Making A Mocha-ry Of Chocolate

Just a quickie tonight. I realise I have overloaded your brains with blogs this week, not all of which you have liked, but I couldn't let this one pass without comment. I can't let much pass without comment, truth be told.

Why don’t companies selling alternative flavours of popular products use different coloured packaging? I’ve just erroneously eaten a Kit-Kat Mocha and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. I hate anything coffee flavoured. I can’t drink coffee. This actually disappoints me more than anything. Every morning on the drive to work I marvel at how much the general public must spend on unnecessarily huge cartons of coffee from Costa, Starbucks or Nero and think that I’m missing out on something. If everyone is drinking it in such large quantities on the way to work, and spending so much to do so, then it must have a positive effect on them. It could all be in their minds, but even a placebo is better than nothing.

I have tried coffee numerous times, naively thinking that I can conquer my distaste of it. It didn’t seem unreasonable. I wouldn’t eat pizza until I was about 20 because of the amount of tomato on it. That was until I was very drunk and hungry one night and someone gave me a slice to try. Rather like when I first tried beer properly, I haven’t stopped eating pizza since. Except for that one time when I threw my pizza at a bloke in a taxi rank. I’d offered him a slice and he sniffed it and gave it back to me. How rude. I was in a transitional period that night. Which means I was drunk.

So anyway back to bloody Kit-Kat. I know I asked the question about why companies disguise their flavoured alternatives but I know the answer. It’s because they know that if they didn’t then nobody would buy the bloody things. Who in their right mind buys vanilla Coke, or Coke Lime or whatever the feck it is called? Every single can of this shite has been bought by someone who didn’t have time to look properly at the can and just picked up a red can thinking it was the real deal. It’s how Brendan Rodgers must have felt when he signed Mario Balotelli.

It’s been suggested to me that this incident was a clear case of ‘user error’ but I would dispute this. We’re all busy people. We can’t be expected to carefully study Kit-Kat packaging to look for the minutest label in the corner that reads ‘Mocha’. It’s like smallprint on a contract. Nobody reads it but everybody gets in a lather when they get royally shafted by some small detail that they missed. Often these details are hidden in 97 pages of terms and conditions which nobody will live long enough to justify reading. So it is with Kit-Kats. We don’t have time for your shit, chocolate manufacturers, so start playing fairly. You don’t get this with milk. If you want a different type of milk from the standard, full-fat stuff you look for a different coloured bottle top. Simple. Kit-Kat Mocha should come in a light brown packet and, in keeping with other coffee-related products, should be seventeen times more expensive than it has any right to be. If the woman serving me had asked me for £4.00 for it I would have recognised it as a coffee product, thus realising my mistake straight away and exchanging it for something that is not so far up its own arse.

I ate it anyway, by the way.

Mistaken Identity

I need to lift my game. I have been looking through these pages and it is fair to say that I'm not impressed. I'm sick of myself, in fact. If I keep using the same old clunking phraseology then pretty soon someone is going to figure out what percentage of the contents of these pages is brazenly lifted from other people's work. And we can't have that. I just thought I'd tell you that, just to reassure you that I am aware of the deficiencies in this column and I am trying to address them. But it probably won't happen overnight. Ask Jurgen Klopp. By the way, did you hear the one about the German Liverpool football manager who said that two years ago Roberto Firmino was the best player in the Bundesliga? The same Bundesliga that contains Arjen Robben, Robert Lewandowski, Mario Gotze, Marco Reus and Thomas Muller? Keep cracking those gags, Jurgen, you'll go down well in Liverpool.

Thrillingly, I have got two more mistaken identity tales for you today. Two for the price of one. You must feel like Lembit Opik did when he met The Cheeky Girls. The first of these happened a month or so ago, the day before Emma and I were due to fly out to Rhodes for our holidays. Being the last minute sort of person I am we had to go into Liverpool after work to get our Euros for the trip. Emma's birthday was coming up during the holiday so I took the opportunity to go and buy her card before I met up with her to get the Euros. I was just getting served when the woman behind me tapped me on the shoulder. That could start a whole new column in itself about the able bodied invading the personal space of the disabled, except when we want them to. But we don't have time for that right now so I'll crack on if I may. The woman tapped me on the shoulder and said;

"You're a Kirkbyite aren't you?"

Yes, that does say Kirkbyite, and that is the exact word she used. Kirkbyite as in kopite, meteorite, Thatcherite but not pie shite. That would have stretched the boundaries of how far I am prepared to tolerate being insulted.

Naively, I hoped that a quick response in the negative would be enough to convince her so I just said 'no' and smiled that 'you must be mistaken' smile that people with Spina Bifida are born with. We get that and hydrocephalus and I know which is more useful. Yet the woman, let's pander to lazy scouse stereotypes and call her Mad Margi, wasn't having it.

"You are, you're a Kirbyite." she insisted.

"No, no I'm not." I replied, using the best, broadest St Helens accent that I could muster. Which is broad. I made Johnny Vegas sound like The Duke Of Cambridge. Not that it put her off any.

"You are a Kirkbyite. I've seen you."

No, you have seen a man using a wheelchair in Kirkby, which believe it or not is not beyond the realms of possibility without that man being me. If I was perplexed by this claim and her borderline psychotic insistence on its validity, her next snippet of insight into my life was nothing short of sensational.

"Yeah, I know you." she said.

"You lost your mother recently."

What? I only came out for a fucking birthday card and a few Euros and a complete stranger is telling me that my mum died recently?

I told Mad Margi that as far as I knew (and I'd seen her a day or two before if memory serves me correctly) that my mum is alive and well and not living in Kirkby. There was no relief on Mad Margi's face, only confusion. She looked almost offended that I hadn't lost my mother or, more specifically, that I was in some sort of manic denial about it. It was a good job I was leaving the country the next day. Surely nobody in Rhodes would recognise me. Erroneously.


I may write about Rhodes at some point but for now we will jump forward to a week or so after my return. There's a café just over the road from work which I frequent at lunchtimes. It's expensive but for that reason it is also quiet so it offers a good opportunity to get out of the madness for an hour. On the first or second day back at work following my holiday I was in the café ordering my lunch when another Mad Margi came up to me at the counter and asked;

"Excuse me, are you Dennis?"

Who?

My granddad is called Dennis. I have this on good authority from my parents but Dennis has never officially verified it because I haven't seen Dennis for over 30 years, except for a couple of funerals. He and my nan divorced some time in the 1970's and he decided that he wasn't going to have a relationship with his grandchildren. He lives fairly nearby I believe, but he might just as well live in Malta. Or he might just as well be a Kirkbyite. Maybe then he could at least have a rapport with my non-doppleganger in that part of the world. He is, I think, the only Dennis I know. There was a Dennis I used to play basketball with at Sheffield but his name wasn't really Dennis, and we only called him Dennis because his surname was Lillee. Get it? I know, pure bloody Oscar Wilde.

So in the same way I wasn't a Kirkbyite, I wasn't going to be Dennis either. This Mad Margi was far more willing to accept the concept of the existence of more than one man in Merseyside using a wheelchair so the exchange was not as laborious and painful as the Kirkbyite one had been. However, she did go on to explain that Dennis was a friend of her nephew.

Who is dead.

The nephew that is. As sad as that is, the fact that he was called Stephen (or Steven, she didn't stipulate the spelling) is I'm sure you will agree a cruel but marvellous irony. I am Stephen, but I can't be every person called Stephen just like I can't be every man who uses a wheelchair. I feel a little guilty about it actually. I could have just admitted to being Dennis and kept a little part of Stephen alive for her. She probably would not have known the difference.

I've been Daniel, Phil, Paul, Lee and Martin. Why couldn't I just be Dennis?

Shrewsbury Theatre And Honest Betty

A little access tip for you, since that is allegedly one of the functions of this column. If you turn up at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool with a wheelchair under your behind you are not going to be sitting next to the person you go in with. You will be sat behind them. Possibly in front of them. I can’t remember which. But certainly not next to them. You might aswell go by yourself. It’s reminiscent of two very strange young men who used to go into the Springy together on a Thursday night for the karaoke, buy their pints together at the bar, and then go and sit in completely different places as if they didn’t know each other at all. No, I don’t know either….

I mention this because Emma and I like the theatre. You can suggest that is because I have become middle class if you like but then I’m not the one drinking Pimms and watching fat hairy men shout ‘heave’ at each other at the Rugby World Cup. So anyway to get to the theatre we had to take the slightly drastic measure of travelling to Shrewsbury. When we were last in Shrewsbury we visited the Severn Theatre just to have a nose around, but there was nothing much on. We resolved to come back one day, especially given the access limitations closer to home, and so when a Sherlock Holmes-related play hit the stage we thought we would take the opportunity.

With the doors opening at 7.30pm an early evening meal was required. We had been out earlier for a couple of relaxants to watch Jurgen Klopp’s first game in charge at Liverpool, a catatonia-inducing 0-0 draw with Tottenham Hotspur. Even that presented a dilemma with Emma’s Sheffield Wednesday playing Hull City on half of the television sets in The Salopian, reminding us again of our friends from the Springy karaoke. The Salopian is a dinge-hole of a bar but one which is sufficiently 21st century to know that subscribing to BT Sport will be a profitable exercise. One or two others in the town had failed to realise this.

On our travels we had noticed a nice looking pub restaurant type place on the river close to the theatre. In the event it looked far nicer from the outside than it did on the inside. It was far more pub than restaurant. There were some booths (inaccessible unless you are able and inclined to vacate your wheelchair) and just one large round table in one half of the room. There was another rectangular table or two on the other side of the room but one was full and the other had a notice on it indicating that it had been reserved. Not that this stopped the customers on the full table from stealing the empty chairs from the reserved table. We were left with the large round table, so we settled in and picked up a menu.

It was not exactly a rip-roaring success. We only ordered sandwiches with a side order of chips but Emma complained that the chips were not cooked properly on the inside. She got a fiver back for her troubles, which is first of all an admission of guilt on their part and secondly the value of two portions of chips in this place. It is not my local chippy. I didn’t even like my ham sandwich, which Emma said was because it was ‘proper ham’. I ate it anyway but it wasn’t to my tastes. Still, good job I was eating ‘proper ham’ now that other types of ham apparently give you cancer. Aswell as sausages and bacon of course. I read somewhere that these things pose the same risk of cancer as cigarettes, which strikes me as slightly hysterical. I haven’t done the stats, but I’m almost certain that the percentage of bacon, ham and sausage eaters who have developed cancer is much lower than the percentage of smokers who have. Otherwise there would be government health warnings on packets of bacon, wouldn’t there? Who knows, perhaps that’s next. All in all I’m reminded of a scene from The Young Ones in which Rik complains that Neil had kept him awake all night ‘pacing up and down and ringing bells’ to which Neil replies ‘sleep gives you cancer man, everyone knows that’. Everything gives you something and you will die. This is not news.

There was time for some liquid refreshment before the show but predictably this meant fighting through the queues at the bar. In a brilliant initiative geared towards saving time they were taking orders for interval drinks aswell, so we blatantly pushed our way to the front and did the deal. The barman assured us, after scanning our tickets, that we would be able to take our drinks into the theatre. We had to make sure of this before we bought them as it was getting a little close to performance time. The last thing you want to be doing if you have a hiatus hernia is downing a bottle of Budweiser in 10 seconds before you settle down to watch anything as lengthy as a stage play. I’d be thrown out once the wretching started so it was important to know that we would be able to take our time.

Having scrambled around for a few minutes trying to find the right theatre (there are at least three in the building, probably more) we arrived at the door to be advised by the lady on the door that we would not be able to take our drinks in after all. A sense of panic began to take hold at this point, as I faced the prospect of either not drinking a hugely expensive Budweiser (imagine!) or forcing it down and exposing myself to my ailments and subsequent ejection from the premises. We argued that we had been told that we would definitely be able to take our drinks in by the barman but the lady on the door was not budging. The best she could do, she said, was to get the manager up to speak to us about it. We waited a few minutes more before the manager appeared. But all she did was confirm that we would not be taking any drinks into this auditorium any time that night. She mumbled something about accessibility which I didn’t fully understand, probably because I was so focused on the fact that I’d apparently been conned by the barman downstairs.

I was just about to go into a rant about how the only accessible theatre was the one which customers were not allowed to take drinks into. The injustice of it all was sure to fill these pages with months of rants just like this one. And then Emma said;

‘Is this ‘The Game’s Afoot’?’

It wasn’t.

We were in the wrong place. This was Abba or something. I quickly apologised and then pushed away towards the other auditorium at the end of the corner as fast as possible. In mitigation, shit like this always happens to us so it was a natural conclusion to jump to. The idea that we would be misinformed by a barman and that an accessible theatre would turn out to be an alcohol free zone seemed, and still seems completely realistic. But perhaps it would have been prudent of us to ask if we were in the right place before we got into a debate about rules around alcohol. You live and you learn.

‘The Game’s Afoot’ is not strictly a Sherlock Holmes story. It’s about an actor who plays Sherlock Holmes on stage. During one performance he is shot in the arm by a mystery member of the audience. Subsequently the action switches to his large house on Christmas Eve where he and his actor friends contemplate the riddle of who tried to take him out. When of course there is another murder. But all of this bloodshed is done in the right spirit, if that is possible. The deaths are funny and meant to be. There are running jokes, knob gags, slapstick and general silliness aplenty. And the interval drinks thing even worked out well. It was a hugely enjoyable evening from the moment I stopped blushing about the wrong auditorium scenario.

Later, we were in the nearby Wetherspoons having a few to finish the night off. We noticed a bag had been left unattended. It was hanging from a chair at a table which, until a few minutes previously, had been occupied by a large gang of women. We weren’t sure whether they were coming back or not but working on the assumption that only some kind of crazy woman leaves her handbag unattended like that, we told the bar staff about it and they put it behind the bar. Just a few minutes later a panic-stricken woman wandered in and started looking around for something. When we told her that the bag was behind the bar because we weren’t sure who it belonged to and whether they were coming back she wore the look of a woman who had recently won a large sum of money on a hugely unlikely outcome. She must have had a bit of money as it happened because she insisted on giving us some of it for making sure the bag was safe. She had somehow forgotten about it, which I didn’t think women were capable of given that they seem to keep their entire lives inside their handbags. Or maybe that just shows what I know about women. Anyway, despite our protestations she would not take the money back. So we spent it on more beer.

That incident brings me nicely on to the story of how I spent my lunch hour today. I say hour, it was more like two and a half hours in the end. I’d been out of cash for a few days. Not because I’m skint but because I’m lazy. It’s too easy to wave my card at the man who works in the cafe over the road, even if he does charge an extra 75p for admin on card transactions. Today I decided that since it was one of the less freezing days of the week enough was enough and I was going to finally get out there, get some cash and get my hair cut. It was going through that awful bog brush phase that it gets in when it hasn’t been shaved for more than a month. Think John Terry without the mysterious ability to attract women. The whole thing was a bad idea, as it turned out.

I stopped at Sayers to buy my lunch and somewhere between there, failing to find a space in the canteen and getting back up to the office I managed to drop both my wallet and my phone from the bag underneath my chair. This was no doubt largely due to the fact that in the first place I had forgotten to zip up said bag, and in the second place I was playing my MP3 player (which won’t play three quarters of its content in the car but that is another story) at a volume that no sensible hearing specialist would recommend. If all you can hear is Ed Sheeran, you are not going to hear your phone drop on the floor, concrete or not. So I didn’t.

I didn’t realise this until I got up to the office and reached into my bag for my wallet, which contains my staff card which opens the door. Regular readers will know all about what fun I can have with the doors at work, but we won’t go over all that again. There were more pressing matters at hand, like the whereabouts of my wallet and phone, and consequently my cash card and the £85 or so that remained from what I had withdrawn earlier after spending some of it on my hair cut and my lunch. Only slightly panicking I went back down exactly the same path I had travelled between Sayers and the office (including a lap of the canteen after remembering my failed attempt to get a table there). Along the way I asked everyone in the canteen and all the security staff if anything had been handed in and nothing had. I asked the staff at the cafe just on the off chance because they seem to know me there (three visits a week on average will do that for you) and I asked at Sayers. I even asked at the bookmakers next door. Nothing.

So I rolled down towards the bank resigned to the fact that I needed to cancel my card and that I could pretty much kiss goodbye to the money in the wallet. On the way down the hill an extra dimension to my sorry predicament was added when a total arse of a man decided to walk right in front of me on the pavement. Stopping suddenly, I over balanced and hit a crack in the pavement, throwing me forward and on to the ground. If I had taken stock at that particular moment I might have concluded that since I had lost my wallet and my phone and fallen out of my chair I might just aswell stay there on the floor and give up on the whole day. But that would have been embarrassing and potentially expensive since the card had not been cancelled at this point. I got up, brushing away the attempts to help me of a well-meaning passer by. Incidentally the actual culprit merely glanced in my direction and walked on as if the whole thing were my fault. The man was a total, total Jeremy Hunt.

You have to cancel your cards on the phones in the bank. I didn’t know this, and it took quite a long time for anyone to answer. I had considered that the staff there were winding me up and that whoever does Jeremy Beadle’s job these days would soon come bouncing around the corner giggling uncontrollably at the hilarity of it all. Finally I got through and did the necessary, before trudging back up the hill to the office. Whereupon I discovered from my friends and colleagues that the wallet had been found. Now you might think a wave of relief would have swept through me at this point. Yes it is an inconvenience to have to cancel the card and wait up to five days for a replacement but at least I would be getting my money back. But it was just the beginning of another absurd saga in the longest lunchtime on record.

I spoke to security downstairs. They said that actually they did not have the wallet, that a woman called Betty had it. Betty doesn’t work for the same company that I do (you know the one that does a lot for charity and saves puppies from drowning but who unfortunately we can’t name?) but she did leave a number for me to contact her on. But she also left instructions that she must be texted and not phoned, because they are not allowed to receive phone calls where she works, a place called Armstrong’s Solicitors just off Dale Street in the city centre. Am I allowed to mention them? Fuck it, I just have. I couldn’t text Betty, because I had lost my phone, so there then ensued a quite ridiculous three-way communication between myself, Betty and the lady who works on the reception desk downstairs in our building. In the end I decided to just have a stroll down there and just ask for Betty. Waiting for the three-way communication via the receptionists phone was going to see us all off.

Armstrong’s Solicitors (sue me) is set back from Dale Street a little so it is not the easiest to find. I had to ask someone, but when I eventually got there Betty came bounding out all smiles. She handed me my wallet and, it turned out, my phone (which I was half hoping had gone missing forever if I’m honest) and told me that the former had been at one end of Dale Street and the latter at the other. It was all very embarrassing, particularly since it wasn’t just me and Betty in the reception at Armstrong’s but two of her co-workers. I thanked her endlessly for her trouble and tried to offer her some cash for her honesty. She wouldn’t accept any money of course. I can’t even buy a round of drinks for people I have known all my life. I’ve got fuck all chance of convincing a total stranger to take any of my money. All of which led to an amusing discussion in the office during which the girls tried to think of the many, varied and most expensive ways I could thank Betty for her good deed. They concluded that I should send flowers or chocolates but not cakes that are unwrapped because then I could be trying to poison her.

I may yet do this. There aren’t many people left in the world it seems who would find a wallet and return it to its owner with the contents untouched. Good on you Betty, then. You have restored some of my faith in humanity at the end of what has been a total and utter disaster of a day. So thanks Betty, wherever you are tonight.

The Trouble With Football

Watching Liverpool has been a big part of my life for a very long time. On the telly, mind. I’m not rich enough to be paying £50 a throw to actually go to Anfield. Plus whatever it costs these days for some track-suited youngster to ‘watch your car’ while you’re at the game. As anyone who has visited any of my pages before knows, Saints is my match-going guilty pleasure. But Liverpool FC is a much older passion. I only started really watching Saints seriously in about 1989, right after Michael Thomas ruined football with his last minute goal for Arsenal at Anfield which won the Gooners their first title in forever and taught me the harsh lesson that actually it was possible for someone other than Liverpool or Everton to win the league.

I explain my passion merely as a way of justifying the presence of an article about Liverpool FC and its ailing fortunes on these pages. It might not be a subject which is strictly concerned with ‘my life’ and certainly not with the laughable access issues that represent the rare diamonds herein, but it is a part of my life. And this is about my life. And anyway it is my bloody blog and if you don’t want to read about the worst Liverpool team in living memory (if your living memory only stretches as far back as Paul Konchesky’s hay-day) then bugger off and read another meme about love, peace, religion or some such other figment of your imagination. Football is real.

The truth is I can only take so much of watching Liverpool these days before I have to bash my keyboard manically in a forlorn attempt at some sort of catharsis. During the summer I had to have my say on the Raheem Sterling transfer saga which, while threatening to place us all into a coma with the sheer daily tedium of it all, also raised my ire on account of Liverpool FC managing to avoid any blame for his eventual sale to Manchester City. It was all greed on the part of Sterling and his agent, everyone said, with nobody prepared to point out that actually Liverpool FC has long since declared itself a selling club whose policy now is to sell its best player at the end of every season and re-invest the small fortune it makes in several piles of shit. And so it came to pass again as Sterling departed and in came James Milner (that noise you can hear is Bill Shankly turning in his grave).

The result of all of this manifested itself clearly but unattractively with the recent dismissal of Brendan Rodgers. His Liverpool sides had been stumbling around to little effect long before he was finally given his marching orders by the owners. It all begs the not unreasonable question about why he wasn’t invited to clear his desk in the summer, rather than being allowed to bring in seven or eight new signings in as he had done a year earlier. For all their underwhelming football they had only lost twice under his tutelage in 2015-16 when the axe fell. There was no further evidence to suggest that he was not going to turn things around than there had been say…..after they took a 6-1 pummelling at Stoke on the last day of last season…or when they lost 3-1 at home to Crystal Palace a week or so previously in one of the most lethargic and pointless performances in the club’s storied history. The only explanation is that Rodgers’ dismissal was timed to ‘coincide’ exactly with the availability after a short break of Jurgen Klopp.

So we are three games in to the Klopp reign and the best you can say about it is that the German is undefeated. He hasn’t won either, but don’t let that spoil the mood. League games against Tottenham at White Hart Lane and at home to Southampton aswell as the home Europa League clash with Rubin Kazan have all ended level. It was while watching the Southampton game yesterday that I suddenly became compelled to have my say on the current state of play at Anfield. In the now time honoured fashion, Christian Benteke’s dreamy second half header was not enough to take all three points as the clowns at the back contrived to allow Sadio Mane to equalise from around three centimetres. One day soon someone will remove the nine inch nails from the feet of Simon Mignolet to enable him to come off his line to claim something in his area. Until then we can look forward to more of Mahmadou Sakho and Martin Skrtel trying to outdo each other in the field of slap-dash defending. Sakho was described by the Guardian last week as Liverpool’s best defender, which may be true but is the very definition of being damned with faint praise. It’s like being my favourite member of Union J or Little Mix.

If you look further up the field to the midfield the reasons for Klopptimism are hardly any greater. My dad hates Adam Lallana. Every time he gets within a five-mile radius of the ball my dad slaughters him. He’s just got it in for him in the way I have for Milner, or the way I did for Dirk Kuyt when he was somehow deemed good enough for Liverpool all those years ago. The definition of the phrase ‘good enough for Liverpool’ has changed dramatically down the years and not for the better. Anyway, in the case of Lallana I actually think he is one of the few of the current crop who actually possess something approaching a footballing technique. His touch is assured and he can beat a man. The trouble is he can’t beat seven, which he often tries to do as if he is some latter day Diego Maradona. He cannot or will not pass the ball. It might be because he deems it impossible for a team mate to be in a better position than him, given that none of them have any ability on the ball. If you want something doing, do it yourself. Cloning this foolishness on the other side of the field is an increasingly grumpy-looking Phillipe Coutinho, on whom most bookmakers have no doubt stopped taking bets to be the next superstar out of the Anfield door. Barcelona have shown interest, or at least his mate Naymar has, and FSG have probably already spent the money on another Serbian winger.

Milner’s cross for Benteke’s goal was top class, but in many ways the fact that Liverpool have come to rely on a man deemed only a squad player at Manchester City shows the level of ambition at the moment. Klopp’s appointment seems to signal an improvement in this department but how much he can do at the helm of a club run by baseball enthusiasts whose hobbies include penny pinching but not football is questionable. Has anyone considered the possibility that Klopp has been appointed by FSG precisely because he didn’t seem to mind having his Borussia Dortmund squad routinely asset stripped by the likes of Bayern Munich? He’ll put up with it, and they expect him to challenge for major honours regardless. It’s a little easier in Germany, however. Finish above an occasionally off-the-boil Bayern Munich and you are probably going to be Bundesliga champions. In England you have to contend with spend happy LVG at Manchester United before you even start to worry about the dual billionaire threat of Manchester City and Chelsea. Then there’s Arsenal, about whom there might well be some unwritten Premier League law that says they must finish in the top four otherwise there’ll be some point-docking going on.

Where Klopp was able to over-perform in the face of stifling transfer policies was in Europe. Yet the Rubin Kazan game did not suggest that he has particularly prioritised getting out of the Europa League group and going on to consider putting actual silverware in the cabinet. It’s another of my bug-bears on the modern game unfortunately, and Liverpool are among the worst culprits. You spend all season concentrating on the Premier League because it is important to get into Europe. Then you get into Europe and immediately do everything in your power to get yourself out of Europe because it is interfering with your Premier League form which is important because you want to get into Europe. Rodgers’ decision to play what was basically a reserve side against Real Madrid in the Champions League last season was unfathomable and nigh on unforgivable. At what point is one of Europe’s most famous clubs going to think about the glory of the game above the pounds and pence in the bank? A lot of people moaned about the recent international break, calling the lack of Premier League football ‘boring’. Those people haven’t watched Liverpool recently nor must they have seen yesterday’s tedium-fest between Manchester United and Manchester City. International football is just about the only form of top class football left in which winning things is more important than financial power. The stories involving Wales, Northern Ireland, Albania and company in European Championship qualifying have been uplifting amid the daily diet of Mourinho moaning and experts queuing up to try to convince me that Harry Kane is anything but a bloody pub player. By contrast, Holland’s failure to qualify from a group that included Iceland, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Sidac Social Club offers a far more interesting Dutch-related narrative than waiting to hear what song LVG will sing at his next overly rehearsed barm-pot fest in front of the salivating journos on a Friday afternoon.

Oh, do you see what has happened here? This started off as a piece about what is wrong with Liverpool and has just grown legs. Unlike its author. Well, not legs that work, at any rate. This has now become a withering critique of modern day football, a cautionary tale, and a compelling argument on why you should probably pick up the phone right now and buy yourself a season ticket at Saints instead of that BT Sport subscription.

At least Martin Skrtel won’t be involved.

(Car) Park Life

I do this far less often that I intend to. Stuff gets in the way. There’s probably a certain irony, or a certain something if not irony, about life getting in the way of writing a blog which is essentially about life. Or my life in particular. But there it is. You get up, you go to work, you have a shit day, you come home, you eat, you watch 5% of the programmes you naively recorded thinking you would have time to watch, you go to bed. Life, right there.

Last week was a particular doozy. Outstanding in the field of Shit Weeks. If there is such a field. There is such a field and it is covered, I can tell you, in shit. It all started the previous weekend when Emma went out to the car only to find that the glass was missing from the passenger side wing mirror. We have had this car for less than three weeks. Ordinarily it might be quite difficult to get the glass out of a wing mirror without someone noticing that you are needlessly stealing it, so there is either a thief with a lot of time and patience doing the rounds or it simply fell out. A friend of mine told me that this once happened to his dad’s Ford Focus so it’s possible. Yet this is my second Ford Focus and the first occasion I have been left deficient in the glass department.

So the upshot of all this is that I had to take the car into St Helens Ford on Monday morning when I should have been in work. I had been quoted £46 for a piece of glass over the phone (this includes VAT you’ll be relieved to learn) but in the event they only charged me £33. I don’t know why and I didn’t ask. It’s best not to lest you get a patronising answer. I’m lucky I wasn’t sent on my way with a lollipop and a Mr Bump plaster to boot.

So anyway off I went then to work, arriving in the car park at around 10.45am. I’m normally in around 8.30 so as you can imagine by this time the car park was heavily populated. Handily, there was one disabled space left. I couldn’t believe my luck, truth be told. Normally if I go in late there are no disabled spaces left and I either have to find two free spaces to give myself enough room to get my chair out (Emma’s already caught the train into Liverpool at this point) or, as is more common, I end up driving around and around the one-way system around Tithebarn Street contemplating whether or not I should re-mortgage the house in order to be able to afford to leave it in one of the public car parks nearby. So a free space was a gift, a lollipop and a Mr Bump plaster all rolled into one.

The problem was that there was someone blocking the space. Helpfully, a man working for a Fire and Security firm had parked his car facing the space, but just close enough to it so that I couldn’t get my car past to be able to move into the space. Clearly he was not concerned with all aspects of health & safety. Just those he was paid to worry about. Mortified at the prospect of spending what remained of the morning driving around the one way system I tried anyway. I like to play my music loud enough for people in Hemel Hempstead to hear, so I’m not sure at exactly what point I made contact with a small concrete post just next to the space, but I was first alerted to it by the fact that the car would not roll forward any further. There was almost certainly some damage, which was most infuriating given the positively embryonic stage of life at which the car sat.

I phoned the security desk, which is what I should have done in the first place, and asked them if they would kindly locate the considerate Fire and Security man and get him to shift his heap of shit. Ten minutes or so later he came from behind me (the nearest exit is right in front of where I was parked) and nonchalantly got into his car and moved it without a word of apology. That would come later. I got out of the car to find that, predictably, the car had sustained a small scratch on the driver’s side. Wearily, I consoled myself in the knowledge that Motability have changed the rules so that anything short of setting fire to your car and rolling it over a cliff is now considered to be fair wear and tear, so I’m banking on them not charging me for it. Just like they didn’t with the last one after I suffered a similar incident in a multi-storey car park. I’m not good with car parks, especially when berks park in places which appear to have been carefully designed to prevent the disabled from gaining proper access.

This was the second such incident in the space of a few days by the way, as previously I had been stuck in the very same car park for 45 minutes waiting for someone who had parked illegally and thus blocked me in to move his heap of shit. There’s a lot of shit in this story, you’ll note. He had left a note in the window with both his mobile and his office number on it which would have been most helpful had he been inclined to answer either of them. As it turned out he never did show up until the next morning when it transpired that the car belonged to a colleague that I know quite well and get on perfectly well with. He was at pains to apologise. He apologised so much that I am now able to crow-bar the word ‘profusely’ into this blog, a word which much like ‘aplomb’ is never used in any other context. So anyway…What do you say? You just force a smile and forget about it, don’t you? If I hadn’t been guided out by the security staff (having gone back inside the building to try and get a message to the driver of the offending vehicle) then I might have been there all night and might not have been so good at accepting the apology.

Which I had to do again, as we hurtle forward through time again to end this sorry tale. Having got out of the scratched car following the removal of the Fire and Security van I trundled up to the office. I was about to regale my colleagues (loudly and irritably, no doubt) about the ordeal I had suffered when the driver of the Fire and Security van poked his head out of a door he had been crouched behind and apologised for his errant motoring ways. Turns out he had spent the morning working on the fire alarms in the very office in which I carry out my own mundane contribution to society.

It was awkward. Like David Cameron turning up for the Cabinet’s annual ball to find the main course on a spit amid the distinct whiff of pork.

40

It’s been a strange week. I was sick for the first part of it. Riddled with infection. Ecoli, the medical report from my last visit to the consultant said. That makes it sound like the World Health Organisation should form a perimeter around my house and keep me there in my own private little quarantine lest I spread this deadly bug all over England. It’s really just a water infection, which for someone with Spina Bifida is hardly unusual. Not life threatening, but not exactly pleasant either. I threw up violently at lunchtime on my first day back at work on Wednesday and again on Thursday. That was after I’d had to take half a day’s flexi having comically forgotten to take my catheter to work with me. It was half a day’s flexi or piss your pants. What are you going to do?

Before this small oversight I became the owner, or at least joint owner, of a cat. His name is Mowinkle (I think that is how you spell it but I very much doubt whether you can prove otherwise in any case) and he is three and a half years old. He is named after a Norwegian skier. I don’t even remember her first name but Emma and I were watching the skiing during the Winter Olympics in Sochi last year when she came gliding into view with her name emblazoned on the screen. And then I said, sarcastically as I say everything else sarcastically like that character Robert Newman used to do on the telly, that Mowinkle would be a good name for a cat. We were always getting a cat after we had finished the rebuild of the bathroom and extension this summer, so the name stuck and now he is stuck with it too. He doesn’t seem to mind. He doesn’t seem to know.

I haven’t exactly bonded with him yet. He spent all of his first day with us hiding behind the sofa. As I write he is still hiding behind the sofa but thankfully he has done some other stuff in between. He seems to like Emma. He’ll go to her but only if she is on the floor. He also likes to smell her hair. This preference might be down to the fact that she has been feeding him because I couldn’t stand the smell of his food during my illness. But the one time I did put his bowl down for him he looked up at me and ran away.

I can only conclude that Mowinkel has a problem with disability. The only time he has ever come anywhere near me until today is when I have been sat on the sofa, away from my chair. Even then he couldn’t walk past me on the back of the sofa without drooling on me from a great height. Who would have thought I’d need an umbrella to sit on my own sofa watching Only Connect. That’s the best quiz show on telly isn’t it? If only because it’s so bloody hard and because it is presented by Victoria Coren-Mitchell who is the funniest woman on television. But then if you are up against Miranda…..

If I get in my wheelchair Mowinkle stares at me intently and if I move he runs away. If he is eating in the kitchen and I go in there he leaves abruptly. He has a real problem with the way I move around the house, but at least he is honest and open enough to admit it. That’s half the battle with overcoming these things, isn’t it? I should send him on some sort of disability awareness course.

Back to Thursday. Not only did I experience an equipment failure I also managed to turn 40 years old that day. I have mixed feelings about this. It doesn’t seem much different from being 39 in all honesty, but then you sit and think that you were only 21 five minutes ago so what happened? It doesn’t help that work is making me feel particularly miserable at the moment but we can’t talk about that. Then there is another part of me that wants to celebrate because firstly that will involve seeing my friends and drinking lots of beer, but secondly because it is something of an achievement to reach 40 when you have kidneys like mashed potatoes. There’s a distinct feeling of victory at having not let the bastards get me yet. That may sound negative, but I have seen far more of my friends with similar disabilities to mine leave this world than is comfortable for anyone. This life shit is a dangerous business and so my main reflection upon reaching 40 is that I’m sick of the fact that for eight hours of every day five days a week I bloody hate it. Something has to change. I should start by refusing point blank to get stressed by it, but that is much easier to say than it is to do. I realise I am not alone in feeling like this by the way, but turning 40 makes you think. Like I said, dangerous…

To celebrate on the night I just went out for a meal with Emma, my mum and dad, Helen and Patrick. Joe is 16 now and so understandably has a myriad of better things to do than visit his local Flaming Grill. My mum told a story about how she got an email advising her about re-training to be a plumber. She’s not that far away from retiring but perhaps it is one of Jeremy Hunt’s new policies aimed at getting people to work harder. Did you see that in the news? If I were a doctor in particular I would refuse to treat Jeremy Hunt if he came into my hospital with his appendage stuck inside a farmyard animal. Or I’d separate them using a chainsaw. Years from now, Jeremy Hunt will pass into the lexicon as a valid and accepted form of rhyming slang. If it hasn’t already.

The final act of a mixed but mostly turgid week was when Emma went outside to the car this morning only to find that someone had taken the glass out of the passenger side wing mirror. Not the wing mirror itself, just the glass. We have had this new car for three weeks and already it has been violated by some screv with a steady hand and light fingers. My world was rocked when Motability presented me with a £250 cheque for keeping my last car in good condition (imagine? LOL, as the cool kids say) but life giveth and it taketh away. A new piece of glass for the wing mirror will cost £46 to be fitted and this is the best bit…they do not have any in stock. So I have to rock up there on Monday morning at 9.00 and see if they have arrived after they were ordered today. If not I am either leaving my car there and getting on the bone shaker to work, or I am driving to Liverpool deficient in the wing mirror department to the tune of one.

The girl was very polite on the phone though.

Shouting Into The Void - Goodbye Facebook

I deleted my Facebook account today. Or should I say I ‘deactivated’ it. It doesn’t let you just delete it. It’s like trying to leave Reader’s Digest used to be or, for a more modern update, trying to get out of LoveFilm or Netflix. Before you are released you get asked whether or not you are sure at least three times, and then you are asked to give a reason for your exit. You are given a list of possible reasons for leaving and are forced to choose one. It’s like trying to get a divorce and having to attend marriage guidance counselling to ‘be sure’. Or at least I imagine that’s what divorce is like. I wouldn’t bloody know. Anyway, If none apply and you just tick ‘other’, you are then compelled to explain exactly what you mean by ‘other’. People have left the military during times of raging conflict with less scrutiny than is placed on you by Zuckerberg if you have the temerity to no longer take part in his world domination project. In the end I declared that I no longer find Facebook useful, which is true but not exactly the main reason why I left Facebook. After all, it has never been particularly useful.
I left Facebook because of people. Me included. I’m sick of them. I’m sick of myself. Sick of shouting into the void at nobody. Time was when I could write a status and at least elicit a response, make someone laugh or start a debate. Not now. Now there is a deathly, whispered silence greeting my every inane wittering. Which is probably justified. I’m not complaining about that. I’ve alienated a lot of people through Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard. I lost one reader because I expressed the opinion that Disability Awareness Day is a rotten pile of bullshit because disability awareness should be every day and become second nature to people. Shouting about it for one day of the year does fuck all. He didn’t agree and I haven’t heard from him since. Probably never will. Other than that it has been mostly just religious types and people who like rugby union and Karl Pilkington who have been offended, but that’s quite a large portion of the population. Oh and the able bodied. Nobody seems to have caught on to the fact that Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard’s liberal use of the phrase ‘able bodied bastards’ is actually a brilliant satire on modern society.

But I’m not arguing that people should want to read my shit. It’s just that frankly I would rather save myself the bother if I know that they don’t. Lately I had been using it just to post these blogs and the pieces I do for redvee but even that was beginning to get futile. I must have been down to about three interested parties through Facebook, none of whom were me and all of whom were probably only reading out of a muddled mixture of loyalty and habit. Twitter is a much better barometer of where you are with your writing, and much more rewarding with it. I have much more interest in my work there and the vast majority of it comes from people who have never even met me. These are the true judges of your work. All bias is removed and nobody is afraid to tell you that you are a bellend if you write something stupid. You get a lot more out of your work that way and you will develop better as a result.

Back to Facebook, and contrast my interaction with that of a former acquaintance of mine who won a Paralympic gold medal in London in 2012. Shortly after his victory he posted on Facebook that he was going outside for a walk and received 592 ‘likes’ for his troubles. Now life isn’t all about likes but there comes a point where you don’t want to spend time mulling over a potentially amusing status which will be ritually ignored in favour of the mundane details of a minor celebrity’s gentle exercise plans. There seems to be an imbalance there somewhere. Nowhere is this more evident than when people post information about their child’s latest bowel movement. You would think that nobody but the proud parents would be interested. Everyone you talk to says they are not interested in ‘baby bores’ yet every post of this kind is littered with responses, ‘likes’ and gushing praise for the individual’s ability to pro-create. You should have to pass stringent tests to be able to have children, but the fact that any old gobshite can still do it doesn’t stop those around them from treating it like a never before seen miracle.

Yet you don’t need to have children to bore the arse off everyone or to do enough to persuade me to fold in my Facebook cards. My last timeline before I zapped Facebook into the wilderness was chock full of what are irritatingly called memes. I don’t even know how you fucking pronounce that, but what I do know is that it usually consists of some drippy truism which the poster has no hope of actually adhering to due to their basic humanity. They’re all about love and honesty and how good people do this and good people don’t do that. Who the fuck says what good people do or do not do? You could argue that good people don’t post pictures of tortured animals to ‘raise awareness’ while simultaneously doing fuck all about it, the net result of which is just to upset people who don’t want to see it on their timelines. You could argue that. You could. Why don’t these people get the fuck off Facebook and get involved in animal charities or put their hand in their pockets to help? Because posting a picture of something dreadful is much easier and is a very public badge of honour which shows that you care, you bloody saint you. Fucking stop it.

So anyway goodbye Facebook. I have enjoyed you, at times. Long ago. I just no longer feel the need to keep in touch with 250 people who don’t give two shits about me. That’s the honesty that Twitter has that you just simply do not. I know nobody on Twitter gives two shits about me and nobody on there ever said they did. I could prolong the agony and just have another cull, but there is only so many times that you can delete anyone you think would not talk to you if you met them on the street before you find yourself with only you, your mrs and your best mate on your friends list. And well….that would just be boring.

Amy Versus The Cinema-Going Public

Britain, I'd like a word with you. I say Britain, I mean anywhere where there might be people bored enough to be reading this on a Tuesday night. This involves you wherever you live. You're all equally bloody culpable.

I've just been to the cinema with my sister to see Amy, a film documentary about the late, great Amy Winehouse. Emma didn't want to go because she's not a fan but that's alright. I'm not here to foist my musical tastes upon everyone. We can't all drive around singing Joss Stone songs at 250 decibels. That would be stupid. I can understand that not everybody likes their drug-addled, deceased jazz singers as much as I do either. That's not my problem, my problem is this.

We never got to see Amy and it is your fault, Britain (and other parts this blog may reach and in which rabid commercialism takes precedence over genuine art). We arrived at Cineworld about 20 minutes before the scheduled start of the film only to be told, upon ordering the tickets, that Amy has been cancelled. A screen has broken. Oh how unlucky, right? On the very night I want to go to see Amy the screen upon which it is being shown is broken. What bad luck. Except it wasn't bad luck, it was bad taste. And you're responsible.

You see, the screen which broke was not the one scheduled to be showing Amy at 7.45 this evening. It was another one, but as a result of this they had to have a 'reshuffle' we were told. Amy was brutally and tastelessly sacrificed so that they could carry on showing moronic guff like Minions, fucking Ant-Man and the latest in a long line of absurd Arnie vehicles. It doesn't take a genius to work out that this is because these turgid titles make more money at the box office than Amy will. And that is because you, Britain and other parts this blog may reach and in which rabid commercialism takes precedence over genuine art, are more likely to spend your money on the latter than you are on Amy. Why would you want to watch a film about one of the greatest musical talents this country has ever produced when you can watch another twat in spandex showing off his bogus, trumped up super power? Or a band of annoying little yellow creatures who tried but failed to ruin the humour in Despicable Me. Or a wrinkly old grope-meister and Republican shooting up shit with Khaleesi by his side.

Not wishing to fly in the face of public opinion in too controversial a fashion I have kept quiet about this for a long time now but the truth is I am bored shitless with superhero films. What is it about our daily lives which forces us to lap up this dense wtfery so regularly? Put a group of caped bellends together in the same film and the country wets itself in anticipation. Even the idea of Ben Affleck in a batsuit has managed to get past the studio bosses who know all too well that they'll make millions out of it. There's no place for realism, even among an audience whom I assume stopped believing in men that could fly a long, long time ago. Often they will have retarded titles like Batman Versus Superman, Alien Versus Predator or A Big Sack Of Cash Versus Worthwhile Musical Endeavour. Are we so desperate for escapism that we want all semblance of reality removed from our cinema entertainment? I weep for a society that places special effects, explosions and dodgy masks above story telling and character. One in which acting is an afterthought and it is entirely possible, advisable even, to start your Hollywood career in the wrestling ring.

I suppose I should be glad that Amy is showing in my local cinema at all. It was scheduled for cinema release on July 3 but only hit Satan's Little Acre this past week. There was no room for it, no demand for it. No money in it. It is still not showing in either Widnes or Warrington, both of which we checked in a doomed attempt to avoid the evening becoming a complete write-off. Which to my mind, apart from being infuriating and a waste of my time and petrol and the ruination of what would have been a perfectly good evening, is one of the saddest things about the world we live in. If there was any justice people would be queuing around the corner to see documentary film making of this kind. Instead the man selling the tickets barely remembered that it was due on, much less that it had been cancelled. He actually had to refer to a sign on the kiosk desk.

Just like you reading this perhaps, nobody working in Cineworld seemed to care. When we asked a member of staff if they could guarantee that it would be shown tomorrow night at the scheduled time she could not confirm. All she could do was give us a direct line to the cinema so that we could ring ahead to check on their latest reshuffle. If the screen cannot be fixed by then it is reasonable to assume that it will be Amy that gets the boot again. And as much as I loathe the capitalist, commercialism behind this sort of decision I can't really blame them. They only exist to make money and I know this and don't expect any better of them.

It's you I blame.

The Ticket Saga Rumbles On

First the good news, because what follows does not contain very much of that. So here goes. I have tickets for the Challenge Cup semi-final between Saints and Leeds on July 31. In the North East corner, which is sort of near the Saints fans maybe. Or something.

So anyway you will remember how I was blatantly misled by the Saints website into believing that I, as a season ticket holder of our exalted and glorious club, would be able to purchase tickets for the game ahead of the general sale just like everyone else who has a season ticket? And then how I turned up to the stadium only to be told that my money was no good there (or words to that effect) and that I would have to contact the RFL. And you remember the ensuing, 1,000 word whinge about this incident?

Well I received a tweet from Saints telling me that they would look into it for me. All very generous, except that all they did was confirm what we already knew, which was that they were not able to sell them to me. They haven’t quite explained why the information on their website was incorrect although I suspect they are not arguing the point. Something has made them feel guilty enough to contact me following my earlier blog.

The best (or worst) part of all of this preamble to actually getting the tickets was the gentleman on Facebook who was arguing with me hammer and tongs about whether I should have the right to buy tickets through the club first because of my season ticket holder status. He had a disabled daughter, he told me, and he has won awards for championing the rights of disabled people and it was his view that it is entirely fair and sensible that wheelchair users should contact the RFL. The argument seems to be that there are only a limited number of spaces and so…..and so what? There are only a limited number of spaces for everyone and that has been the case at sports events probably since the Taylor report made stadia more safe. If clubs can’t sell tickets to wheelchair users then how can they reasonably suggest that they can sell them to anyone? However many you have available, why would you not split that figure between the clubs and allow the respective season ticket holders first dibs, as you do with non-disabled tickets? The reasons why this cannot happen are unknown and my head hurts just thinking about it frankly. Incidentally I’m sure the gentleman on Facebook has done an awful lot for disability in this country but you know, Ron Atkinson did an awful lot for black footballers in Britain and still got the sack for being a racist. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, sometimes we are judged on our one-offs.

And so to today’s absurd correspondence with the RFL over the actual tickets. The semi-final is 25 days away as I write and so there was no other way I was going to get them than to comply with their discriminatory policy and call the ticket line. When I did, and made the booking, I asked the customer service operator why it was the RFL’s policy not to allow wheelchair users to buy tickets for these events through their clubs in the same way that non wheelchair users do. Of course this is an unfair question. Part of my work involves dealing with telephone enquiries and I am all too aware that it is not his decision, and that actually it is just his misfortune to be employed to deal with angry people who are questioning shit decisions made higher up. I know how that feels and I explained to him that I was not blaming him, I just wanted to see if he knew what the reason was for the bizarre policy.

He actually went away to double check it. Double check it? Fuck. Brilliantly, the answer to this now well-worn riddle is that only the RFL know the stadia that are being used to host the events and so the clubs would not have a very good grasp on where the best places would be to sit wheelchair users. Yes, it is impossible in the view of the RFL to train staff employed by a rugby league club to be able to tell wheelchair using customers where the accessible seating might be in another team’s stadium, and to let them make an informed choice on buying tickets based on that information. Forgive me….how do they know where the best place is to sit for non-disabled people? A stadium plan you say? On a bit of paper? Using things like colours, numbers and letters to identify sections of the ground. Fuck off. Can’t be done.

There’s more, as a famous and utterly crap Irish comedian of the 80’s used to say. The RFL’s man had not asked me if I was a season ticket holder before he sold me the tickets. When I pointed this out he adopted what can only be described as the stance of a rabbit caught in a very bright set of headlights, fumbling his words like Mumbles from Dick Tracey and then admitting that actually, it’s a fair cop, having a season ticket has no bearing on whether you get a ticket or not for an RFL event if you are a wheelchair user. Non-disabled season ticket holders at Saints have this week to secure their tickets before they go on general sale to the rest of you next week. I don’t. Wheelchair accessible tickets have been available from the RFL to any Thomas, Richard or Harold presumably since the dates and venues of the semi-finals were announced. It’s an open and shut case. As clear a case of discrimination as having separate shops for selling bread to black people and white people. Everyone gets their bread, but it doesn’t make it right, does it? And isn’t there a high risk that it might not be the bread they wanted?

Does anyone care except those of us affected? You’d be surprised at how many people do not. One person on Facebook accused me of thinking that the world owed me a living which is quite laughable. He went strangely quiet when I politely explained to him that actually I work Monday to Friday the same as everyone else and pay for a season ticket the same as everyone else. Despite some strides having been made in the field of equality, it is clear that some people still assume that to be disabled is to sit around on your ‘arris all day claiming benefit and trawling through social media so you can scream when something goes against you. There may be disabled people like that, in fact I can assure you that there are, but I’m not one of them and I resent the implication that I am. I don’t sit behind a boring desk in a boring office all day to be disrespected by clowns with pre-conceived ideas from 1964.

It’s very likely that I won’t be able to change this policy and the attitudes which perpetuate it with any number of angry phone calls, social media rants or even eloquent blogs. But I’m buggered if I am going to put up with it quietly.

Piss Off Saints....Just Piss Off

I'm characteristically fuming. At Saints. And not about last night's shambolic performance at Leeds. That was bad enough. Suffering through the ineptitude of Matty Dawson and Kyle Amor was enough to drive anyone over the edge, and when you add that to the embarrassing lack of effort on show from the likes of Luke Walsh you could easily start tearing up your season ticket before you have had a chance to think about it properly.

But no, the reason for my unfettered rage at our champion and completely tin-pot organisation is their policy on selling wheelchair accessible tickets for the Challenge Cup semi-final against Leeds at Warrington at the end of the month. I am a season ticket holder and have been since the club moved to Langtree Park in 2012. I'm pretty keen on all things Saints and rugby league. I also work very hard to promote both the club and the game by writing for an independent Saints website at least twice a week. So it was with some anticipation that I was checking the club's website daily this week for ticket information for the semi final against the Rhinos. Now keeping in mind that the club could not be contacted by phone this week as tickets were only available in person at the ticket office, this is what is written on the website in regards to ticket information for disabled supporters;

"Disabled (Wheelchair and Ambulant) are entitled to receive a complimentary carer's ticket upon production of valid ID. Disabled tickets are charged depending on age."

Now let's ignore the offensive and boring implication that all disabled fans need a carer, and focus on what that statement tells us about how to go about acquiring wheelchair accessible tickets. Does it say that they are not available from the club and that you should contact the RFL? Does it bollocks. And if it did say that, would it then explain why this should be? Why are disabled season ticket holders not afforded the same pre-sale rights as their able bodied counterparts? Do the powers that be at the clubs and at the RFL really consider it that much of a stretch to believe that a disabled season ticket holder would bother themselves to travel 20 minutes down the road for one of the biggest games of the season? If I didn't know better I would suggest that some suit full of shite at the RFL and Saints have looked at the DDA over a brew, decided what they need to do to comply with it to the bare minimum and gone out for a round of golf! It won't matter, they probably thought, nobody is actually going to try to turn up at the ticket office and attempt to buy a ticket. Fuck, why would they do that?

Anyone who has stuck by this column long enough may remember that something similar happened to me in my quest to get tickets for the Grand Final in October. The club threw it's hands up in the air and denied any responsibility for the sale of wheelchair accessible tickets and just directed me to the RFL. But at least they did so over the phone on that occasion. When I phoned the RFL they informed me that the only tickets available were in a 'neutral' area of the Old Trafford stadium. Quite when the definition of 'neutral' became 'right in the middle of the Wiganers' I'm not sure. We made the best of it and had an amusing exchange with a Wigan Walker near the end of the game, but if I'm being brutally honest I would rather have been in among the Saints fans on such a great day. I was denied this right despite being a season ticket holder and between them, the RFL and Saints seem to be trying to ensure that I am denied that right again for the Challenge Cup semi-final this year.

It's a shameful, shambolic encore to the tripe served up on the field by the team at Headingley last night.

Our Number One

It feels a bit like a death in the family. Not a shocking, sudden death in the family that might be the result of a grotesque accident or massive and sudden organ failure. More like the death of an ageing relative who had been suffering from ill health for years but who you never thought would actually pass on in to the next world. Paul Wellens has announced his retirement from professional rugby league with immediate effect.

It follows months of uncertainty about his future as a result of a serious hip injury to which he finally succumbed during a 12-4 defeat at Wigan on Good Friday. That he took to that field that day at all said everything about this modern great of a man and gem of a player. He was in no fit state really, but with seven or eight team-mates similarly crocked his home town club, the only club he ever played for in a 17-year career, needed him badly. It was just one example of how Paul Wellens put St.Helens Rugby Football Club and its fans before his own interests.

Yet amid all the glowing tributes on social media and on the forums which seem to focus on his commitment, bravery and inspirational leadership qualities, few have done justice to the standard of his performances. Wellens was easily the best British fullback of his generation and quite possibly the best in either hemisphere during that time. Those of us who wrote him off as a halfback suggesting he was too slow were left looking very silly indeed and with no option but to just marvel at his brilliance from the fullback position. The positional switch was a masterstroke from Ian Millward and changed the course of Wellens' career forever. He never did get much quicker, but any coach who thought this might be a good enough reason to target him with raking territorial kicks downfield soon discovered that having the first defender bring Wellens to a halt was an impossible dream. He was too deceptively elusive and he could make the best of defenders look very average indeed. Go aerial against Wellens and you got the ultimate in bomb disposal, a man so calm under pressure that he often gave the impression that opponents on the field were hardly a factor in his thinking. A minor inconvenience only slightly complicating the task in hand. Just go up and catch the ball, no fuss. Everything from the timing of his leap to his handling technique was just about perfect. If you were at a game where you saw him drop a high ball you got a t-shirt printed as a memento.

Wellens was an excellent support player from fullback also. He scored over 230 tries during his career, 199 of which came in Super League. He used that same deception and elusiveness employed when returning kicks to find gaps in the league’s tightest defences close to the line, and was always on the shoulder of the man in possession when the opposition’s defensive line was broken. In some ways it is cruel that he has been denied the opportunity to get that 200th try, and the five appearances he needed to hit 500 for his boyhood club. Yet these are minor irritations in a career which has taken in a record 10 Grand Final appearances, 5 Super League title wins (including winning the Harry Sunderland Trophy for Man Of The Match in the 2006 final against Hull FC), 5 Challenge Cup wins (winning the Lance Todd Trophy as Man Of The Match in both 2007 and 2008) and 2 World Club Championship titles. There are many, many rugby league clubs who have not and will never win that amount of silverware in their entire histories. He was also named Man Of Steel in 2006, a year in which Saints won everything in their path if you include the World Club Challenge which was played early in 2007.

Wellens’ leadership qualities earned him a chance at the club captaincy in 2011 when he was appointed joint skipper alongside James Graham. It was a very difficult time to be handed the role with greats like Keiron Cunningham, Sean Long and Paul Sculthorpe recently departing the playing scene. All of that added to the temporary move to Widnes that season as Langtree Park had its finishing touches applied meant that Wellens was charged with helping to lead the team through a transitional period. Wellens still managed to help his team to the Grand Final that year, losing narrowly to a Leeds Rhinos side which had won three of the previous four Grand Finals, all against Saints who had managed to stay competitive almost despite themselves and the events conspiring against them. By the time Graham headed to Canterbury in the NRL Wellens was left to lead the team in his own right as they entered a new era in a new home in 2012. The first two seasons there continued to be turbulent on the field but as the team improved under Nathan Brown, so Wellens' influence on it grew and grew. His performance (ironically in the halves in the midst of yet another injury crisis) in the 14-6 Grand Final success over Wigan last year was heroic, and his emotional, exhausted reaction to it remains an iconic image for the thousands who were at Old Trafford that night or who saw it on the television.

If we are talking about Wellens the man aswell as Wellens the rugby league player, then perhaps the greatest compliment you can pay him comes from the reaction to his retirement from outside the Saints bubble. Fans of other clubs on social media have been unanimous in their praise and respect for one of the modern era’s greatest players, while former team-mates and opponents alike have followed suit in paying tribute to his achievements and wishing him the best of luck as he enters a new chapter in his life. BBC Sport are reporting that he has already been welcomed on to the Saints coaching staff alongside former team-mates Cunningham, Long and Ade Gardner. If so it is a shrewd if rather obvious move by the club’s hierarchy. Players with Wellens’ level of game intelligence seem the best placed to make the transition from player to coach and if he can pass on half of what he knows to the next generation then the club will be developing home-grown stars for years to come.

Paul Wellens should never have to buy another pint in his home town again. So many of us are indebted to him for the great entertainment, the glory and the wonderful memories that he has provided us with for more than a decade and a half. Wello, we salute you…

5 Talking Points From Saints' Loss To Castleford Tigers

5 Talking Points From Saints’ Loss At Castleford Tigers



If You Live By The Sword……



Ben Roberts’ last gasp drop-goal was a perfectly wretched way for Saints to lose a match they had been in full control of. Particularly in view of the fact that they had a scrum feed deep inside the Tigers’ half of the field with barely a minute and a half on the clock. You could argue that a professional rugby league team should never lose a game from that position. But a sneaky glance into the history, indeed the very DNA of Saints reveals that they have been doing exactly this sort of thing to others for years. Who can forget Sean Long’s winning one-pointer in the 2002 Grand Final against Bradford Bulls, or a similar effort which put paid to Warrington’s hopes of ending their losing streak against Saints in Ian Millward’s last game in charge? Warrington were a serial victim as Saints mastered the art of winning games that they had barely bothered to turn up for. It was almost a sport within a sport. The Castleford defeat just shows that if you live by the sword you are occasionally going to die by it. Best get it out of the way now than have it happen when the pots are on offer in August and October. So let’s cheer up just a little bit, eh?



The Humanity Of James Roby



Not to labour a point, but Keiron Cunningham has declared twice recently that in his opinion James Roby is a better hooker than Cunningham himself used to be. Now this might be false modesty on the part of the head coach. He’s probably not going to come out after a game and say ‘yeah, he’s alright but have you seen who’s on that statue outside the stadium?’ However, it is nevertheless an indication of just how brilliant Roby is that a legend such as Cunningham is prepared to concede ground even if it is politeness combined perhaps with a desire to boost his star man’s confidence. Whatever the truth of the Cunningham-Roby debate there is no doubting that the latter is a freak of a player in his own right. All of which makes it all the more shocking to note that the normally robotic Roby broke down a little at The Jungle. His 40-20 attempt sailed out on the full at a crucial time for Saints, and the winning drop-goal was only made possible after Roby failed to pick the ball up cleanly from the base of the scrum. In mitigation he did have Louie McCarthy-Scarsbrook doing his level best to confuse the situation by plodding around clumsily in the vicinity of the ball as it lay on the ground, but the fact of the matter is still that Roby should have picked the ball up and that, had he done so, Saints would likely have run down a fair proportion of the clock and not conceded the possession and territory which allowed Cas to set up for Roberts’ winning effort.



So that’s his two errors for the season out of the way, then. You wouldn’t want to be Widnes Vikings…..



Does Anyone Have A Spare Fullback Lying Around?



I really had hoped to avoid banging on about injuries AGAIN in this column but fate has again conspired against me. Shannon McDonnell is the latest to join Saints’ long-term injury list and in so doing becomes the fourth fullback to be forced out of action this season. Jonny Lomax’s season ended early amid fears for his future in the sport, before time finally caught up with and overtook Paul Wellens. Tommy Makinson filled in ably before McDonnell returned to the club, and now both face months on the sidelines in any case. Adam Swift has been mooted as a possible candidate to take over the role but he suffered a nasty bang on the head at Castleford and will presumably need to pass all of the concussion tests during the week if he is to make the starting line-up for this weekend’s cup quarter-final with Widnes. There are no more cabs left on the rank and everyone is getting very angry about it indeed. It’s like town on a Saturday night before the advent of 24-hour drinking. Step forward Mark Percival who, it has been suggested, will be the last line of defence against Dennis Betts’ side on Sunday. If he can handle the defensive side of the role it could work out wonderfully well. Percival needs to get his hands on the ball more and where better to do that than at fullback which often affords players with his sort of gifts all the time and space they need to prosper. It might just work…… Or if not it has also been suggested that Saints could move for former New Zealand international Kevin Locke, whose resignation from Salford Red Devils has been accepted by Marwan Koukash at a press conference this week.



And So To The Good News……



Just as Saints were out losing fullbacks, they also acquired one of the best scrum halves in the Super League and one of its emerging back row talents as both Luke Walsh and Joe Greenwood made try-scoring returns to action against Daryl Powell’s side. Ok so it was in vain, but it was still uplifting to see Walsh scheming in tandem with Travis Burns, even if the latter is still too fond of a step back on the inside and a drop ball to a barely moving front rower. With Walsh now committed to the club for 2016 what we would really like to see is him enjoying a lengthy spell without injuries. It’s abundantly clear that the men in the red vee are a transformed outfit in attack with Walsh out there directing traffic, while Greenwood’s form before his broken leg was impressive also. If he can reach those heights again at the back end of the season then there is every reason to be optimistic for the Super 8’s and the subsequent play-off series. It just doesn’t feel a lot like it when you have just lost to a last minute drop-goal.



Wembley Dreams



Saints are regulars at the Grand Final. We’re still Super League champions in fact, which is something you might want to ponder before you sink into despair watching re-runs of the Tigers game. However, we haven’t been to a Challenge Cup Final since 2008. A full seven years ago. Even if you just miss having the chance to crack open a beer at 6.00 in the morning before the coach leaves you must be as desperate as I am to get back down to the capital for the more traditional of the game’s showpiece events. Opportunity is knocking with a home quarter final against the Widnes Vikings coming up this Sunday (June 28). The Vikings have slipped out of the top eight of Super League in recent weeks following defeats to Hull KR and Huddersfield Giants and come to Langtree Park with confidence somewhat shaken. Yet it was a very competitive struggle when the two teams met there in the league earlier this season, with Saints pulling away in the last quarter to record a 34-16 success. These stakes are higher this time around, with the winner’s Wembley dream alive while the loser goes home to ‘concentrate on the league’ and gaze longingly into the distance with thoughts of another crack at it in 12 months time. Every minute matters in Super League, but none more so than the 80 that will be played in the Challenge Cup between two old local rivals this weekend. Saints have their best chance of reaching Wembley in recent years. They just need one big performance…

And maybe a favourable semi-final draw……….

The Raheem Situation

Just a quickie today. I've heard all the evidence, read all the headlines and I just wanted to make my point about the burning issue of the day. It won't be popular, but then neither is Spina Bifida so what the fuck do I care? The only thing on the sports pages today is the news that Raheem Sterling is refusing to sign a new contract with Liverpool and will likely end up on the bench at Manchester City/Chelsea/Real Madrid/Bayern Munich/Delete As Appropriate.

I can understand fans being unhappy about this, but really the level of indignation thrown at Sterling while the club continue to get away with passively allowing their best players to sod off elsewhere is making me gag. OK, so Sterling is greedy and it probably is all about money and blah blah bloody blah. But to pretend that paying that amount of money to a player is an affront to Liverpool Football Club and it's unique classy-ness is what Stephen Fry would have called loose stool water and arse gravy. They've paid dozens of players that amount and more. In all likelihood they have no desire to keep Sterling and, instead of coming out and saying so and admitting to their fans that they have become a mediocre selling club in the manner of Spurs or fucking Everton, they want instead to bang on about the well-known evil of agents in football and greedy boys from London who have no connection with the club and are probably just bored of the lack of ambition that is associated with the belief that Martin Skrtel is a serviceable Premier League player.

If it is Liverpool's policy that they will no longer pay any of their players that kind of money then they have already joined the also-rans and will never win the league again. Ever. Perhaps they are waiting for Platini and his boys to give them a helping hand, but that looks unlikely given that his restrictive, cartel-protecting Financial Fair Play rules are about to be legally challenged into oblivion. I mean, I ask you, who in their right fucking mind wants to watch a league in which the traditional giants dominate and nobody is allowed to clumsily happen upon an oil-generated fortune and spoil their party? You can like Chelsea and Manchester City or not, but to my mind there is absolutely no doubt that football is a lot more interesting for the fact that they have been allowed to buy and pay the best players on the planet the big bucks and ritually tonk Crystal Palace and Hull City to pass an otherwise boring Sunday. If you block this from happening then you guarantee that everyone who is currently outside the elite will spend eternity playing for the privilege of avoiding relegation or a fate worse than that, the Europa League.

So no, I'm not saying Liverpool should pay Raheem Sterling. I'm just saying they should fucking grow up and stop whining about what it costs to be competitive in the Premier League these days. If they don't pay Sterling then the reason that they should not is because actually he's been crap this year, not because of how much money his agent wants him to make. Now I realise that this goes against all my every day political beliefs which lie somewhere to the left of Josef Stalin, but football is not remotely related to real life. Nobody in football has to go to a foodbank because Chelsea just bought another £50million squad player. And in any case, a football club trying to deny the fact that it is a capitalist behemoth masquerading as a socialist vehicle of the people is vomit inducing.

That's all. Bye Raheem.

Blackpool Part Three - Sunday

If you’ve read much of this rubbish you will probably know that I have been to the top of both the Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building in New York. I have spent time looking out over the city from both which offer mesmerising views of everything from the Statue Of Liberty and the Chrysler Building to the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. The Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building are high. Very high. And I don’t like high. But if you’re going all that way….

Compared with all of this the top of Blackpool Tower was going to be a breeze. Hopefully without too much of an actual breeze considering high winds had stopped us going up there the day before. But easy. No bother. It stands 158 metres high, or 518 feet which must be some sort of mathematical anomaly. Surely not all heights and distances can be converted from metres to feet using the same digits? No, they can’t as we will see but it should be remembered that I failed GCSE Maths twice. When I say failed I mean I got a D when I needed a C. I got it at the third time of asking, which I still believe is down to the fact that nobody marks maths papers and instead names are drawn out of the education authorities’ equivalent of the FA’s velvet ballbag. Once they have the required number of successful candidates the rest get sent back to re-sit. In my case I re-sat with one-time Saints centre and winger and noisiest person in the class Andy Haigh, and Andy Mikhail who once carried Sonny Nickle on his shoulders in a particularly exuberant celebration of some Saints win or other and can now be found managing the affairs of St.Helens’ middleweight boxing contender Martin Murray. I’m an administrator for a wonderful organisation I am still not allowed to name. Maybe you had to be called Andy to go on to greater things from that maths re-sit class.

Which name dropping bullshit does nothing to lead us to where we should be going. Which is comparing heights of well known global landmarks in tenuous preparation for my telling you about the day I went to the top of Blackpool Tower. So allow me to continue. The Empire State Building is more than twice the height of Blackpool Tower at 381 metres or 1250 feet, while Rockefeller Center stands 266 metres high or 872 feet. So given that, the 158 metres or 518 feet of Blackpool Tower was small beer. Except for the glass floor. Glass floors tend to freak me out a little bit. At the Yorvik Centre in York I had trouble crossing a glass floor which overlooked about a three-foot drop to a model of the old Viking digs beneath the glass. I was ok if I looked straight ahead but when I looked down at it and was hit by the optical illusion of nothingness beneath me I struggled a little bit. The glass floor was going to be interesting.

Getting there wasn't straightforward, however. The set-up is quite similar to the New York landmarks in that you are led from queue to queue by the staff before you actually reach the lifts to take you to the very top. There is information about the tower on the walls to distract you from the fact that you are waiting but the truth is that you are not waiting nearly long enough to be able to take it all in. Just long enough for it to annoy you. Included in the price of a ticket for the Blackpool Tower Eye, to give it its proper name, is a 4D show. So before you get to where you need to be, but after you have finished queuing and failing to read the end of the paragraph on the wall that you had started reading to make the waiting time go more quickly, you are given a quite absurd pair of 4D specs and ushered into a small theatre. Whatever happened to 3D? Is 5D a thing and if it is, is it hurtling towards us? In the 4D theatre there is a bar at absolutely the right height to stop someone at my eye level from seeing at least a quarter of the screen. None of which turns out to be particularly disappointing as the underwhelming 4D 'show' consists of a small boy who seems very taken by the tower, the ballroom and the circus and experiences some deranged fantasy about the whole thing launching like a rocket. Kylie Minogue's 'All The Lovers' is the soundtrack to all of this for reasons which are beyond my comprehension. But then I could only see three quarters of the screen so perhaps I missed something. Perhaps the names of all of Kylie Minogue's lovers scrolled across the screen like headlines on the Sky News ticker.

On the subject of tickers (another seamless link) the lift to the observation deck is not for the faint hearted. It's fairly transparent so you can see the framework of the tower as you go up to the top. We also had the bonus view of the scaffolding which currently envelopes parts of the tower as they carry out some refurbishments. If anything needs refurbishment it is the 4D show. Regardless, Blackpool Tower currently (at least at the time of our visit but bear in mind that I am writing this six weeks later) looks like an enormous version of my house, which is currently unrecognisable due to all of the building work going on. On the first day of work the builders phoned Emma and told her that they would have to remove my ramp, as if that wasn't really important and we could do without it. After all, Emma can help me inside and why the fuck would I want to go outside anywhere on my own given that I am a disabled retard who is a danger to himself and society? It's bad enough that I have to park my car at my mum and dad's house.

Back to the Blackpool Tower lift. I had a sneaky peak outside but I spent most of the ascent looking straight ahead at the door of the lift. Unlike the windows at the side you can't see through the door in front of you so it becomes just like any other lift if you focus your gaze straight ahead. We were let out at the top and advised that when we were ready to go back down a member of staff would assist us in using the lift around the other side. Normally I get irritated when there are signs on lifts asking you to refrain from using them without a member of staff to assist you, but in this case I'm reassured by the idea. If this were a free for all and little Johnny was allowed to press the call button whenever the mood took him, and then the lift broke as a result, well then we'd all be buggered. Or at least I would. I don't know how many steps there are from the top of the tower to the bottom of it but in the event that the lift breaks no emergency service worker is assisting me in descending them. I'm waiting it out on the top deck, on the glass floor, until they fix the fecking thing. I don't even know if this thing has steps any more. Nobody uses them. And this a listed building. Progress, that.

The glass floor is on the west side of the tower and offers some very special panoramic views of the seaside town. Directly in front of you is a huge glass window overlooking the sea. I focused completely on this and rolled over the glass floor without giving it half as much thought as I had in York. Perhaps the views of the sea and the town were a useful distraction. In the Yorvik Centre I don't remember there being much to look at other than the glass floor and the model beneath it. If you looked in front of you, you might catch a glimpse of a pre-historic stool from some ancient bowel. In a frame. Or an interactive touch-screen offering you information about the history of the horned helmet. Certainly not Blackpool beach.

Having gained in confidence I decided to look down at the pavement below. It's at that point that you realise just how high 158 metres or 518 feet really is. You can expect to lose at least part of your stomach but hopefully none of your breakfast. On the ground below there is the comical sight of the outline of a human body, the kind that you see drawn around dead bodies in crime dramas on television or film. Nordberg, all of that. Beside the outline it just says.....'ouch...!'. Which is amusing but I suspect inaccurate. I'm not sure you would feel anything if you fell 158 metres or 518 feet on to a concrete pavement. It's not long before I stop contemplating this and go for another wander around the viewing deck. It's far easier to look at tall buildings in the distance than it is to dwell for too long on the pavement and the ant-sized people traipsing across it.

Predictably, the ride down in the lift takes a long time. Since you cannot operate the lift yourself you have to just wait until a member of staff becomes available to do it for you. By which time everyone has had enough of the views and the heights and wants to go back down aswell. You do get to go straight to the bottom though, so at least you are spared another viewing of all Kylie Minogue's lovers. Any more of that and you could be tempted to try to find out whether you'd feel anything if you jumped off the top of the tower.

With nothing too vital to get home for we decided to spend part of the afternoon in the Tower's other major tourist attraction, the dungeons beneath. Adverts dotted around the town promise 10 live actors taking you through the history of various types of horrific punishment in England, going back centuries. The actors take their responsibilities very seriously, which they should do for £15 a throw, never once showing even the merest hint that they might exit their characters at some point. They've zoned out completely, and become medieval peddlers of torture and instruments of torture. No expense spared in the special effects department either as at one point one lucky punter is sprayed with fake blood from a body lying prone in the centre of a small room. All of which is surprising given that the body is both a dummy and supposedly dead. In another scene a young girl is shown the delights of some ball-crunching instrument of pain before being invited to lock herself into a small cage while another tour guide character finishes telling us the about the many and varied painful ways there were to impose justice in those days. But just to prove that the old ways can still be effective and at a much cheaper rate, one man almost vacates his skin at the beginning of the tour when an actor dressed as a monk leaps up from behind a desk and shouts something along the lines of 'boo'. Or something.

Upon being led from room to room in the dungeons we also manage to get lost among a maze of mirrors, which has to rank as one of my worst nightmares.

Of course, if you go to enough of these sorts of things you are going to get picked on. It seems everyone loves a bit of audience participation. And so it was that inevitably, after one lady who had declared herself to be called Fred and was found guilty of fornicating with a horse or something, I was called upon to move forward into the spotlight to face a bit of medieval justice. The judge reminded me of David Schneider from I'm Alan Partridge and The Day Today. Except he had a robe on a stupid wig on, of course. He asked me my name...

"Geoffrey." I replied. No, I don't know why. It was just the first name I thought of.

"And where are you from, Geoffrey......?" he asks, in a voice that would have been at home in the local shop for local people in The League Of Gentlemen.

"Skelmersdale."

No, I don't know that either, except to say that I thought about saying Wigan and then felt like that was a bit too predictable. Believe it or not there is a point where even I start to think that hammering Wigan becomes a bit stale. I've known two people in my life who have lived in Skelmersdale, on the other hand, and both have assured me that it is an unblemished, perfect shit hole. Either way I was going to answer the two questions with anything other than 'Stephen' and 'St.Helens'. I can't remember rightly what I was accused of. It may even have been more equine fornication, but naturally enough I was found guilty. But he'd already punished me by sending me to audience participation hell for the last ten minutes and charging me £30 (there were two of us, remember) for the privilege.

There was nothing more he could to me now.