringing his own side down from the inside, so he should be welcomed, not castigated, on these shores. Peter Siddle, who equally has a punchable face, should be vilified by supporters, but as he's the ultimate 'whole-hearted bowler', I find myself wanting more Siddles. Even David Warner, guilty of punching England batsman Joe Root in a Birmingham club, is only hated because of his own off-field follies, rather than his tenacious batting.

This is not to say that I'm not absolutely loving this series. Non-partisan fans might ask how such a one-sided contest, especially in a sport such as cricket, which relies on ebbs and flows, could ever be considered interesting. Cynics might ask whether I found 2006-07 as enjoyable, when England were whitewashed. For the non-partisans and the cynics, the answer lies in each other's questions. This is revenge, and anyone who feels sorry for Australia needs to spend a few hours watching 'Australia's Best Days'.

Even 2002-03, right at the tail-end of those eighteen years of hurt, still held a perverse enjoyment. We might not have realised it at the time, but those one-sided cricket series were brilliant. To use an analogy, it's a bit like the film The Usual Suspects. For the first ninety minutes, I always find myself wondering why I'm watching this slow, dull, average thriller. And then, because the last fifteen minutes is so excellent, I come away thinking 'no, actually it was brilliant after all'.

Catharsis Cricket
 http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/07/15/article-2364106-1ACFA9A9000005DC-134_634x457.jpg

For eighteen years, the Ashes might have seemed dreadful, yet we kept watching. It was only in 2005, when the Ashes were regained, that sitting through all that pain became worthwhile, and, mercifully, we're still reaping the benefits now.

This summer, like none other before, is catharsis cricket at its very best.

Ed Goes In-Seine: Coach Trip

I'm sat in a Parisian restaurant watching aghast as an extremely drunk Russian, who may or may not be a prostitute, gives a lap-dance to a pissed-up Brit whilst his wife prepares the divorce papers. A woman from Mumbai is palming roast potatoes onto my plate when I'm not looking, and I've just been handed what looks like eyebrow tweezers, along with a plate of snails. Meanwhile, a bloke plays 'Delilah' by Tom Jones on the accordion whilst the rest of the geriatrics sing along.

She stood there laughing. Ha ha ha ha.  

******

Many people, upon reading the introductory blog to this two-parter, questioned why I was taking a coach to Paris, when a multitude of options were available. Believe me, I asked myself that very same question as we sat in a car-park in Swindon at 8am. The practical answer is that you'd have to be mad to try and get round Paris on the metro with my grandparents, the world's most panicky people.

The idealist answer is that coach trips are always entertaining, aren't they? Entertaining, much in the way that Shameless is entertaining. We laugh cos it's not us.

Well, this time it was me.

Aside from a handful of 40-50 year olds, everyone on this trip was retired. Many of the passengers had been on a long voyage like this one before, seasoned travellers. Sadly for us, the 'long voyage' was seemingly a boat trip to the Underworld with Charon the ferryman, only to discover they didn't have the right fare, so he'd sent them to Paris instead.

Dover, and we met up with our coach drivers. One, named Chris, possessed an air of Scouse joviality masking the fact that he resented each and every one of us. The other, Mike, an old campaigner. I tried to place his accent, but the nearest I could get was 'miserable'.

'Hi, I'm Chris. On your right, that's My Ship'. He pointed to a ferry, the logo 'My Ship' plastered on the side. No-one dared laugh.

'It's mine actually', piped up an old man. A joke? On holiday of all places? He wouldn't last long.

But I was lost like a slave that no man could free.

*******
The first day, we had a coach tour round Paris. A red-haired eccentric tour guide got on the bus, baffled by the traffic of a Friday morning. In Paris? Quelle Surprise!

We didn't stop at the Eiffel Tower. Nor the Champs Élysées. Too mainstream, apparently.

After we'd paused for our tour guide, Maxine, to pick up some goat's cheese that she'd ordered, she invited us off the bus to examine a monument. To this day, I'm still not sure what it was, and I'm not entirely convinced Maxine knew either. She seemed to be conducting the 'Paris without the sights' sight-seeing tour.

Not to worry though. She'd spotted my youthful looks, and I was 'coming back again', apparently.

'You', she turned and pointed at an elderly woman, 'time will tell'.

'RIGHT, ALORS', she yelled, 'do you want to go and see a beautiful sixteenth-century church?'

'NO!' came the shout from a septuagenarian. This was democracy at its finest, and the coach rumbled on.

I watched and went out of my mind.

******
At the restaurant, a group meal.

'...365 marks, one for each day of the year, but don't ask me to count them!'

Facts? Here on the tour? Don't make me spit out my escargots.

I made the fatal mistake of turning round. He misinterpreted my glance for an invitation to chat.

'I used to be a tour guide you see, round Paris'.
'I see. Were you just discussing the Obelisk?'
'The one given by Ramses III as a gift to the French back in 1829? Yes I was'.

Versailles- all the same, really.

I turned back to my food, avoiding the stares of the is-she-isn't-she-prostitute as she got more liberal with the wine glass and more loose with the morals. A waiter who was filed under 'Archetypal French Disney Villain' muttered something about the Revolution under his breath. As the woman began to interfere with an accordion, my face must have protruded into a bizarre shape, as the Disney villain smiled. Another victim of the coach trip.

So before they come to break down the door.

******

The second full day, and seemingly nobody had been voted off the coach yet, but we were a couple light all the same. This being a coach full of old people, the 'return to the coach time' came fifteen minutes earlier than it should have been. A naive pair, probably busy enjoying their holiday, made the mistake of turning up at the coach a l'heure.

They were left behind.

Unsure if I was part of a Leger coach tour or a remaking of The Hunger Games, we continued to Monet's Garden and the Palace of Versailles.

'I'm not sure I'd fancy looking after a garden like that'.
'It's not that interesting when it's all the same, is it?'
'Doesn't do a lot for me'.
'...365 marks, one for each day of the year, but don't ask me to count them'.

Forgive me Delilah I just couldn't take any more.

******

Home-time arrived, and at 8:45, we stood in the car-park, ready for our 9:00 departure, naturally.

Only the Scouse driver was around, and his mask of joviality was slipping.

'Well how do I know where you are if you don't know where you are?'

Not ours. Sadly.

*Silence*
'You're where? Well what can you see?'
*Silence*
'The Arc de Triomphe? Jesus Christ...'

Overnight, our wheel had caught fire, and the One with the Unplaceable Accent had taken it to a garage in Paris. And had got lost.

Three hours I was stuck in that lobby, waiting for him to turn up. Three hours. Three hours of the elderly whingeing, but secretly loving every second of it. This was the highlight of the holiday for them. The hen-coop was bustling with the knowledge that the Scouse fox and the Unplaceable fox had to come back to the scene of the crime.

And they were going to badly review them to within an inch of their careers.

I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more.

******

We got home, eventually. The elderly women smiled at me as they got off the coach. Bless, the ill kid's come on holiday with his mum cos he can't look after himself. I couldn't be bothered to argue, explain that I was doing a degree and didn't actually know it was a coach trip until after I'd asked to come. By this point I was a vegetable, desensitised.

******

DISCLAIMER: I thoroughly enjoyed the city of Paris, and it ranks alongside Rome, London and Barnsley as one of my favourite places to spend a couple of days.

Just don't ask me to go by coach again.

Going In Seine? A Parisian Preview

Revision's getting me down. Cramped in a tiny space, staring at a small screen, genuinely not remembering what my life was like before exam season started. I have a vague recollection of it, but it feels a little bit like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. That was my life then, this is my life now. Everyone tries, but no-one quite understands your pain.

With that in mind, to alleviate the stress, I'm going on an organised coach trip with a load of old people, my mother and my septuagenarian grandparents. At least, I assume the coach trip will be full of old people.  I don't think it's going to be like This is Spinal Tap, put it that way. Admittedly, Paris lies at the end of this coach-trip, much in the same way that both Heaven and Hell lie at the end of purgatory.

My Mum's been on several coach trips recently. She says they're fun, but I think she means 'laughing at the moronic people is fun'.

Case in point: 4 days into her coach trip around the USA, they were asked to say a little about themselves. Anodyne stuff, until one Australian bloke declared,

'Hi, I'm Peter, and I'm bitter'.

And that was the end of the exercise.

I can't guarantee to blog about the architecture of Notre Dame, or the fine French cuisine, but rest assured, gems like these will be diligently reported.

My experiences of coach trips in recent years have been largely punctuated by awful, interminable official coaches travelling to away days with the Blues, in which bus drivers 'hilariously' put on Mission: Impossible as we travelled to North London for an ultimately fruitless relegation showdown. As if that wasn't bad enough, on the way home we were treated to an 'outrageous' 'flick' with 'Eddie Murphy' whilst people looked forward to the prospects of another coach trip to Barnsley.

So what do I expect from my four days with the cast of Cocoon? Fourth toilet stop by Dover? Pickled onions being passed round the back of the bus? Eddie Murphy? It doesn't bear thinking about, it really doesn't.

I might be being pessimistic. When I informed Twitter of my impending holiday, I was told by one person that it would be like 'going on holiday with twenty versions of your Nan'. Bon-bons, Horlicks and racist generalisations, then.

The last time I went to Paris for an extended period of time (mysterious, no?), I cried at seeing Captain Hook and shit myself. That won't be happening this time.

We're not going to Disneyland.

*credit to one of my followers on Twitter for the title- the best effort in a plethora of wonderful puns*

Re-marks on hitting 20

I'm 20 next Sunday.

Normally, I'd think to myself, like every birthday, that 'oh, it doesn't feel that different to 19, or even 12'.

But it really, really does. There's an old cricketer's adage that once reaching a half-century, or a century, you should re-mark your guard, and build your innings again. The equivalent to that tit in every Sunday League football side that shouts 'it's still 0-0!' Even though it's not 0-0. Baffling.

Spot the world-weary one

The last few months almost seem like they've been designed for me to re-mark my guard. I never hit a century in cricket, or a half-century, but I did once hit 20. So I'm re-marking here.

Figures from my childhood have been outed as horrible, vile monsters, cheating me into giving them my laughter and attention. Other lynchpins of my childhood have disappeared into glorious and deserved retirement, when you believed they'd go on forever. Whoever decides these things have even released my favourite novel as a film a week before my birthday, almost by way of drawing a line under the last twenty years.

I didn't write a blog when I was 10, mercifully. I was on holiday in Amsterdam. Canal trips and museums, not weed and whores, before you ask. But if I did, I'd have jotted down the following conversations 10-year-old me might have had with present-day me.

'Go on, Ed'.
'What?'
'There's The Great Gatsby. Take it by way of a birthday present'.
'But I don't want it. The film will be a let-down. There's no way they can transfer the floral prose of F. Scott Fitzgerald onto the big screen. Especially with Baz Luhrmann at the helm. Did you keep the receipt?'
'It's non-returnable. It's the Apollo in Leamington meeting Hollywood. They don't do receipts. Now go and watch it, and find a different book to define yourself by for the next ten years. Maybe some Ben Elton'.

'Oy, Ted'.
'What? Why are you calling me Ted? That's a name from my childhood'.
'Sir Alex Ferguson has retired. David Moyes has taken over'.
'What? David Moyes? He's still Preston manager, isn't he? I remember, they beat us in the play-offs, like, yesterday, and I'm still not quite over it, and-'
'Well, he's clearly got over it. He's Manchester United manager. And why haven't you got over it? You won a trophy. You saw it, with your sister. A generation to finally see Blues win a trophy whilst still being at school. That wiped away all the pain'.

'Ed. Wake up. Sports Report. The music. Start whistling'.
'Fantastic. Is that funny bloke still on it? Really like him. Proper, vintage voice. Old-school'.
'He's run into some trouble. Pleading guilty to some nasty crimes'.
'Oh, really? But I always loved driving home from the match with my Dad, laughing at him, wondering what on earth was going on in the match. I really hope it doesn't taint memories for people'.

'Ed. Ed. Why aren't you revising?'
'Revising? I don't need to revise. I'm going to be a footballer'.
'You're not. You were crap at football. You were crap at all sport. You dance instead'.
'Fuck off'.

In some ways it feels like someone's given me an Etch-a-Sketch as an early birthday present, imploring me into wiping it clean, and urging me to move on and find new things to define my life by, rather than Paul Scholes. I guess that can't be a bad thing. In other ways, it feels like Armageddon, as if the Millennium Bug will somehow shut down my body when I have to put a '2' as the first digit in my age.


You'd think, in a digital age, this sort of stuff wouldn't happen. I don't mean my body shutting down, that's nonsense. I mean feeling distanced from the past. I'm a couple of clicks away from locating 'Brum' on YouTube, or a Paddington audiobook. But even that's a contradiction. Clicks? YouTube? Audiobook?

Plus ça change...

A review of August Wilson's 'Fences' with Lenny Henry

Here is a link to my review of August Wilson's Fences, seen at Malvern Theatre on the 11th April 2013, starring Lenny Henry as Troy Maxson. The article was written for Warwick University's student newspaper, The Boar.

http://theboar.org/arts/2013/apr/18/lenny-henry-stars-august-wilsons-fences/