England vs Ireland at rugby.

What a game it was. A thoroughly northern hemisphere affair. No elegant passes out to the winger who skips like a gazelle down three quarters of the pitch, arcing around slightly after outrunning the hapless last line of defence, to touch down under the posts.
No. This was good old fashioned grappling about in the mud. Inching forward and considering every inch a sort of victory in itself.
Big men hitting each other in a big way. If this hadn't happened on a sports pitch, just about everyone involved could have criminal charges brought against them. As it was, no-one even got sent off.
In rugby, aiming a few well weighted punches at your opponent's head after the scrum has broken up, is invariably described as, "A little bit of nonsense."
The referee, who is like a firm but fair teacher at some public school, steps in, gives the culprits (or, chaps) a stern talking to, and it's back to the terrifying, bone-crunching action.
In football this would never happen.
In football, you don't fight. That's because handbags aren't allowed on the pitch.
You just sleep with your team-mate's wife and then ask for a pay rise.
I do have to say that today's very entertaining game was spoiled slightly by the assistant commentator.
I don't see the point of assistant commentators at the best of times, but today they had chosen some guy called Brian. I either missed or they never said what his assistant commentator credentials were, but I assume he was English.
He mostly said things like, "That's a disgracful decision by the referee, to give Ireland a penalty."
Or, " You can clearly see that Ireland were offside there. That try shouldn't count."
It was like I had invited a skinhead in Union Jack boxer shorts round to my flat to watch the game.
I found that during tense moments of the game I couldn't help myself from shouting, " Shut your fat pork-pie-eating mouth, Brian!"
While he said, " England should have had a penalty there."
It spoiled the game a little, as I found it stirred feelings of nationalistic animosity in me, which is totally against the spirit of rugby.
The game was good. Thirty big lads trying to get a ball from one end of a field to the other.
Brilliant!

Pain.

I am in pain. I went to the chiropractor today. My shoulder was sore. Now, after the treatment, it feels worse. Apparently this sometimes happens.
But anyway I am sitting at home feeling sorry for myself.
And she is just standing there whining at me.
So I said, " Why does it always have to be about you? What about me? I'm in pain here."

I never thought I would say that to a cat.

War films and musicals.

I sort of like war films sometimes. And I hate musicals with a passion.
But I was just watching a war film, and I realised they are not that dissimilar.
The thing I hate about musicals is that when people burst into song, you just have to sit through four or five minutes that effectively do nothing to advance the plot. Then the song ends and the dialogue begins again.
Well I just noticed war films are much the same.
They start out with a bit of a story. Then it becomes necessarry to do a bit of fighting, and you just get a few scenes of people shooting and throwing grenades and stunt-men doing somersaults out of machine gun towers, and then it's back to the story.
Cowboy films, on the other hand,the violence is usually quite short-lived, and tends to advance the plot somewhat.
"You dirty dog! You killed my partner, and now I'm going to kill you."
Bang. Bang.
And there's a narrative development.
Not like, "There's no business like Show Business, like no business I know!"
Or, senseless amounts of pyrotechnics and gunfire and then back to the story.
Maybe I'm on to something here.
Vietnam, the musical, perhaps?

My cat is obsessed with the paranormal

My cat is obsessed with things that don't really exist. She chases shadows and reflections with an almost disturbing amount of zeal.
But if a real mouse walked into the room, she would ignore it as if it was just a new piece of furniture I had bought.
All she would think, "Where is the box it came in? I like to sit in boxes. Where is the box?"
It's a mouse. Your natural enemy. It doesn't come in a box. Just go and kill it, you daft cat.
"I'm hungry. Where's my food?"
So I go and feed her.
I swear, I came home from work one day and found a little bird flying around my house.
Lucy was sitting there totally oblivious. If it was a tin of Felix with wings, flying about my living room she might have attacked it.
But, no.
Daft, useless cat.

Fear of nuclear war

Did you ever have that?
In the Eighties it used to haunt my every waking (and a lot of my sleeping) hours.
I still have this stupid superstition that if I don't start and finish walking up or down stairs on my right foot, it will cause a nuclear war.
Apparentlly Switzerland is littered with underground shelters people had built in preparation for the inevitable Armageddon.
I wonder what they do with them now?
It might be fun to set up a tourist industry where people go and spend two weeks in one of them, pretending that the outside world has obliterated itself, and they just sit in there, eating corned beef and pooing in a chemical toilet, before emerging to find that the earth is still a beautiful place where birds sing and trees grow.
It might make everyone realise that nuclear weapons are a pretty stupid idea.
To date, only the ones dropped on Japan in the Second World War are the only nuclear weapons ever to have been used. And to be fair, the people who did it didn't really realise how devastating they were going to be. And as is the nature of science, when the first one had such a devastating effect, they thought, "Maybe we had better test another one, just to make sure the first one wasn't a fluke."
That was good news for scientific research, but bad news for people living in Nagasaki.
The first one wasn't a fluke.
Thus the MAD policy grew up. Mutually Assured Destruction.
The Russians took it to mad proportions, when in the Eighties they developed a bomb so big, it could annhialate all life on the planet.
Instead of asking them to wise up, the Americans started talking about a "Star Wars" plan, to launch sattelites to shoot down the "Sword of Damocles" and protect the USA.
Meanwhile, I lay in my bed, worrying equally about my O'Levels and being burnt to a crisp at any second.
I don't know why it never happened. Because for ages, I thought it was only a matter of time.
Maybe it was Mikhael Gorbachov, maybe it was people just saying, "This is madness."
But it is strange how the cold war all ended so quickly all of a sudden.
And kids growing up now don't live under the fear of the bomb the way we did.
Maybe our parents and grandparents grew up under the shadow of a real and horrific war, but I feel that I grew up under the threat of something I had no control over, something that scared the life out of me.
I hope that is gone now.
If I may just add an opinion to this, and it is only an opnion, I think our Government would do better to furnish our troops better in the wars they are engaged in, than to spend a vast amount of money on re-newing a nuclear arsenal that we are we are never going to use.
And maybe while I am at it, I can add an observation. Does the word, "opinion" not bear quite a resemblance to the the word, "onion"?

Things I don't like.

This might take while. Maybe I should call it "Things I don't like Part One".
Okay, well, diving right in... people who stand outside my house and repeatedly bang a stick against a lamp-post for no apparent reason. I don't like that.
Let's see. What else do I not like.
People who phone me up and tell me I owe them money and make out like they are somehow providing me with a service. I don't like that very much. I am sorely tempted to just scream obscenities at them. But usually I don't. I usually just say, "Fair enough", and give them my bank details and allow them to drain loads of money out of my bank account.
What else?
Adverts for the Halifax seem to particularly irritate me. It's not that they are one of the banks who behaved so stupidly with money that wasn't theirs, it's more that their adverts are just really annoying. Is Halifax a city?
If so it must be one of very few cities that begin with the letter H. Try to think of any other cities that begin with the letter H.
.......
Struggling?
Try Hiroshima.
Now, I don't know, because I wasn't at that particular meeting, but I assume the Americans had some reason to obliterate Hiroshima rather than some other Japanese city. Here we are, we've got a really big bomb and we're going to drop it on Japan.
What about Tokyo?
No. Too obvious.
Well I've never heard of anywhere else in Japan.
I've heard there's a place called Nagasaki.
Hmm. Interesting. But maybe later.
Well I don't know about you fellers, but I've always hated the letter H. Something to do with the symmetry of it just riles me so.
Nods of agreement.
So I'm reckonin' we find a city that begins with the letter H, and drop our big bomb on that.
Good idea. What about Halifax?
No. I don't think so. They're on our side. It needs to be somewhere in Japan.
Well, Jeepers, Creepers. We might be here all night! Do the Japanese even have the capability of grasping the concept of the letter H? They certainly, to date, do not have the ability to corner the world market in video games!
Hang on, guys. There's a place called Hiroshima.
How do you pronounce that?
Hiroshima.
That won't do at all. It sounds too much like Auschwitz. We'll have to pronounce it Heer-o-shima. That sounds good, it sounds foreign, let's do this!
And then they did it. Incinerated children who looked up at the sky on fire and maybe wondered, "Why would anyone do this to us?" before their hair caught fire and their skin melted and their eyes exploded.
Let's see. What else do I not like?

A dubious toy?

I don't know. It's one of the things I never dabbled with. Partly because my Dad once, quite seriously, told me not to. You would have thought I would have immediately gone and sought one out after that. But I never did. Because my Dad was quite serious about it, which struck me as weird. I would have thought my Dad would dismiss such a thing as nonsense.
Then when I was at art college, I went out with this girl. We went to the cinema one night and I think it was that film"Ghost". Afterwards she was in a really bad mood, and I couldn't figure out why. It wasn't that bad a movie. Later she told me that there had been a scene in that film with a Oiuja board in it. And she went on to tell me she had used one when she was at boarding school. She said it was a terrifying experience and later that evening she was rescued by a passer-by, from trying to drown herself in the sea.
So I don't know. I would normally be sceptical about those sorts of things, which I sort of associate with Victorian parlour games that people indulged in because TV hadn't been invented yet.
But if my Dad warned me off it so vehemently, and that girlfriend, who was a pretty balanced sort of person, walked into the sea because of it, and got really upset just because of the sight of one in a film years later, maybe there is something to it.
I am talking about this because I am off work this week as it is half term at the college, and I am watching "the Wright Stuff", a strange mid-morning show on TV. Strange, because other than the fact it is on TV, in every other regard it is effectively a radio show. They just talk about topical things, review the papers and encourage people to phone in with their opinions. It is a fairly light-hearted affair. It's not like "Newsnight" or anything. One of the guests today is Mark Little, who used to be Joe Mangle in "Neighbours", so that should pretty much tell you the pitch of the show. Mark Little is very entertaining actually. Very funny. In case you saw the show, he should have gone to Specsavers. But it was quite an enjoyable show, although one that leaves you with the vaguely uncomfortable feeling that you should really have something more important to do. Which I do. I have a couple of paintings to be getting on with. But experience has taught me that I don't paint well in the morning. Well, it's not so much that I don't paint well. I don't paint at all. I potter about in the studio, finding any excuse not to paint until after lunch. I don't know why. You would think I would take advantage of the natural light which streams in in abundance through my north-facing studio window. But no, I think I'll just have another cup of tea first, and the cat's litter tray could do with being changed.
I know I should be more like Picasso, who once said, "I paint all day and f**k all night."
Nice work if you can get it. I f**k around half the day and paint all night. I'm not as rich as Picasso, but I'm not as bald either. And I have the added advantage of still being alive. So that's one nil to me.
Anyway, "the Wright Stuff" was talking about how a toy company is marketing a Ouija board as a game for kids. Given my, admittedly, second-hand experience of the subject I would say this might be a bad idea.
You might as well buy them a chemistry set, or Dungeons and Dragons, or God forbid, buy them a paintbox and encourage them to be an artist for a living. That will screw them up.

Sex education at school.

Do you remember that?
Diagrams of willies and fannies and words like "aroused" being openly bandied about in the middle of a science lesson. I seem to remember there was very little sniggering going on during all of this, which is probably much to the credit of Mr. Lynas, our science teacher. One wag, and there is always one, said,"Do you ever get aroused, sir?"
"Yes." he answered, without a blink of an eye. "It is a normal and physical reaction."
Maybe it is. But can you picture yourself saying that in front of thirty 12 year-olds?
Well done, Mr. Lynas. He drove a really crap car as I remember, so teachers really must have been badly paid in those days. I don't know how much you would have to pay me to stand up in front of a bunch adolescents and admit that I sometimes get a hard-on, but it would have to be a lot.
I also used to quite regularly get given a lift to school by a teacher, Mr. McCready, who came spluttering along the road in a Citreon 2CV, and stopped to pick me up when I was standing at the bus stop. I bet not many teachers do that these days. I kind of liked it. It taught me something. It taught me that my Dad was an awful lot richer than this guy. For example, my Dad's car looked different on the inside than on the outside. This guy's car was basically just a tin box with a very noisy engine attached to it. I used to love it when the bus turned up before he did. At least the bus had a heater.
He didn't even have a radio, so we had to make shouted conversation over the deafening blare of the 2 horse power engine.
SO WHAT ARE YOU STUDYING AT THE MOMENT?
MACBETH.
WHAT?
MACBETH!
DON'T SAY THAT! IT'S BAD LUCK. YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO SAY THE SCOTTISH PLAY he said as we veered off the road and hit a tree.
No, we didn't really, but it would be a good story if it was true.

A Valentine maessage.

I don't care that much about it. There was only one occassion in my entire life where I had a girlfriend on Valentine's Day. We went to a disco, and I gave her a card I made myself. I bought her a flower that was seriously over-priced. I'd never bought her a flower before, and when I gave it to her, she just looked vaguely confused, took it, said,"That's nice." and then threw it away.
On the way to the disco we stopped by Sefton Park to watch a man playing the bag-pipes. He was just standing there in a kilt and everything, playing the bag-pipes.
I thought,"Either this LSD is really good, or there actually is a man in a kilt playing the bag-pipes in Sefton Park while we are going to a disco."
Then I realised that the first Gulf War was going on at the time, and it was probably something to do with that. His brother, or best friend had probably just been killed, and there he was in Sefton Park banging out a pretty good tune on the bag-pipes, dressed up in all his gear, and the only people who saw it were a couple of in-love spaced out student hippies.
We watched him for a while and then went on our way.
Later the LSD really did kick in. So we had enough on our minds and never discussed the strange piper we had seen earlier. At one point, at about three o'clock in the morning, we tried to have sex. I don't know if you have ever tried to have sex on LSD.
But it didn't really work like it normally does. For one thing I didn't feel that connected with her like I normally did. It wasn't all fireworks and nice things like it normally was. It was just a stupid physical thing we were doing to each other, and something about it seemed vaguely wrong, somehow, like we were doing it in front of our parents.
And The other thing was, it never really came to that conclusion that it normally does. I kept thinking, "This is weird. Weird how close we are to each other. Her eyes are so big. I could almost fall into them. And she might have been thinking, "That damp patch on his ceiling looks a bit like Australia. Maybe I will go there one day."
Eventually we just gave up, and lay there hugging each other until the birds started singing and the rotten drugs wore off. Then I got up and made us a cup of tea and my flat-mate, a girl, came in and saw me standing there in the kitchen with no clothes on.

I might give up being an illustrator and become a commentator's side-kick on TV football.

That is certainly the longest title I have ever given to a posting on this internet web log. And my footballing commentator side-kick alter-ego would feel obliged to chip in, "You're certainly right in what you say there, Michael. There's definitely no denying that he's used more words in that title than what he normally does."
I was just thinking about it as I watched the footage of Archie Gemmell's goal in the 1978 World Cup.
The commentator didn't have a side-kick in those days, and the commentary was fairly minimal.
"Here's Gemmell.
Gemmell.
Gemmell!
What a goal by Archie Gemmel!"
That, it seems to me, is pretty much all you need as you leap about the living room,cheering, up-ending bowls of crisps and tins of pop. But today you would get a little post-script from some inarticulate footballing has-been, along the lines of, "Gemmell has certainly gone through the Dutch defence there Jackie, and as you say, what a finish!"
We know that. It's TV. We just sat here and watched it happen.
So here's me back in the studio for the post-match analysis, with Alan Hansen on one side and Mark Lawrenson on the other.
"Well, for me, Gary, the BBC definitely sent too many men out there on first class tickets, to do nothing more than state the blatantly obvious. At the end of the day."
You never seem to see those jobs advertised in the papers. I have all the qualifications. I've even got a cheap suit.

Again?

Yes again!
I don't know. I find it expunges something from me. Like, well at least I've done something.
I know what I want to draw. I've bought all the stuff I need to do it. I've done the embarrassingly bad sketches, a sort of brain-storming session with myself. Graphic designers take note. Brain-storming with yourself is not easy.
"Oh, that's a good idea. But wouldn't it be better if you had exactly the same idea, and even though you realise that idea needs a bit of development, you just can't think beyond it?"
It is a lonely life. The life of an illustrator.
I think I would rather be a spy.
You are in constant danger, but you always seem to have plenty of money. And guns.
I don't have any money. Or guns. And frankly it is starting to get on my nerves.
And my balls are constantly itchy. It's not lice. I know about those boys.
I suppose I will have to go to the doctor on Monday, and say, "Hello Doctor, my balls are constantly itchy."
And after the humiliating personal questions are all over with, hopefully he will prescribe something that will allow me to get on with my life without scratching like a dog. It's not just my balls actually. It's everywhere.
My entire body is just one huge itch longing to be scratched at every minute of the day.
The funny thing is, the only place where there is any sign of a rash of any sort is my arms, which don't itch that much most of the time.
But, God. When it really starts itching, you almost wish you were dead. Scratching it only makes it go away until you stop scratching. And there are social occassions where it is not acceptable to be frantically massaging your testicles and saying, " Jesus, that's such a relief."
Doctor appointment first thing Monday, I think.
As for the illustration thing, I can do that tomorrow between scratchings.

Painting

I think I like writing more than painting.
I can sit and write this rubbish quite easily.
But the prospect of actually painting seems to fill me with dread these days.
I know I can do it. I just don't want to.
It hurts to paint. It hurts that I know that I will put hours into something that no-one will ever care about, and it will sit about my flat mocking me.
I, personally can't stand art in my own house.
You just get sick of it.
Looking at art is like going to  the cinema.
You do it when you're in the mood for it. You don't want to come home and be confronted with it every day of the week.
I pity the Pope, with that bloody Cistene Chapel and all.

Thinking outside the box.

This is a term that basically means, not really answering the brief.
You should try it if you are anyway employed (or trying to be employed) in any creative industry.
I am about to try it today, right now, as soon as I get off my backside and actually do a bit of "work".
When I was at college, there was this guy from Hong Kong on our illustration course. When they gave out the brief, most people went away and researched it meticulously before coming up with what was referred to as a "solution".
Pak took a different approach. It may have had something to do with his perfunctory command of the English language. It may have been that he was a genius on a par with Pablo bloody Picasso.
Pak just went away and drew whatever the hell he felt like. His drawings were always delicate. They had that bleedy watercolour quality, overlaid with a bold, confident ink line.
They were never less than fantastic, any more than they bore any relation to the brief.
Some people used to complain at our presentations, "But he hasn't answered the brief!"
It didn't matter. At the end of the course, Pak got a first class honours degree. Maybe he was on to something. To hell with the brief. Just go for broke on the illustration. If you put the hours in, that will carry you through. Thinking too hard about the content may, in essence, dilute the end result. Also, an image that seems not to relate too much to the subject is often more arresting than something too obvious.
It makes you look twice and think, "Hang on. What has that got to do with that?" And BANG! You've captured attention.
How often have you seen a full page advert for a car in the paper which features a picture of...the car, and you just turn over the page without hardly looking at it? If they had a picture of a man standing on a balcony wrestling with a fishing rod, trying to reel in a wellie boot, you would stop for a minute and think, "Hang on, what's this all about?"
And you would take time to read the crappy copy.
"Do you yearn for the open road? The freedom to make your dreams come alive? Or do you just want a car that will get you into work and back home at the end of the day, with a radio that allows you to listen to Womens' Hour while you sit in traffic wondering whether you should bother buying a present for some distant relative you hardly ever see, or just send them a card?"
Buy a Volvo, you boring boring, but sensible person, or buy a Porsche, you sexually inadequate rugby rugby rugby rugby rugby loving shouty person."
Hey! It's up to you.

I wanna know what love is...

As Foreigner warrble unconvicinglly.
I hope you can tell me.
Because if it means anything like what Foreigner are talking about, I will happily give it a miss.
But I think I was in love once. Once. But long ago.
I remember it well.
I was lying in bed with this girl and everything was all right, and then she said, "I love you."
And, to my credit, I said, "That's nice."
But later, I did love her too.
But then she dumped me to go out with someone who lived closer to her house.
Twenty year olds are fickle that way.
I suppose the practicalities of love were coming into play there.
"Well, I really love him, but he lives two hundred miles away, so I will just dump him mercilessly, and go out with some guy that lives more locally. That seems like the practical solution."
And so she did.
And I got over it.
I suppose it was a reasonable enough thing to do.
But sometimes I wonder if she ever regretted it.
If it never worked out with that guy, and secretly she still yearns for me.
Probably not.

Valentine's Day!

Some single people hate Valentine's Day. I don't.

They say they are made to feel like outcasts. Excluded from the festivities.

What festivities? Going to a restaurant with candles on the table and mushy music playing ( I wanna know what love is, I want you to show me. I wanna feel what love is, I know you can show me). Single people don't go to restaurants anytime never mind Valentine's Day , so it's not like we're missing out on anything. 

I used to wait tables at a restaurant and Valentine's Day was always an easy night. The place was booked up months in advance by cheap-skate Romeos determined to romance their chips-fond-of Juliets (it was a pretty down-market restaurant that specialised in deep fried cuisine, that made up for in quantity what it lacked in quality).

It was great. "Hello, a table for two? Why not sit over there where we normally have a table of ten obnoxious, cackling, quick to complain, office-working morons who think because they're out for a sit-down dinner, they are entitled to be treated like royalty?"

It was easy for the chef too. Because she knew every sad man-Jack and Lady-Jill of them was going to order off the special menu which had been hastily typed up on parchment-style paper with little roses printed at the corners, and the kind of purple prose that disguises the fact that this was much the same crappy fast-food we served up pretty much all the time.

"Luscious breasts of succulent truffle-fed chicken, drenched in its own oyster jus. With thick chips and steamy aparagus."

Aye. Another two of those please, chef.

There you are!

That was quick.

Here, you might as well take these ones out to table two while you're at it.

But they haven't even ordered yet. 

Aye, trust me. Just take it out. And go up to the store and get me a couple of bottles of cooking sherry. It's going to be a long, easy, predictable night.

And no-one complains. They just sit and goggle each other and order a lot of wine, and order one dessert to share. "You have that bit."

"No you have that bit."

"No, it's got too much cream on it. I'm watching my figure."

"I think you look gorgeous just the way you are."

"Really?"

"Yes. Yes. Will...will you marry me?"

Hmm? Have we got any Champagne in the fridge? Maybe I should go and check.

Suddenly there is an emergency in the kitchen. The dishwasher informs me that the sous chef has barfed all over some plates in the sink. As supervisor, it is my job to reprimand him, but that is difficult when he is swaying between unconciousness and drunken psychopathy with a big sharp knife in his hand.

I bring to bear all my crisis management training, and instruct the kitchen porter to cover the said plates with puff pastry crusts, drizzle strawberry sauce hearts on them, garnish them with a dollop of chocolate ice-cream and a sprig of mint, and send them out as complementary rhubarb tart, with a complimentary bottle of wine, one each for staff and customers alike.

This seems to work. An ambience of merriment soon infuses the restaurant, and there are tips a-plenty, which is not surprising, considering most of these feckless gombeen customers have willfully shelled out thirty quid for a hideously tastless, woefully inadequate bunch of garish red flowers with a polystyrene heart with "I Love You!" crudely painted on it, not half an hour before they came here and paid twice what they normally would for food cooked and served by a crowd of mysanthropes, at least twice as drunk and uncaring as they normally are.

Hooray for St. Valentine!

By the way, if you can even bring yourself to watch that video, it may be a lesson in not to be too literal.

The "World on my shoulders" line demonstrates a particular inability to grasp the concept of metaphor.

Unless it is ironic, of course, which before I go to bed tonight, I will kneel at the side of my bed and pray to Christ it is.

But I guess if you are going to go to the trouble of patching together a cheap video for a Foriegner song, you are bound to be a bit of a dick in the first place.

Goodnight, children.

World Cup picture cards

Back in 1978, I used to collect these. The World Cup was on in Argentina at the time. The nation's interest was heightened by the fact that Scotland were there, England, Wales and Ireland North and South all having failed to qualify, the United Kingdom truly did unite behind "Ally's Army". It looked good at first. Scotland were drawn in a group with Peru, Iran, and Holland. Even those unfamiliar with international football in the late Seventies, might not be surprised to learn that Iran were not considered much of a threat to anyone. Peru weren't supposed to be very good either. Holland were mighty opponents, these being the days of Johann Cryuff, a sort of Dutch version of Pele or George Best.

But hopes were high that we, and "we" were suddenly all Scottish, could win the first two games and that would be enough to carry us through, regardless of the result of the Holland game.

Meanwhile, I ate as many packets of "All Stars" as my pocket money would allow. All Stars were a sort of corn snack crisp created by Golden Wonder specifically for the World Cup. They were a bit like those Space Invader crisps you get now. They stick to your teeth and only come in pickled onion flavour, so it's a good thing I was too young to be trying to kiss girls at the time. The real attraction of All Stars was that they had World Cup picture cards. You got one in each packet, and there were thirty or so to collect. I don't know if this was a nationwide thing, but at my primary school they certainly caused a veritable firestorm of frenzied corn snack consumption. Shares in Golden Wonder must have gone through the roof, as every ten year old boy, vaguely reeking of pickled onion, bought All Stars every time they were in possession of five pence, and a ruthless and frantic bartering system blossomed.

"I'll give you six Roberto Bettigas for one Zico." (pictured)

"No way! Everyone's got more Bettigas than they know what to do with. He's almost as common as Archie Gemmell."

Archie Gemmell was the most common card. At one point I could have wallpapered my bedroom in Archie Gemmells. Of course, Golden Wonder were obviously exploiting our childish enthusiasm. They were holding back on a few cards. Notably, the Brazilian maestro, Rivelino. Now, the sensible thing to do would have been to build up your collection for a while, and then, when you got your fiftieth Bettiga and your ten thousandth Archie Gemmell, stop buying All Stars for a while, until Golden Wonder started playing fast and loose with the Rivelinos.

Over in Argentina, events were not unfolding according to plan for Scotland.

In their opening game they got beaten by Peru. This was a disaster, as it meant that even after the foregone conclusion of beating Iran, they would have to at least draw with Holland to have a chance to progress to the knock out stage.

Then a surprising thing happened. Golden Wonder, sensing the atmosphere of disillusionment, released a few Rivelinos onto the market. Tommy Boyd got one. He showed me it.

"What shop did you get it in?"

He wouldn't even tell me.

Sales suddenly soared like never before. The classroom stank of pickled onion, and people resorted to offering to trade Subbuteo teams, Scalectrix sets and Evil Knevil stunt bikes for a Rivelino card.

It was like a ten year old version of the .com bubble.

In the midst of this, the unthinkable happened. Iran drew with Scotland, effectively making it impossible for Ally's Army to go through.

The English started refering to Scotland as "Scotland" again, instead of "us" and huge stockpiles of Archie Gemmell cards were ceremoniously burnt in massive bonfires of shameful disgust. God knows there were enough of them.

Then something strange happened. I bought a packet of All Stars. And there it was. A Riveleno.

That night, Scotland were playing their meaningless game against Holland. I looked at my now complete collection of World Cup picture cards, and thought how futile, how pointless it all now seemed.

Then a really fantastic thing happened.

Archie Gemmell, the last footballer who ever tried to fool everyone that he had a full head of hair by employing a comb-over, the most common card in the collection, that you couldn't swap for anything, skipped through probably the best defensive team in the world at the time, as if he was playing against a team of primary school children, and aimed in what is arguably the best goal ever scored in the history of football.

For those of you too young to remember it, it is honoured in a scene from the movie "Trainspotting".

But to see it at the time was pure joy.

Archie was like William Wallace. It didn't matter that Scotland were out. They had won, even though they had lost.

I wish I still had one of those Archie Gemmell cards. It would mean more to me than a hundred Rivelinos.

A funny thing is, when I went to art college in Liverpool, in 1991, my tutor, a man by the name of Doug Harker, showed us a portfolio of his illustration work. In among it was a series of World Cup picture cards he had been commissioned to do for Golden Wonder in 1978.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB0nFze1Fdw

oh

i just wrote something really meaningful and deep. but it's lost now forever. oh, well.

One word

If you had to describe yourself in one word, what would that word be?
Fat?
Thin?
Boring?
GSOH?
AbletofacilitateanddeveloprelationshipsandconnectivivitywithinacommunnutiybasedrelationshipwiththecouncilinacrosscommunnityenvironmentdeliveringITsolutionsonashortdeadlinebasisinacompetetivemarketenvironment?

Okay, now. Who's first up against the wall?

Is there ever a time when it can be justified to put someone up against a wall and shoot them?
What if it was you?
I mean, it seems to me, the only reason these things happen is because of a difference of opinion.
It seems harsh to kill someone just because you are in a position of power and they disagree with you.
Let's take an extreme example.
Nazis!
They thought it was okay to gas lots of people who disagreed with them. They got away with it for a long time, mostly because the rest of the world didn't feel threatened enough to do anything about it.
The British farted about in Africa defending their colonies long before they took any action to stop Jews and Gypsies and intellectuals being shovelled into furnaces.
The Americans were worse. At one point they might have come in on either side.
But when it was all over, they set up a court and said this or that person should be put against a wall and shot. Well, I think they actually hanged them, but what difference? Maybe they should have crucified them.
Who gave them the right?
The British hunted Aboriginees to extinction in Tazmania. The Americans had a good go at doing the same thing. There are statues all over the bloody place honouring the pioneering achievements of men who instigated this genocide.
There was a point to this, but I can't remember what it was.
I'm going to bed.
I just hope someone doesn't drag me out of it in the middle of the night and shoot me because I prefer salty popcorn over sweet.