Premier Unravel-Inn

Forgive me, it's late.

Anyway - despite much happy diversion at Burton with Shane (plus unexpected others) and plenty of attractive TV - it's time to actively disbelieve the hype and gaze covetously over to where the action is:









Leek, Leek, Leek attack! Amen, brothers.

Workwise, meanwhile, if current trends continue, I'm set for accredited take-no-shit status in early to mid to 2036. Grr!

The downhill shalom

So dear reader,

What of these times we live in? Firstly, I hope this missive finds you well.

And me? All in all, not bad... y'know, industrious enough [I'm feeling like what in football jargon is referred to as a 'good pro,' ideally without the imminent free transfer] though lacking a smidge in the momentum and inspiration departments, hence the intermittent service.

We have, and will have traveled both near and far, but mostly near: from beautiful telly (no, really: a rare, rare thing - TV that's a bit special) to The / A Beautiful Game in the space of a week, via a steaming heap of fresh horse manure for the allotment. And work, and Life, and normality, and b-o-o-k-s and the Sunshine Cafe - yes, those too, mm.

Good times are these - at least, quite good. I may even push the boat out this week for Everton vs Sporting Lisbon or (if I'm feeling logistically awkward) Loughborough Dynamo vs Leek. And I am childless on Wednesday, which leaves me free to visit the new People's History Museum. Happy days.

Furthermore, Sam received [gratefully] a new t-shirt from M and Q in Canada a couple of weeks back. The box-heckling result here in ST6 being: "sod the downhill slalom (initially - auspiciously? - mistyped): what we really want to know is what the cuddly mascot's up to!"

So thanks are due to them too. See? Times're not bad at all. They're quite good, in fact. The itchy question is: where do we go from here, or will we be swept away on the crest of some unforeseen (or all too predictable) wave?

One contemplates the next six weeks with interest, foreboding, and - most of all - mixed feelings.

Yours in hopeful anticlimax,

M.

Pixels

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

- e.e. cummings

Monarchists

With Groundhog and I thwarted in our efforts to watch Leek play Kidsgrove, what better way to occupy ourselves than to case out one of the few pubs in the Potteries (maybe the only one) to appear in CAMRA's National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors?

"Hmm, I'm a bit scared," confided one of us - I'll not say who - as we chiselled our way around the knot of terraces and unannounced dead ends that lies just outside Tunstall.

The Vine - "offering an unspoilt atmosphere," claims the signage - is curiously uncelebrated by Stoke-on-Trent's thousands of hostelry historians. Effectively the three-room bit of an end terrace, it is rather out of the way.

Gently drifting dialect filled the building, and we ventured into the lounge bar area, where a regular was propping up the bar. Eventually the friendly veteran publican appeared, wiping his hands, from somewhere out back, looking - I like to think - as if he'd been busy with his Airfix.

Pints of Walker's Smooth - respectfully topped up - in hands (and New Year's resolution amended...) we perched behind a laminate-top to gauge our surroundings. A conversation bounced around the pub's three rooms, mostly concerning the pressing issues of the day*, i.e. whether the dominoes and darts teams would be playing at home or away this week.

A perfect opportunity to make a mental note of the reasons why The Vine is ace:

1. It is tiny and extremely local, yet survives.
   
2. It has an ancient embroidered sampler on the wall proclaiming it to be 'the best little pub in Stoke-on-Trent,' where such an object would normally read 'suffer little children...' etc. Indeed.
   
3. It has what appears to be the publican's back room at the rear of the building, and the pub is small enough for 'the wife' to be involved in all of the conversations while she knocks back a cuppa out back before taking over at the bar
   
4. Though there are no cask ales, the fizzy keg has proper old-school crappy beer in Ansells Mild.
5. It won an award for best external hanging baskets in the 1986 Garden Festival competition. How do I know this? Because the yellowing certificate is still displayed, proudly, 'pon the wall.
   
6. The memo board is covered in all the exciting news and results from the Potteries' dominoes scene.
7. The curtains are a really good three-tone 1970s orange.
8. The regulars warm themselves by a gas fire like my mum and dad had in 1984.
9. There are loads of black and white photos of regulars gone by, all old-school Potteries looking, hair swept up and brylcreemed into the perfect square (symmetry with the jaw), c. 1957 and beyond.
10. Loads of 1982 royal wedding china and framed photos of the queen in her coronation year. I must admit, Monarchists make good pubs.
    

Go there. But don't go alone if you can't hold your own at cribbage.

(* and earlier, in May St Chippy, the gathered customers were reassuringly, vehemently angry about the way in which their workplaces' shop-fronts had been put through and their Muslim colleagues abused during the EDL affair last weekend.)

Busy doing nothing...

Bugger. The allotment's frozen and I have all but decided to take the risk of not applying for jobs despite various looming spectres. Well, then, what could be more productive than this?

Despite the prominence of some truly awful stock music, I particularly like the Hijo de Puta track that kicks in with beautiful timing around 19 minutes, the Carlos Valderrama stuff (the briefest CV cameo can polish any turd - any turd), the gentle ridicule of that certain-kind-of-masculinity, and the general lack of Premiership hubris throughout.

No more than a montage really, this, but a nonetheless superior one without the laboured Anglo-Saxon bias. Probably deserves a more inspiring title than it got.

Cross my palm with pixels

In a rather whimsical moment, I'm loving* the way that Wordle is apt to cradle and arouse the spurious crystal-ball quality in any old one-horse weblog (mine).

And so, let is be said. 2010 will be: Tracksuited. Tea-puddled. [And] Less than international.

Ta-da! Happy New Year, readers.

*Parlance of the postmodern thirty-something, I'm told.

The REAL Football Factory

Oi! Time for the off!

After I had infiltrated Belper's top boys (average age 73) with a plastic spoon (milky) I lifted from the condiments table, I spent the remaining 86 minutes behind the goal that Leek were attacking. In the lashing wind and driving rain, Groundhog and I were among the *six.*

Hardcore.

1-1, ill-deserved equaliser in the dying minutes. Squalid as sport goes. Posh clubhouse though. "We only do Guinness Extra Cold." Ha facking ha.

Photo is licensed under Creative Commons by Jonathan Gill.

Carsten Ist kunst?

Crowded Penalty Area. Pork and Unripe Tomato, 2009.

And so it was, my three brawny bratwursts bore uncanny resemblances to Carstens Jancker and Ramelow (not the most demonstrative link in the latter case, but too good to miss). Shamefully, I couldn't think of a name for number three. A little more Bohemian and it could have been Jan Koller, perhaps.

Ah... food, football and national stereotypes. The gifts that just keep on giving...

I stayed on my feet, dear reader

Name drop:

So, like many footballers of less-than-international standing, I contrived to happen upon Rio Ferdinand's trailing leg in the Pumpkin at Stockport station today. He was arranged around a tea-puddled table with some guy I took to be his agent, waiting for a London-bound train that had been cancelled. And I must say, the guy is incredibly tall and skinny, built like a human dragonfly.

All I can say is it's a shame he can't tackle Johnny Foreigner nearly as effectively as he can polish off three packets of Starburst. Obviously, my attempts to persuade him that his future lies in Unibond One (South) will provide the latest tapping-up scandal in tomorrow's tabloids. Sadly he didn't seem tempted by the offer of a fully-chauffered 1995 Ibiza and all the cheese oatcakes he can eat.

No matter. You heard it here first. And then he was gone - through the gaggle of tracksuited PE students with camera phones - to First Class, and that London.

Coinage

Much water has lapsed under the bridge since last I typed. Most of it rather too introspective, concentric or just plain rantrospective (boilers, plumbing, cars, careers on which one doesn't break even) to 'do' here (leave that to the poets, eh?)

Still, what can now be made official is that - all being well - we'll be doing this again next year. And yet the birthplace of #1 has been razed. Hopefully also gone are the Entinox pipes that have to be both snorted from and held into the wall at the same time. And with them, say cheerio to the gaffer-taped linoleum and floral seventies wallpaper... the list could go on.

And the parking's more chronic than ever, but I will not, shall not - I refuse to - turn this blog into a place to talk roads and parking spaces (leave that to the Sentinel, eh?)

To be honest, I nearly shed a tear as we shuffled by the taxis, ambulances and smiling families. Sam's was a difficult birth, though not life-threateningly so. None the less, it was his place of birth. And there is (was) something about the old-style maternity unit that's very democratic by 21st century standards, perhaps enforcedly so: everybody in it together, for better or worse.

In that space everybody could hear you scream.

With the private rooms, the all-day visiting, and the LCDs blinking out car-seat adverts disguised as public information films, I dare say some of that will be lost. By and large, mothers will agree, it's A Good Thing. But I bet there won't be the [compulsory] state-sponsored camaraderie that was such a striking feature of that ward.

Or maybe there will - but that's a post for another time.

I am sometimes accused of negativity

but the best place in the world is anywhere on a bright autumn morning.












In this case, Stoke-on-Trent.

*whistles, hops, doffs cap*

What would Cedric do?

...with Stoke?

Every now and again, with a peckish tap of the ENTER key, the Web brings you something fragrant yet tantalising from the back of the fridge.

The Potteries Thinkbelt, a kind of radical/situationist university dreamt up in the 1960s by Stone-born architect Cedric Price, seems visionary even today, and appears still to be tickling today's architects to some degree.

The idea, so it goes, was to mobilise learning by using north Staffordshire's recently-closed railway lines. Educational facilities would be shunted about, combined and recombined in Hanley, Tunstall or Pitshill like Duplo with a doctorate - a kind of anti-university.

The dream was to create something that would never date, since it would be extensible, reconfigurable and generally open to erudite tinkering.

Given the age of the proposals, it's a shame there don't appear to be more remnants out in cyberspace. A search of Stoke libraries' catalogue promises to be a foregone conclusion, but we'll see... oh - WAIT!

(EDIT: hats off to Culturing Stuff. I'd missed this.)

Chopped liver

Or, the feeling that is dicing your innards as your own flesh and blood leaves the club and goes out on loan.

It'll toughen him up, say the pundits, in a hackneyed and weary attempt to kill it off. Mothers (and they are, mostly) can sound a lot like Lawro sometimes, whether feminists, post-feminists, or - usually - self appointed mouthpieces of the free world.

In the morning, there are a few dull prods of the knife-point: begging - pleading not to be left there - and a sudden wrenching, panicking conviction that none of these people will look after him.

Then Kidsgrove station, and the slow prising of sinew becomes deeper and more intense as the fast trains whisk by rather unlike magic bullets. Suppositories, sir? That's the 09.05 Northern Rail service to Manchester Piccadilly.

At lunchtime a phone call; calculated, professional reassurance is anticipated, but instead there's a pregnant pause. They were about to phone, actually. They wouldn't normally.

Word is there was spontaneous panic at school, so it might be worth picking him up earlier than planned. There's something about him, she says - he's bright - but he's up and down. He's so serious and gets so anxious about what might happen, and she's never seen that in such a young child.

The premature train home breaks down. In my lap, Iain Sinclair is wandering by the A1 in Northants. My head and stomach, meanwhile, are wondering in Macclesfield.

Later, I retrieve the lad from his in-between place. I listen hard for sounds from within, then breathe and knock. Smiles, for now. He's proud of himself having drawn a boat with wheels. And he played oustide today. What a transformation from before, they remark. Those anaesthetic analyses wear off, and there is cautious, limp relief where sharp discomfort used to be.

Still early doors, Saint. And it's still a game of two halves. Tomorrow, he and I have the morning to enjoy ourselves, and we are glad of it.

Computer:

Bread. Sliced, white. Margarine.

I wonder what Captain Picard's enviable Earl Grey dispenser would make of that? I'd imagine he might well reply that such a treat is no way to explore the Delta Quadrant, or indeed The Nether Potteries.

What of recent times and climes?

There have been no colourful trips on the 21 - it's been too long old friend. No major angst (well there was, but it was just the the product of an over-anxious mind and has been noted as such), just a fair bit of work stuff (upbeat but busy), and only the odd straggle of mildly interesting annotation in my diary. And therefore, no Sketches From Boz.

The Pittshill of Despair? Far from it. Today I abandoned our only child to Serco ... sorry... Stoke-on-Trent LEA, for the first time. He didn't love it but he didn't hate it either. And for a little while at least, there's the promise of some lonesome time on two weekdays, for the first time in what seems like forever.

I spy some room for a little dérive. Maybe riding the 6A from end to end and back again (and again), or something equally daunting / thrilling. I should probably do a course, but the chances of me abandoning learning in favour of cash or much heavier learning during the next year are too high, whatever the alleged flexibility of the colleges.

I started at Longton Library, where the extremely nice librarian helped me to find a choice volume. "Thing is," she said, "these things get sent to us, and then just disappear when they haven't been borrowed in three years or more."

But there it was, virtually unthumbed: happy days in the town where nearly-new books go to die.

Noose Lane

A few weeks back, Groundhog and I ventured west to Oswestry, where TNS were sadly defeated by Fram Reykjavik. It was entertaining but felt a little artificial, with its sunshine and its Europa League flags, its regulation all-seatedness, and its Hugh Dallas.

So this evening we began our season proper with a jaunt down the M6 to Willenhall, which is anything but artificial. Somehow I knew we weren't quite pioneers, but this was to be our first away game with Leek Town, this season's adopted team, who had rebounded from 3-1 down to draw with Loughborough Dynamo at the weekend.

The match was played out beneath darkening skies thick like monochrome toothpaste. Thumping studs roused swirling dust storms like stetsons in the Nevada Desert. The smell of Deep Heat emanated spontaneously from the thighs of plucky midfielders. In the bar behind the Willenhall goal a fruit machine shuffled out a stream of cash-prize consciousness to distant spectators. Every now and again, a foghorn would sound across the Black Country night: "ANOTHER DISGRACE, REF!" Plus ça change.

2-1. Glorious. Life begins at (seven) forty-five. And thanks to work stuff, I won't even be at Vale Park this Saturday.

Birthday

Yesterday I went with Sam to the induction afternoon at his school nursery, about which he had been very excited for days.

He's had good experience of schools during his short life, having even been unfazed six months ago by the process of a grilling from thirty seven-year olds on the subject of how toddlers are different from babies, and at the end of which he sat down contentedly for a story with them all.

In short, I was kind of expecting it to be plain sailing, which it was, right up until we had to go into the nursery classroom. Sam had been bantering - or at least happily making daft noises - with all the reception kids who had come over to the fence to investigate the gaggle of pre-schoolers and awkward-looking grown-ups; they seemed a thoroughly genial bunch of children.

Sam was reluctant on entering the room, but began to play with a 3D magnetic jigsaw, occasionally sharing remarks with another boy and his mum. But then, there was a moment where it seemed he looked up, his surroundings closed in, and his whole self melted spontaneously. It seemed to dawn on him that the fairly small classroom was thick with people - children and adults - milling around, with most of the latter simply ignored by the former.

Springing to his feet, he clamped himself to my neck and began to cry "I want to go home now, I want to go home now, I WANT TO GO HOME NOW," with an increasing anxiety shortness of breath. I could feel his heart belting like a drum machine as the tears flooded his cheeks, leaving little wet patches on the carpet, and his whole body became a white knuckle.

Probably for the first time since I was ten - deaths, illnesses notwithstanding - I sobbed publicly, visibly and nearly (very nearly) uncontrollably. A man not given to that kind of self-expression, surrounded by level-headed young children happily patting at playdough or charging around in their own little worlds with plastic dinosaurs in hand, and by adults that didn't know where to look.

We asked to go outside for a walk, and returned to the classroom ten minutes later, where it was all I could do to sit boy on lap beneath the coat pegs in the corner, as the pleas restarted. Pressed emotionally and physically into a corner, one of the other parents kindly took some sympathy and relayed a request for some train track to coax some sense of comfort and familiarity. Despite a couple of these half-effective distractions, the indoor parts of the afternoon nonetheless continued in similar recoiling vein.

The one thing that leaves me glad we stayed is that Sam loved playing in the outdoor classroom, forgetting his anxiety instantly and role-playing delightedly in the hidey house / pretend cafe with other nursery and reception kids and charging around on the various bits and pieces.

We chatted on the way home, and he told me that he liked the teacher and the children and the playground and the sing-song but not the banging [of drums and tambourines during the sing-song] or "all the grown ups... they were scary."

Really, there was enough to suggest that he'll be fine once he finds his feet, and the reception children especially were all thrilling to play with. But, as I write this post and say to myself. "he'll be three tomorrow," it's all I can do to choke the tears once again.

Ambition

After yet another Tuesday night of teenage rampage - though quite positive and enjoyable in the end - I came in late and popped upstairs to see Sam.

The boy snored quietly in his pit with hair scruffened and body slackened, right up against the wall and with one leg rooting indolently down the side of the bed.

Ample opportunity, then, for me to recline beside him and stop for a little oneversation (hmm, I'm acutely aware but ... does this sound like a sign of madness?)

Whatever:

"[...] missed you, would have really enjoyed a little play this afternoon [...] teenagers blinkin' obsessed with roflcopters [...] hope you had a nice day too, Mummy was really proud of your burnet moth drawing so we've put it on the wall [...] what do you fancy doing on Thursday, I though we could go on another little adventure up at Berryhill fields, and take some crayons and a picnic this time, eh? [...] so anyway, I'm really chuffed 'cos Ian Miller and Stephen Foster are staying - I guess Colin Todd is a safe choice in the circumstances - and did I agree to take you and Aidan to Vale Park...? Err, maybe that's not such a good idea at your young age, um...."

During this ramble, Sam would loll gently away from the wall now and again. Each time, he'd dribble a bit and then his head would incline itself back to the wall again with a gentle, repeating thud (great for fatherly self-esteem, that).

Manoeuvring him back towards his rocket pillow, this all rendered me speechlessly glad that it's not me banging my head on brick.

Get by. If you can, strive to get paid doing just enough of something you enjoy. Then; work less, play more - ideally caught up in a whirlwind of playful young child[ren] doing his [their] stuff, with crayons.

Like the man says.

Vayamos con Dios

KABOOOM!

"For a herbal touch, add sweet smelling herbs, such as lavender, or
powdered frankincense. As each ant explodes, a cloud of incense-like
smoke will appear, scenting your kitchen or garden."

Ooh, this I like! Sam and I are off to try it now.

Brand values

As you ascend from Lime Kiln traffic lights towards Hanley, you pass a hand car wash facility on the right, which merrily proclaims itself to be "the best hand job in town." In fact it's pretty much adjacent to the venerable horse-trough from which this blog takes its name.

Today, while queueing interminably to turn right, I noticed that Soap Suds also carries signage for a well-known local taxi firm. Also printed on the sign were the logo of Staffordshire's only Premier League football club, and the initials of the club's well-known firm, the N40.

I find this discouraging. In passing, I was mildly shocked by it. I can't think of any other business that would identify itself so obviously and officially with that sort of stuff.

Bizarre, at best, no?

If you try sometimes

These past few days I've had too much time to reconsider all the ruminating and reflection I've done these past few weeks.

Needs, wants, shoulds, could haves, what ifs and other general angsts that loiter all about me much of the time, especially when thinking of The Future (his, hers, ours and mine).

Solely from a personal perspective, it turns out that my conclusion is the same as my starting point, and the journey only ever took me round the houses. I think this is good, though I don't think the loiterers will take that as their cue to leave.

Suffice to say that when you stick your neck out, it's nice if there's at least someone else that can be persuaded to agree that it's a good idea - even if it is a far-from-sage miserabilist or a guy with an unfeasibly rubberised face.