Stuck Between Stations

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Supporter

An extortionate public transport system provides cheap fares that run out before match tickets go on sale while the suits make it even harder to support the club. To call it difficult being a long-distance fan is sad and self-indulgent. It is just different. It makes seeing matches difficult, my last being Lillestrom at home (with the chap next to me berating Stephen Carr for 90 minutes…) and the last before that was the 3-3 draw at Southampton. Even then I had to sit in the Southampton end, right next to the Newcastle fans; I must have been the only person sat down when Kevin Phillips came on.

Isolation breeds contempt, which creates solidarity. My best friend supports Leeds United and I yearn for the days we play them again, those games mattered, what does Wigan away even mean? Crap football, crap fans, crap town. Another good friend is from Norwich and I went with him to Carrow Road for the Birmingham match, Kevin Phillips joined us and I revelled in the fact 20,000 others were willing him to fail. The trouble with the SKY generation, of which I am a paid-up member, is that while it has seen an improvement in the quality of player on show it has created the ‘hybrid’ football fan who has too much time on their hands and foams at the mouth as they hammer at keyboards and text the ‘cracking banter’ brigade on the BBC website’s Live Text.

These morons encircle local boozers when you just want to keep your head down during the Chelsea home match as every taxi driver in Canterbury sneers at your back that Damien Duff knows which side his bread is buttered on. The press frustrate with their clamouring ridicule but it is nothing compared to hearing these ‘opinions’ filter through the masses. They can’t string together a semblance of an argument, during the 4-1 Villa defeat last season I was distracted from the match by a volley of questions about Dennis Wise and his legions of orcs. Wearing the shirt south of Washington seems to encourage these people and their unrepentant missive of bile and ignorance.

I have no love for southern football fans, whenever I visit Portsmouth I am aware of it teeming with wannabe east-enders, the same people who tormented my youth with accusatory questions at birthday parties and tea-time visits as my non-support for Southampton, Chelsea or Manchester United became a sticking point for friends and parents alike. Darren Peacock is swift to point out that the 95/96 defence weren’t rubbish but this didn’t stop the Spanish inquisition at school (again, from Southampton fans). Despite my dad being a Geordie supporting the club has always been an intense, personal, affair, whether it is my first live match, of which I remember nothing bar the chap behind me apologising to my dad at half-time for swearing too much, or Ian Woan, the shot of doom and my subsequent tantrum. I am still ashamed to this day that my reaction upon arriving home from the pub was to hurl my shirt on the ground then kick and spit on it. My mother, appalled, said I wasn’t going to watch football any more if this is how I behaved. I am the same now, minus the delinquency.

The decline of the last few years has seen a strange coincidence with my first real forays into the club’s history. I had ridden on my blood ties to the club for too long and realised there was more to Newcastle United than Alan Shearer, Kevin Keegan and the Champions League. Not growing up in the area has made me question whether I deserve the club in the past, I sulked after losing 3-0 to West Ham but what did the club owe me, what had I invested in it? When I was growing up there were only one or two other Newcastle fans at school, hangers on from the Keegan years who soon tailed off with Dalglish and Gullit, claiming they weren’t interested anymore.

It is difficult to decide whether supporting Newcastle United has made me better or bitter. My Alan Shearer poster reminded me of my responsibilities as a boy and Mike Ashley reinforces them within me now. The apathy that this regime has created hasn’t taken hold of me (although I no longer expect wins against teams with smaller grounds than ours), desire to own the purple shirt dissipates and I am happy to buy tickets and nothing else. Sticking with the club whilst people posture how many years since Newcastle won the league?, you lot think you’re a big club, makes abandoning it now seem a churlish idea. I’ve taken on southern football fans for years, I can take on Mike Ashley. They’re all bottlers anyway.

Brighter Days

Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion

Saccharine.

Buy here or here if you want an exclusive bonus disc mixed by the band.

Throw Away Your Television

How queer that after watching the second part (television) of Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle on iPlayer yesterday I chose to watch the venereal stain that was The Sex Education Show vs Pornography on Channel 4. I ought to explain. Lee dismissed Channel 4 as a deluge of faecal matter that descends upon people, as shown through the sketches that interject between his missives (the majority of which are performed by Kevin Eldon and that fat man from the Little Britain Fat Fighters sketches who wasn't funny then and still, wow, isn't); Anna Richardson seems to be making television programmes to support this view.

Anna decided to ignite a debate by visting a school made up from the mongoloid handfuls of Sheringham, which is in Norfolk (hey... I used to live there!) She spent the next fifty minutes (I turned over before the end, sorry) disecting the seedy world that school children inhabit on the internet. Well, she might have called it seedy, she spent a lot of time repeating herself which was pretty pointless as I think most people spent their time watching it hoping to see some wank material.

The best bit was her reporting a child pornography website after she clicked on a link whilst watching some other porn. She must have mentioned that it shocked her at least five times in twenty to thirty seconds. It grated so much that I answered her aloud, "I get it, you're shocked", then again, I talk to myself a lot, conducting imaginary pre-match interviews for Football Focus on Football Manager, so I suppose an analyst would call talking at an animate object a 'breakthrough'. She also spoke for the crew (of course, if she hadn't, I'd have assumed they were all massive raging paedos spaffing off into the boom, so I applaud her for this) and questioned whether children were being exposed to this.

I question whether Jacqui Smith is being exposed to it, Anna.

The answer is quite obvious, for this is Channel 4. Don't click on it. She's talking to a bunch of porn vets and wonders if they're being exposed. Probably not, Anna, people know not to click on those things because they're not as stupid or weird as you are. Apart from in Sheringham, where The Darkness still seem to be de rigeur in the style stakes. Or was that the Welsh porn star she interviewed? Sorry for not giving a solitary spazzy fuck.

Don't show sixteen year olds naked grown women and be surprised they don't like how they look. You can be surprised at the boys' shit hair styles and the silly things the girls say when looking at tits (even they like the fake ones!) but being flabbergasted that kids don't like saggy boobs of a woman who has had two children is thicky on a bike at the post office. I don't even know what demographic they're going for. The same people that watch all the spew that Channel 4 gag on as they brush their tongues with their toothbrushes, I expect.

Anna visited three computing retailers and was shocked to find that the filters inbuilt in all mobile phones were available on computers but had to be activated by consumers themselves. She was also shocked (there it is again) that each retailer gave her different advice. Welcome to the modern high street, Anna. The obvious answer, from someone who can't even hyperlink or fix their DVD drive, is google. I wonder if she's heard of it? Ah, she fucking has as well! She used it to find porn sites! Hooray. Why not google admin and filters as well then? ARGGGGGGH. Like cutting yourself with a knife to test the sharpness of a blade. I assume she does that too. Just get AVG free, Anna, and sit down.

So, then... Risible, ugly and pedantic television with a bizarre number of ad breaks. It made me sad that my phone was too shit to browse for porn to pass the time while I wait for Stewart Lee to start on BBC2. The entire experience made me feel the need to dig a moat around my house, fill it up with petrol and spend my remaining days tending to a wall of flame to keep these idiots and their mutant spawn from posting me my letters.

Then I watched the aforementioned Comedy Vehicle. Calling it a vehicle seems about right as it seems to exist to propel Stewart Lee in to the same bracket of 'modern life is shit and this is why' as Mitchell and Webb and Frankie Boyle blah blah blah. This would work better if Lee didn't repeat himself so often to make the jokes last longer (and less funny) and if the programme's theme music wasn't that piece of filth that Bolton Wanderers play when (!) they score a goal at home. I watch comedy to be entertained, not to be reminded of the existence of Gavin McCann, Gary Megson and Sam Allardyce. In fact, Sam Allardyce's interviews on why he should be England manager were funnier than the entirety of last night's Comedy Vehicle. Stewart Lee is like Morrissey; only half as good as he thinks he is. He has some wonderful moments which you can forget as soon as he opens his mouth to spout out the next bit of rubbish. For every How Soon Is Now? or diatribe against Dan Brown (from the first programme, on Books) there is some shit about veganism or a shit joke about a maudlin, solitary ballet shoe which culminates in a poor joke about people complaining to the BBC about everything.

He also looks a bit like Morrissey, which is really where the comparison came from in the first place.

However, The Wire started last night and if you missed that you're fucked, well and truly. There's no more to say on that, in all honesty.

Come back later for some appalling creative writing and a one-word review of Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, if you fancy.

Been A While Since I Went Away

Just returned from a sabbatical to see old friends from university and never wish to use National Express again. The utter crap-fest that is my mobile phone's mp3 function has brought me to a crossroads as to what to buy. No desire to have an iPod and my previous Creative broke about three days after the warranty expired so I am wary of them (despite the fact that the Zen Touch was the best thing ever).

A Sansa, then? Hurm, as Rorschach would say.

I will write something far more exciting and interesting soon. I promise.