James D. Irwin

April 25, 2020

It’ll All End in Tears

Today would have been the last day of the season in League Two. I should have been spending today celebrating. My team, Swindon Town, had been top of the league for most of the season. Promotion seemed certain, winning the league outright seemed likely.

But instead, there’s no football. There hasn’t been a live game of football in England for nearly a month now. It’s a strange time to be a football fan — it’s a strange time to be alive at all. But for football fans, so much of life is guided and structured by it. We know where we’re going to be at 3pm. The back pages of the paper are the first thing we turn to, or the online equivalent. There’s the forensic analysis of what went wrong in the last game, or the sage predictions of what will happen next time. There’s transfer speculation. There are podcasts to listen to and highlights to watch.

And it’s all gone. There’s no new football content. But there are decades and decades of old football content. More and more people are watching replays of classic games, reliving certain memories. It’s better than nothing, and sometimes the glory of the past is probably better than the present. FIFA have been uploading classic World Cup matches, in full, to YouTube since the lockdown started.

And that’s how I accidentally came to relive the best worst day of my life. There have been worse days since that summer night in 1998. I was only eight years old. YouTube thought I might like to revisit England vs Argentina from the 1998 World Cup — the first game of football that filled me with anger, excitement, fear, nerves, a sense of injustice, and, at the end, tears…

***

In early June of 1998 I had almost no interest in football. The World Cup meant nothing to me. It was something the bigger, cooler kids were excited about. I don’t remember what I used to do before football.

England’s first game of the tournament was in the early afternoon of a weekday — a school day. Some teachers wheeled TVs into classrooms, but our teacher, Mrs Hansen, was a Scottish lady. As a compromise, we were allowed to have the radio commentary on whilst we did art class. I didn’t really get what was going on, but I do remember having PVA glue all over my hands when England scored their second goal against Tunisia. I asked permission to go to the toilets to wash my hands. Some of the cool big kids were in there. ‘It’s two-nil!’ I shouted, and we all started cheering and celebrating. I’d never seen any football at that point, but I already loved football because it was directly responsible for me being vaguely accepted by the cool kids.

I only vaguely remember watching England’s other World Cup games in the group stage. Both were in the evening, and I’m not even sure I was allowed to watch the game against Colombia. But by then my brother and I were watching all the games we could, not just England. And because of this dedication, we were allowed special permission to stay up late for England v Romania. England lost, but it didn’t seem to matter. England were through to the next round, and I had become obsessed with football. I started collecting World Cup coins from Sainsbury’s. I got a France ’98 FiloFax. Three Lions ’98 on CD. Cheap, unofficial England shirts.

These were the good times. Purer times. I didn’t yet support a club, only England. So I loved all of the players unconditionally. I’d only ever seen England win, or lose a game at a time when it didn’t really seem to matter. Football hadn’t yet had the chance to break my little heart. But it would, in the Round of 16, where England would play Argentina in Saint Etienne.

In the summer of 1998 I didn’t know about the Falklands War or the Hand of God. I didn’t hate them, but I wanted them to lose. By the end of the night I would hate them, and would continue to hate them until I grew up a little bit and realised there was more to life than football.

I begged to be allowed to stay up past my bedtime to watch it. My mother agreed but warned me ‘it’ll all end in tears’. My brother, who’d just turned seven, was also allowed to stay up. I don’t remember being nervous, because in my experience, England generally won and we had Shearer and Beckham and Owen. I didn’t know any of the Argentina players, but how could any of them be better than Michael Owen?

More happened in the opening fifteen minutes of the game than I’d ever seen in any of the 90 minute games I’d seen at that point. Argentina got a penalty, Batistuta scored. Then England got a penalty, and Shearer scored. On fifteen minutes the most exciting thing in the world happened. A goal I’ve subsequently watched hundreds of times since. Beckham plays the ball forward, and Michael Owen runs onto it, and he keeps running. Scholes is in a better position but Owen just keeps running and running and scores. England 2-1 Argentina.

Just before halftime Argentina win a freekick and they cheat. They play a dirty trick. Now I’m older I can appreciate the move as a piece of brilliance, but that night in my eight-year old rage and ignorance I was convinced the goal shouldn’t be allowed. Instead of shooting, like normal teams, the freekick taker played it short to Zanetti who was in a position to shoot, unmarked. 2-2.

And things just kept getting worse and more unfair. These subsequent grievances would be entirely justified. First, Simeone fouls David Beckham. Lying on the floor, Beckham flicks his foot up and brushes Simeone’s calf. Simeone falls to the ground. He gets a yellow for the foul. The referee shows Beckham a red. I am eight years old and outraged and incensed and devastated. It doesn’t seem fair. It isn’t fair. England have to play on with ten men. And they do so heroically.

With the game nearly over, and still 2-2, England score. The ball comes into the box and Sol Campbell jumps up and scores. I don’t know it then, but in four years I will hate Sol Campbell more than anyone else in the whole world. But then, in that moment, he’s a hero. The England players celebrate, the fans go mad. I go mad. England are going to be in the quarter-finals and I’ll be allowed to stay up late again and maybe England will even win the Wo—

The referee blows his whistle. I don’t understand what’s happening. On the screen the numbers change from 3-2 back to 2-2. My dad has to explain it to me. The goal has been disallowed. It isn’t going to count. I ask why and my dad says he doesn’t know. Nobody seems to know for sure. Twenty years later it’s still a controversial decision.

But it means another thirty minutes of football. I get to stay up even later. I am convinced England will win because we’ve already won, really. All we have to do is do it again. But we don’t. Neither do Argentina. The game ends and I don’t know what happens next. My dad, again, has to explain it’s going to be a penalty shootout. Then he tells me he’s going to get ready for bed. He’s not going to watch the penalty shootout because there’s no point. England always lose penalty shootouts. My brother has gone to bed. My mother has lost interest.

And so I watch my first England penalty shootout on the sofa by myself, the only person in the family brave or stupid enough to watch. But Shearer scores for England and things aren’t going too badly. Then Paul Ince steps up and misses. Argentina score. When David Batty takes his penalty he has to score.

I remember covering my eyes, but spreading my fingers enough to I can still see the television. I watch Batty step up. I watch him strike the ball. I watch Carlos Roa save the penalty. England are out of the World Cup and it’s not fair. Their second goal wasn’t fair. Beckham’s red card wasn’t fair. The referee disallowing England’s goal wasn’t fair… I’m eight years old and England have lost and I’m crying my little broken heart out…

***

Soon it doesn’t seem so important. The experience doesn’t make me like football any less. I watch the rest of the World Cup, and pretty much every game of football that gets broadcast in the next twenty years until a global pandemic brings a premature end to the football season and I kind of forget about football. I’m forced to find other things to do, and being so invested in football begins to feel almost absurd and silly.

Until YouTube suggests I might be interested in a live repeat of England v Argentina from 1998. It’s already 1-1 when I open the video. I recognise the frame immediately. I’ve seen Beckham play this pass hundreds of times before and I’ve seen Owen run onto it hundreds of times before and he always runs and runs and he always, always scores and every time I see it I remember the anticipation and the excitement and the joy. And I always remember what comes next. It had ended in tears, but my mother had been wrong, because it wasn’t the end. That summer was just the beginning.

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December 15, 2019

My Top 50 Books of the Year

A few years ago I started keeping a list of all the books I read — I have a terrible memory, and can barely remember the name of a single book whenever I’m asked if I’ve read anything good lately. Now I can just consult my ragged red notebook, purchased in 2015 — a year in which I read 41 books.

Since I started keeping a record, I’ve always attempted to read 50 books in a year — an average of one a week, with a two-week cushion in case of televised summer sporting events or a particularly long book or two.

I failed in 2015 (41), in 2016 (a pathetic 28), in 2017 (43), and in 2018 (an even more pathetic 25).

But this year I finally reached my goal, with two weeks to spare. Here they are, in a roughly chronological order (books with the same author have been grouped together).

Dreaming of Babylon — Richard Brautigan

A surreal, absurdist pastiche of pulp detective novels that is largely nonsensical but very funny.

Sombrero Fallout — Richard Brautigan

More surreal, more absurd, not quite as funny.

The World of Simon Rich — Simon Rich

My introduction to the humorist. As with all humour collections, it’s a mixed bag — but if this book was a box of Quality Street it would have an unexpectedly large number of green triangles and very few of those awful toffees.

Hits and Misses — Simon Rich

See above.

The Last Girlfriend on Earth — Simon Rich

The other two I read back to back at the start of the year. I read this one in November, largely on the strength of a Sherlock Holmes parody that was worth the price of admission alone.

Wonder Valley — Ivy Pochoda

I bought this largely on the strength of the cover, which reminded me of Inherent Vice. It was also a mystery set in California. It weaves together several narratives that are more or less come together at the end.

West of Here — Jonathan Evison

The first book I read in 2019 that I didn’t want to end. It weaves together the story of the a Pacific Northwest town in the 19th and 21st century. It’s immersive, poetic, and pretty funny in places.

The Art of Failing — Anthony McGowan

I bought this in a record shop because I thought it was a novel, but is instead the diary of a vaguely awkward middle-aged man getting himself into various social blunders. It is at least consistently amusing, and sometimes very funny.

The Actual One — Isy Suttie

Isy Suttie is maybe best known as Dobby from Peep Show. It’s more or less a memoir. It’s quite funny, with some lovely turns of phrase.

The Diary of a Pilgrimage — Jerome K. Jerome

I’d read this twice already, but not for some time. Jerome is one of my all-time favourite writers (best known for Three Men on a Boat). This is a humorous travelogue where he goes to watch a Passion Play in Germany with his friend B.

Football Cliches — Adam Hurrey

I read this just last year — a football writer breaks down the various cliches and quirks of language surrounding football. It is genuinely interesting, very funny, and an ideal toilet book.

Bigger than Hitler, Better than Christ — Rik Mayall

I’m not a huge fan of Rik Mayall, but I like a lot of the stuff he was in. I got this on kindle for free a few years ago. I finally gave it a go, and it was funny enough to keep me going. It does get a bit repetitive after a while, but there were enough laugh-out-loud moments to make it worthwhile.

Nomad — Alan Partridge

I read this a few years ago and found it a pale imitation of the first Alan Partridge book. I wanted to give it another go, and it was a bit better than I remembered. But only a bit. It still comes off as a sort of parody of Partridge.

Saturday, 3pm — Daniel Gray

Another short book about football for reading on the toilet. Gray writes romantically about fifty aspects of being a football fan that he still loves.

Black Boots and Football Pinks — Daniel Gray

Similar to his previous book, but this time about fifty aspects of football culture that have been lost.

Dave Gorman vs the Rest of the World — Dave Gorman

I’ve read a number of Gorman’s books where he sets off on wacky challenges. This time he travels around the UK to play strange, unique, or obscure games.

Death on the Nile, Cards on the Table, The Mystery of the Blue Train, And Then There Were None, Death in the Clouds, Dumb Witness — Agatha Christie

I’ve started reading a lot of Agatha Christie books over the last few years. Death on the Nile and The Mystery of the Blue Train were my favourites because I worked out who the murder was. And Then There Were None was a little disappointing. Dumb Witness includes the inner monologue of a dog, which is the main/only reason I read it.

A Cook’s Tour — Anthony Bourdain

I read Kitchen Confidential last year, and it was one of my favourite books of the year. I was disappointed by how much I didn’t like this book.

Franny and Zooey — J.D. Salinger

I read this every few years. It’s simply one of my favourite books.

Moonglow — Michael Chabon

Chabon is one of my favourite authors, and although this is presented as non-fiction, it is a novel. And it’s brilliant. It tells the story of Chabon’s (fictional) grandfather. It skips back and forth to different points in his life — Depression-era child, WWII soldier, model rocket enthusiast, wife to a depressed Franch lady, and retired widower. It manages to balance being incredibly moving with being very funny.

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States — Sarah Vowell

I love Vowell’s history books, which are written in a way that is both informal and informative. It’s largely about the America’s fight for independence, focusing more specifically on the teenage French aristocrat who ran away to fight the British alongside George Washington as a General.

L.A. Noir — John Buntin

This is an 800-page book charting the history of the LAPD in the early 20th century, and the war with organised crime. It’s an interesting story, and the narrative unfolds like a novel.

Prayers for Rain — Dennis Lehane

The first four books in the series are excellent, the characters well drawn, the plots exciting, twisty, dark. And this book had all the things I love about Lehane’s writing, but it was just a bit more gratuitous, and the climax felt as though it was written by a teenager who’s played too many computer games.

Zodiac — Robert Graysmith

This book was the basis for the David Fincher film of the same name. It is about the hunt for the Zodiac killer. It somehow manages to be even creepier than the film.

Primary Colors — Anonymous

A satire of the American political process (specifically, the 1992 Presidential election), the story follows a guy working on the presidential campaign of a senator who isn’t Bill Clinton but also obviously is.

Sunburn — Laura Lippman

Another book I went for based mostly on the cover and general idea of the premise. I’m not sure I enjoyed it, but I was hooked in by the plot.

One More Thing — BJ Novak

Another book I’d previously read. I remembered enjoying it, but nothing about the content. It is a better than average humour collection.

Tinsletown — William J. Mann

Mann attempts to solve the murder of William Desmond Taylor, a film producer who was murdered at his home in 1922. It is a true crime story but reads like a novel. It is also an interesting history of the film industry in the 1920s, and the adoption of the Hays Code.

Absolute Power — David Baldacci

A political conspiracy thriller that is a little bit silly, but a lot of fun and the characters are well developed. A thief burgles a mansion that is supposed to be empty. He has to hide when the lady of the house returns with her secret lover. Her secret lover murders her. Her secret lover is the President of the United States…

Killing Floor — Lee Child

Ludicrous, but quite entertaining.

Station Eleven — Emily St. John Mandel

The best book I’ve read all year.

The non-linear narrative jumps around between a famous actor and his troubled personal life, the outbreak of a global pandemic, and a band of actors who travel the post-apocalyptic landscape performing Shakespeare twenty years later.

The pandemic is terrifying and believable. The characters and the landscape feel real and so vivid. But it made life at the end of the world seem kind of fun. And the big difference between this and most ‘end of the world’ books is that this is full of beauty and hope. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read.

The Lola Quartet — Emily St. John Mandel

Usually when I read a good book, I try and find more of the author’s work. This ended up being a weird sort of mystery novel with a lot of references to Django Reinhardt. I liked it a lot.

The Biography of Tottenham Hotspur — Julie Welch

I love reading about football, and I read this in June — around the time Spurs got to/lost the Champions League final. It ended up being even more interesting than I thought it was going to be — and fun to have an idea of what my great-grandfather (also a Spurs fan) would have experienced in the early years of the clubs existence.

Don’t Panic — Neil Gaiman

A loose but in-depth biography of Douglas Adams.

Ayoade on Top — Richard Ayoade

The premise is absurd. The comedian/director writes an in-depth critique of a largely forgotten early-2000s rom-com as though it were an important and influential work of cinema. It is very funny, and also functions as a weird autobiography — if the autobiographical anecdotes can be believed.

How Football (Nearly) Came Home — Barney Ronay

For a long time my dream was to be a football journalist, and to to cover a World Cup. In Ronay’s account it’s less glamorous than I imagined, but still interesting. And fun to relive a glorious summer for English football.

Pop. 1280, The Grifters, Savage Night — Jim Thompson

Thompson’s writing is genuinely disturbing, to the point he’s almost more of a horror writer than a crime novelist. Pop. 1280 is one of my favourite books of the year — a seemingly dimwitted sheriff manipulates the people around him into doing truly awful things. The Grifters was a slight disappointment. Savage Night I read in a single sitting, as a diminutive hitman arrives in a small town in order to disguise a murder as an accident.

The Last — Hanna Jameson

I saw this book in WH Smith’s when I was flying home from England in the summer. The cover was striking, and the blurb compared it to Station Eleven and And Then There Were None. It turned out to be closer to the former than the latter — the world ends, and the guests at a remote Swiss hotel seem to be the only survivors. Then they find a dead body. My second favourite book of the year.

Road Kill — Hanna Jameson

I still don’t know if I liked this book. It was insanely violent and none of the characters were particularly likeable. It was incredibly well-written though. It’s a sort of road trip/mystery/Tarantino film.

Pulp — Charles Bukowski

I’ve tried and failed to get into Bukowski before. However, this was a pastiche of pulp detective novels — quite similar to Brautigan’s Dreaming of Babylon. It’s even more surreal than that, and brilliantly funny.

Just for One Day — Louise Wener

Louise Wener is/was the singer in the Britpop band, Sleeper. This is a memoir focusing mostly on the early-to-mid 1990s. Very funny and self-deprecating, as well as a fascinating inside look into the music industry.

Gazza in Italy — Daniel Storey

More of a pamphlet than a book, Storey charts Paul Gascoigne’s three-year career at Lazio, and how it affected the later events in his life.

Slapstick — Kurt Vonnegut

It’d been a while since I’d read anything by Vonnegut, and settled on this — it’s set in a post-apocalyptic New York, which has become an accidental theme of my reading this year. Even for Vonnegut, it’s a bit weird but still full of his usual humour and wisdom.

Pointless Stats:

Fiction: 26
Non-Fiction: 20
Humour: 4

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July 29, 2019

Upcoming Crime Novels from Celebrity Authors Who’s Main Character is a Thinly Disguised Version of Themselves Dealing with Murders Set in the Field in Which They Are Famous

Court Out

by Rod Laver

Rod Laver serves up another tale of tennis coaching and murder as ace detective Bob Pulley investigates the death of an umpire at the French Open.

After an angry, on-court confrontation, the reigning Open champion, Todd Ferrell, finds himself the No.1… suspect for murder!

And how is Olga Chamanova — the forehand-favouring femme fatale for whom love means nothing — involved?

Together they have conquered grass, clay, and indoor… but how will they fair on the court… of law?

Best Served Cold

by Jamie Oliver

Jamie Oliver cements his status at the new maitre’d of the macabre, as he serves up another gruesome tale of murder and masterchefs.

Jimmy Oliphant, the chef-turned-Private Investigator is first to make the link between the string of seemingly unrelated murders when he finds the body of Mick Gold, the famous film director-turned-food critic… From Yelp to The Good Food Guide, all the victims are restaurant reviewers…

Now it’s not just the critics with the knives out, it’s up to Oliphant to discover just who in the world of fine dining has an appetite… for revenge!

Is it Chester Emmenthal, the avant-garde chef-turned-TV star? Or could it be the original bad boy of TV cooking, the chef-turned-TV star Jean-Pierre Noire? Or perhaps it might even be the hot-headed chef-turned-US TV star, Jordan Ramsden — one thing’s for sure, it’s definitely not a woman!

With his loyal sidekick, Wallace Gregg, Oliphant must find the killer before he strikes again — and he has no reservations about using violence to get results. His cooking days may be over, but he can still serve justice…

The law is his kitchen, and Oliphant it’s pastry chef with the recipe for success. Today the only thing on his menu is dessert — just desserts.

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June 12, 2019

I Sometimes Believe in Miracles

… and we of Spurs have set our sights very high, so high in fact that even failure will have in it an echo of glory.

— Sir Bill Nicholson

This was initially written in the early hours of Thursday 9th May, shortly after the Champions League semi-final second leg.

The last time I felt like this, I was a thirteen year old schoolboy and I had been a Tottenham fan for nearly four years. My first live match as a fan was the 1999 League Cup final at Wembley — a game we won 1-0, with a last minute goal. It was fun, but I was too new to really understand or appreciate it. If anything, it gave me a very unfair impression of what it being a Spurs fan is like.

But by 2003 I had seen Beckham’s last-minute freekick to send England to the World Cup. I’d watched Owen score a hattrick in Germany, and known the highs and lows of England’s 2002 World Cup. And I probably cared about that more, because supporting Tottenham in the early 21st century was a low-stakes affair. There was little drama in the safety and comfort of the middle of the league table.

But then, that night in 2003, we beat Chelsea. Not in the league — that would take another decade or so. It was the League Cup, again. The least prestigious competition in English football, but a competition nonetheless. And we beat Chelsea — newly monied Chelsea. Chelsea always, always, always beat us but that night, somehow, we beat them. We didn’t simply beat them, we destroyed them. We scored five, winning 5-1. It was a school night, so I had to go straight to bed. But I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t want to sleep. This was my first real taste of glory as a Spurs fan, and I wanted to enjoy every second of it. I lay under my duvet, my bed surrounded by glossy posters, taken from Match Magazine and Spurs Monthly, of all my heroes — Darren Anderton, Teddy Sheringham, Gus Poyet, Stephen Carr… My bedroom light was off, but I knew they were there, surely the greatest football players in the history of the game… I was experiencing a joy so pure and visceral I didn’t know what to do with it… I was singing to myself, under my breath, quietly, but loud enough for my parents to hear me and shout at me to shut up. But I was too excited — how could I possibly sleep again, when we’d thrashed Chelsea and made the final?

***

We’re sixteen years on from that game now. I am no longer a schoolboy, I’m almost 30 years old. I’m a teacher, and I live abroad, in Poland. And I can’t sleep. I’m too excited. My cheeks are streaked with tears of joy. My left knee hurts from jumping up and down, and from jumping up too fast. And I am singing to myself, under my breath. I am singing the same songs I sang all those years ago — mostly just an endless loop of Glory, Glory Tottenham Hotspur.

‘Tottenham are in the Champions League final’ feels like an absurd sentence to write. It feels unreal —- more unreal than England reaching the World Cup semi-final did. And the World Cup felt incredible, and reminded me of all that is good about being a football fan, but it was a different feeling. It’s a different relationship, more intermittent by its nature — England play every few months. Spurs play every week. And very few of England’s games are competitive. I support England because I’m English. I don’t have a choice, and for a long period between maybe 2008 and 2018 I didn’t really care. Most of the team were players I hated week-in, week-out in the league. For me, the best thing about the 2018 World Cup wasn’t reaching the semi-final, it was finding myself enjoying being an England fan. Obviously, the emotion and drama of reaching the semi-final helped, but international football doesn’t feel the same… it can never mean as much as club football. International football is an occasional thing, but your club is an all-consuming passion, part of who you are, your identity. It’s the part of being a football fan that non-football fans don’t get when they sneeringly dismiss football as a stupid, childish, meaningless game. Which it is, on a basic level. It doesn’t really matter, but it’s also the most important thing in the world. In the sense of being part of a tribe, a community, of something greater than yourself, football isn’t really any different to religion. Football is universal and unifying — and tribal and divisive. It’s also history and tradition and family…

This is what I think about whenever my frustration with Spurs begins to boil over and I start thinking maybe I’ll forget about the fucking team and start following the Bundesliga or the J-League instead.
Tottenham Hotspur is not just part of my life, they are part of my family history. The club has been part of my life since before I was born, decades before even my father was born. My life simply wouldn’t have existed.

Tottenham Hotspur were founded in 1882. I have a letter, written by my great-grandfather in 1922, in which he makes plans with a friend to watch Spurs play Watford in the FA Cup. He predicts a 9-0 win (I checked this online, it was a less dramatic 1-0). I have this letter, because my great-grandfather’s friend mentions that his sister is interested in coming to the game. I don’t know if she did, I only know that she eventually married my great-grandfather.
My grandfather was never really interested in football — possibly because he was born in 1934, and reached the stage of childhood when you get converted into a football fan during WWII, when professional football was suspended.

But my father and uncle, born in the late 1950s, grew up as Spurs fans in the period where the legendary Bill Nicholson was still the manager. Although Tottenham’s golden era had already peaked by the time my dad was three years old, the club would manage to win a few more trophies before he reached puberty… He moved to London in the 1980s, and attended home games regularly, and so often found himself at White Hart Lane train station, which is where he met my mother. My mother didn’t really care about football, but lived opposite Highbury and her best friend (my godmother) was in a serious relationship with Steve Perryman — a football player with a record 655 appearance for Tottenham Hotspur.
In 1986, my father took my mum on a ‘date’ to White Hart Lane to see Ossie Ardiles’s testimonial, which was the only game Diego Maradona ever played in England. And he played wearing a Tottenham shirt.

I was born in 1989, two years before the 1991 FA Cup final — Tottenham’s last real, major success. And seven years after that — roughly 100 years after my great-grandfather — I finally became a football fan, swept up by the 1998 World Cup.

A lot of the last 20 years of watching football blurs and melds together, but I remember the beginning so well, so clearly. I remember using my France ‘98 filofax to record a diary of Tottenham’s first few games of the season. I remember choosing which team to support — for my brother, it was easy — all his favourite England players played for the same club: Manchester United. We were starting from nothing, and we didn’t know anything about anyone. I was unaware that Tottenham had almost been relegated a few months before the World Cup. And if I had known? I’d probably have been a Liverpool fan. I was already tempted — Michael Owen was every 10 year old boy’s hero after the World Cup. But my father took me aside, and told me why I should support Tottenham, and encouraged me to follow the family team. It helped that my favourite player at the World Cup had been — almost inexplicably — Darren Anderton.

My father’s speech worked, and I agreed to support Spurs. I remember throwing myself into my new hobby. I had a three-hour VHS charting the history of the club from 1882 to 1996, which had unnecessarily ominous incidental music and narration. I read books and magazines. One afternoon, whilst we were staying with family friends, my mother went to the corner shop and bought two football magazines — Match and Shoot! I got the copy of Match, which had Ian Wright on the cover, in a West Ham shirt. Inside was an A4 poster of Paolo Tramezzani, Tottenham’s long-forgotten left-back, with his black boots with lime-green Umbro logos and his shirt half untucked, the pre-season sun shining on his greasy blond hair.

On a long train trip I bought a copy of FourFourTwo, because I wanted to be grown up and sophisticated. Inside was an interview with Moussa Saib, who used the expression ‘baptism of fire’ which I took literally because Saib was Algerian and I was only ten, and the idea of baptising someone with flame sounded like the sort of mysterious religious ritual they might have in Africa… Neither Saib or Tramezzani were at Spurs come the end of the season…

I didn’t know about my great-grandfather then. I didn’t know my relationship with Spurs existed before I was aware of it. I was aware of the club’s history, from the creepy VHS. I didn’t know how this small, simple choice — this new hobby — would affect me life. It’s not the sort of thing you think about when you’re ten years old.

And maybe I was always going to be a pessimist, but Tottenham made sure of it. They did this by conceding goals — important goals — in the final minutes of games. By blowing comfortable leads. By doing well enough to get within sight of glory, then fucking it up in spectacular and humiliating style. One year we failed to qualify for the Champions League on the last day of the season, because almost the entire squad got food poisoning. Another year we needed just a point to finish second in the league, and lost 5-1 to a team that had already been relegated and had a player sent off. It’s always something, defeat from the jaws of victory…

I quickly got used to losing. It doesn’t bother me, it’s my natural state of being now. Even a few years ago, when Spurs had THE BEST defence in the league, I was still always waiting for the last minute goal, the late kick in the teeth. We could be 4-0 up with less than a minute left and I’d still be half-expecting to somehow lose.

I almost, almost miss the late-’90s and early 2000s, when we were comfortably mediocre and nothing was really at stake. Losing wasn’t the end of the world, and winning was a pleasant surprise… In the last few years, the closer we’ve come to success, the more painful it’s been to not have it. It really is the hope that kills you. And because you’re a Spurs fan, you’re always sort of expecting to lose, but you also have this false sense that it will be different this time. But it never is. And now, because we’re so much better, losing feels so much worse, so much more disastrous.
In the early 2000s, supporting Spurs was like arriving at a bus stop and reading a timetable that told you there wouldn’t be a bus for 20 years. Now it’s like reading a bus timetable that tells you there’s a bus due any minute now… and you wait and you wait and re-check the timetable and it keeps promising you that the bus is due, it’ll be here any minute… so you wait, and finally a bus does appear… but it’s not your bus, so you just have to keep on waiting and waiting…. filling with anticipation every time a bus appears on the horizon, and frustration as you realise that no, this isn’t your bus either…

***

I was watching Spurs play tonight. 2-0 down, playing lethargically during the biggest match the club have played for 30-35 years. Why do I do this? I thought. This is meant to be a hobby. It’s meant to be fun. It only ever makes me stressed… How much joy have I really had out of watching this fucking team over the last 20 years? If you push it all together, it probably isn’t much more than two hours total…

Part of the trouble with supporting Tottenham is that they are a romantic club. They are sleeping giants. The glory days are long past, but the glory days are the stuff of legend. The players, the goals, the trophies… There is a tradition, a way of playing… a long history of flair players too good for the club, but never quite enough to carry the team back to where they once belonged…

Something strange happened tonight. It’s never happened to me watching Tottenham. 2-0 down in the Champions League semi-final. 3-0 down on aggregate. We need three goals, minimum. And the way Ajax are playing, they look like scoring every time they break forward. I keep sipping my beer and tell myself it’s incredible to even be here. I lie to myself that Ajax were always going to be too good for us — especially with all our injuries and lack of squad depth. I tell myself I’m not nervous, because I’m not nervous the way I was when England played in the World Cup semi-final. But the difference isn’t that I care less. I care more, so much more. The difference is confidence. This is the strange thing, that defies all logic and goes against all my experience of following this team. At 3-0 on aggregate, away to a team that knocked out Juventus and Real Madrid, with only 45 minutes left and our best player injured, I am certain we are going to win. It feels like destiny — that the road to this point has been too dramatic to fizzle out in this manner. I feel like even this depleted Spurs team can beat Ajax. I’ve had a sense since we beat Dortmund that somehow we’d be in the final… despite losing our first two games in the tournament, and drawing the third. One point after three games, and somehow we get through. Dortmund are tearing up the Bundesliga, but then we tear them apart. I even think, privately, secretly, that we’ll beat Man City because Liverpool beat them last year. In the league they’re invincible, but in Europe they’re fragile. And we get all the luck we haven’t had with out stadium, our injuries, our refereeing decisions all at once, in one VAR ruling. And somehow, without Son, Sissoko, Kane, or any real midfielders, we limit the damage to 1-0 against Ajax — and we’re better away. It might as well be 0-0. Son will score, one at least. I’m sure.

But I know not to jinx it. I didn’t tell anyone I thought Spurs would make the final way back in the Round of 16. And before the game, when people ask me about it, I make pessimistic noises to cover myself because it’s like a birthday wish — tell anyone and it won’t come true.

***

It’s 1-0 before I can even leave work. It’s 2-0 almost as soon as I get to the bar. The players just don’t seem to care, seem resigned to defeat. And so am I. Ajax keep coming. All my optimism and confidence liquidises and becomes a bilious certainty that we’re going to be humiliated. We’re not just going to lose, we’re going to be humiliated… and all I want, all I can hope for is maybe one goal to lessen the embarrassment. To blunt the jabs that will come the way of all Spurs fans. Of course Spurs lost, Spurs always lose… they don’t know how to win…

I don’t want to watch. I’m not going to sit here and be humiliated, miserable, alone. But I stay — because what sort of fan would I be to miss our biggest game for decades? And… and… what if? What if somehow, there’s a miracle? I pray for miracles watching Spurs, but they never happen, or they never used to. This year, in Europe, we suddenly seem to have a hotline to God. And I remind myself that we’re always stronger in the second half. Pochettino riles them up, we come out strong… Ajax have missed a few good chances to end the contest, maybe… maybe it’s a sign that everything will be all right?

And then Lucas Moura scores. Early in the second half. The crowd on the TV is silent. The only other table watching the game are supporting Ajax.The goal is met with such silence I’m sure it’s been disallowed.

And now Tottenham look like a different team — they’re playing like the team we always imagine them to be. We’re dominating now, although that pessimist is telling me it’s exactly the sort of dominance that will appear in tomorrow’s match reports as ‘despite a strong spell of pressure early in the second half, Spurs were unable to convert this into goals’. And every so often Ajax break and I’m sure this is it, the end, I can just pick up my coat and go home because three goals, sure. But we’re never going to score four in 25 minutes.

And then… and then… and then… Moura scores again. It’s an ugly, scrappy goal unbecoming of the occasion. As with the first, I’m sure it’s been disallowed because there is no noise accompanying it. But again, it stands. And that’s when that strange, serene confidence returns. Ajax keep countering, and when they hit the post I’m sure.

I sit back, and relax. I am overcome with the certainty that the third goal we need is coming. It’s not hope or optimism. I just know. I can feel it… We will score in the last minute. And if we don’t, 3-2 on aggregate to the team that knocked out Juventus and Real Madrid isn’t anything to be ashamed of. But we will. Suddenly, for the first time in 20 years, in the face of no real evidence, I start to believe in miracles.

As the clock gets to 90 minutes I begin to doubt. 24 hours earlier I’d been hoping Barcelona would snatch a late away goal and wipe the smile off Liverpool faces but I knew it wasn’t going to happen. And now that feeling creeps in, so familiar watching this team — desperately wanting something that looks increasingly unlikely. There’s a corner, and the goalkeeper comes up — the greatest sight in football. And yes, of course. Lloris is going to score. It has to be him. But that would be too dramatic, it would feel scripted. The corner is wasted, the Frenchman has to hurry back.

Five minutes of stoppage time — what used to be called ‘Fergie Time’. My first Champions League final is still my favourite — 1999, United scoring twice in the last two minutes. The game I always think about when I think about giving up on a game. But what if…? Miracles happen. Usually to other teams. Five minutes makes me relax. Five minutes is plenty of time — maybe too much time. I’m sure… I’m always sure in these last minutes of stoppage time, but in a desperate way, almost trying to will the ball in. It never works.

At 90+4 the waitress takes my empty glass away, and I’m still certain the miracle is coming but less so. Time seems to have sped up. Five minutes of injury time usually feels like an eternity — longer when you’re defending. And the pessimist in me, the one who’s been watching Spurs for 20 years is telling me to give up, forget about it, get real, to stop torturing myself…

And we do, as football fans, torture ourselves. We pray for things that will never come to pass. We raise our hopes, time and time again… and every time we are hurt, we are crushed… and it hurts all the more because we allowed ourselves to get carried away. So why do we do it? Why voluntarily put yourself through such constant and bitter anguish?

We do it, because sometimes miracles happen. Because sometimes, the long ball forward is knocked down to LLorente, and the knock-down is slipped through to Lucas Moura and he puts it in the bottom corner exactly like his first goal and in all the shock and excitement you don’t even notice he’s scored a hattrick… Because sometimes, all that emotional investment pays off…

And the person who jumps off that wooden chair in a strange bar in a small, obscure Polish town isn’t the 29-year-old English teacher. It’s the 13-year-old schoolboy who used to sing under the covers, and who once cried after losing an FA Cup semi-final and then vowed never to cry over something so stupid again. But the schoolboy has broken his promise twice now — once, when England made the World Cup semi-final, and again, now. Both times, it’s tears of joy. And it feels fucking ridiculous to be crying. It’s absurd to be so, so happy over a stupid little game. But it is also maybe the single greatest, purest joy you have ever experienced. It’s inexplicable, it bypasses the brain. Your brain knows it’s stupid, but your frantically spasming nervous system doesn’t care…

And that’s why being a football fan is one of the best things you can be. It allows you — even as a mature and responsible adult — to feel, in rare and fleeting moments, the simple and pure joy of childhood — those long-lost carefree days when football really was the most important thing in the world, and you always believed in miracles.

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June 9, 2019

The Best Books I’ve Read this Year (so far…)

Every year I set a goal of trying to read 52 books in a year — an average of one book a week. I’ve always failed, but sometimes get close. I managed 44 in 2017. But this year I’ve managed 33 books — a few them pretty forgettable, some a grind, and two I was surprised to find I disliked.*

Anyway, here are the 5 best books I’ve read in the first half of this year:

5. Death on the Nile — Agatha Christie

I’ve read four Agatha Christie stories this year. I liked this one the best because I worked out who the murderer was and it made me feel clever — even if it’s actually quite obvious.

=. Absolute Power — David Baldacci

4. Lafayette in the Somewhat United States — Sarah Vowell

In England, we don’t really learn about the revolutionary war. But I like American history — it’s easier because there’s less of it. A few years ago I read Vowell’s Assassination Vacation, which covered the four presidents who were killed in office. It was fascinating, but also very funny.
Lafayette… tells the story of the revolutionary war from the perspective of the teenage French aristocrat who ran away to fight against the British, and ended up as General and George Washington’s best friend. It’s a good introduction to the subject, and I learnt a lot (I didn’t know the war lasted so long, or that a lot of people in England supported the revolution because King George III was being a total dick about things…)

3. West of Here — Jonathan Evison

For many years, I wrote for the literary website, The Nervous Breakdown. This is where I first discovered Evison and his writing. A while back, his third novel, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, was adapted into a movie.
West of Here is his second novel, which goes back and forth between the 19th century and the present day but all set in the same town in the Pacific Northwest. It’s beautiful, immersive, kind of poetic, and funny. It’s in the top 3 because it’s one of three books I didn’t want to end…

2. Moonglow — Michael Chabon

Chabon might be my favourite novelist. He also wrote the script for Spider-Man 2, which is still the best superhero film ever made.

I kept putting this off, because it is (supposedly) the story of Chabon’s grandfather. Chabon appears as a character called ‘Michael Chabon’. But it’s entirely fictional and completely wonderful. It’s a non-linear narrative, covering the grandfather’s life at different ages. It cover WWII, mental illness, space exploration, Nazi scientists, cat-eating snakes, and adjusting to retirement. It’s laugh-out-loud funny in places, and incredibly sad and moving in others.

1. Station Eleven — Emily St. John Mandel

I don’t read enough contemporary fiction. I don’t read enough genre fiction. I don’t read enough female writers. And in looking to rectify that, I came across Station Eleven.

*1. A Cook’s Tour by Anthony Bourdain. I loved Kitchen Confidential. It’s why I bought this book. But I found it kind of irritating, which is even stranger having watched and enjoyed episodes from the TV series…

2. Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane. The first four books in the series are excellent, the characters well drawn, the plots exciting, twisty, dark. And this book had all the things I love about Lehane’s writing, but it was just a bit more gratuitous, and the climax felt as though it was written by a teenager who’s played too many computer games.

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April 13, 2019

A Tale from the Crypt

My grandparents used to live in a house on a hill, overlooking a church graveyard. The graveyard scared me, on my rare childhood visits. It was dark and gothic and undoubtedly evil. The headstones were crooked, and drowning under moss and the overgrown weeds. The names had been erased, the stone worn smooth by a century or so of wind and rain. I was an adult the last time I saw it, visiting for my grandfather’s funeral.

One evening, when I was maybe ten years old, he showed me a very large, very old key and asked me if I wanted to see the crypt. I wasn’t really sure what a crypt was at that age, but it had to be more better than sitting in the eerily quiet front room. The silence was intensified by the ominous tick-tock of the grandfather clock and, occasionally interrupted the intermittent farts of Basil, an ageing basset hound. My brother declined the invitation but my father joined us. We put on our coats and crossed the narrow road. It was not yet dark, but the light was fading. We walked single file, alongside the green-painted iron railings of the graveyard. And then, before I knew what was happening, my grandfather then led us through a creaking gate, and down the jagged stone path that cut between the headstones and then zig-zagged towards an old stone church.

My brother and I used to stay upstairs, in the smallest room. There was one small, square window that looked out towards the sea. With effort, on a clear day, you could just about make out the water. In the foreground was the street below and, of course, the graveyard. The church was barely visible, hidden behind trees that swayed in the evening breeze and cast long shadows the flickered and moved.

I didn’t like to look at it, if I could help it. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but the moving shadows and whispering rustle of the trees were enough to question my convictions…

I never knew much about my grandfather. I learned more about him after he died, at his funeral, than I did whilst he was alive. This was less to do with him being private and secretive, and more a result of a fractious relationship with my parents. The visits to my grandparents, infrequent when I was a child, stopped altogether by the time my brother and I became teenagers.

I didn’t understand my grandfather when I was a child — he seemed, for the most part, quite a stern and sensible man. He liked discipline, English history, and porridge — the most sombre and sensible of all breakfast foods. He was a Methodist. He went to church every Sunday, and before he’d retired he’d been an architect — but only designed buildings for some public use… schools and hospitals, that sort of thing.

But he was also incredible silly, almost whimsical. He loved to tell stories, often involved retellings of historical event. He could play the piano and tried to teach all of his grandchildren. He was not the church organist, but could step in when required. And he was always being called upon to give speeches at the various clubs he was a member of. It was only later, when I was an adult and he was dead, that I learned that he’d spent most of his youth as an actor. Secretly, he enjoyed silliness and theatricality.

So whilst I didn’t understand it at the time, it now makes perfect sense that he had successfully attempted to become the crypt-keeper at a disused church. I suspect that his official title was probably something more prosaic, like ‘caretaker’. But if I had the key to a crypt, I’d probably call myself a crypt-keeper too… the older I get, and the more I learn about him, the more I understand certain aspects of my own personality.

Children exaggerate and memory distorts, but nevertheless, what I remember is a large oak door on rusty iron hinges like the entrance to a medieval castle. I remember cold stone steps descending into a basement that seemed to be carved from blue-grey stone and filled with bones and skulls. The skulls were kept stacked and separate, whilst the bones were all thrown together like the mismatched screws, and the washers and nuts and bolts at the bottom of my father’s toolbox.

I remember being somehow scared and fascinated at the same time. I’d never really had to confront death — my other grandfather had died when I was very young, and I have no memory of him. All skulls look evil, with their hollow eyes and frozen smiles… but I was old enough to understand that once upon a time, decades and decades ago, each of these skulls would have been a person, no different from me, or my father, or my grandfather. I tried to imagine what they might have looked like, what sort of clothes they might have worn, what sort of life they would have led. I tried to imagine how it was that their bones had ended up here on display, instead of being buried in the ground.

After my grandfather had had his fun, showing off his little catacomb, his collection of skulls, we went back to the house. I went upstairs, to my brother, and to my grandfather’s box of tin toy soldiers — painted in the dull grey of WWI uniforms. They would have been old when my father and my uncle had played with them as children, and over time the typical wartime wounds had been inflicted — missing hands, dented legs, and the occasional decapitation. The heads that remained attached had ghostly faces, faded or entirely erased. I lay awake at night, waiting for them to spirit to life at the stroke of midnight, ready to wreak revenge on the children that had deformed and disabled them…

But by the morning, the evil tin soldiers were allies once more, the gothic graveyard was just a knotty tangle of untended grass, and the crypt-keeper was wearing his trademark green jumper, and stirring a large saucepan of porridge. Our bags were in the hallway, and soon it would be time to return to the familiar sights and reassuring sounds of home.

I never heard my grandfather mention the crypt again. It seems likely that the position would have been passed on to someone less whimsical… a man who would treat his custodial duty with more reverence. But it’s more fun — more in keeping with my grandfather’s spirit — to imagine that he died a cryptkeeper, and that the terrible iron key is now a cursed family heirloom destined to pass from generation to generation, carrying with it the sacred duty to protect the bones…

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April 10, 2019

Stories Within Stories

Sometime in October 1971, a man named James Thorne bought a book — a book that would one day, many, many years later, become my favourite book, more or less.

Most books I own are relatively disposable, in the sense that if I lost my copy, or was forced to get rid of some books (as has happened over the course of several moves, as the family home became smaller and smaller) then it would be a small matter of buying a replacement copy — or convincing myself to just let it go.

But some books have particular sentimental value — the book, as an object, is important to me. I love The Grapes of Wrath, and I like the copy I have — it’s a Penguin Classics edition that is sort of made up to have a vaguely beaten up, Depression-era aesthetic. But it holds no romantic appeal to me.

On the other hand, I have a bright orange copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was bought brand new but already looks considerably older. I remember buying it — my mother actually picked it out for me, as something I might enjoy. I went for it largely based on the aesthetic and the blurb. And then I went home and read it, and it changed my life — I used to write a little when I was at school, but reading that book made me want to really write. To take it seriously. I usually read it once a year. In 2007, when we went on a family holiday to Las Vegas, I brought it with me. I stayed in the Flamingo hotel, where the second half of the book takes place. I’ve lent it to my brother, several friends, and a girl who broke my heart. It’s lived a life, it represents something. It’s taken on an almost holy dimension — my desire to write shaped the course of my life, and shaped my personality. For many years it was how I defined myself. And it all comes from that ancient artefact — every copy contains the same words, but none have the creases or the stains or the smells of my copy. And I can picture the face of everyone who’s read my copy.

The same year Fear and Loathing was first published, James Thorne bought a copy of Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. On the inside cover, in small, neat handwriting, he wrote his full name and the month and year. His handwriting is similar to mine — small, and a mix of cursive and printed. It would have been brand new when he bought it — it was printed in 1971, ten years after the books was first published.

It’s my favourite book mostly on an aesthetic level. I’m not sure I’d like it so much if it had a different cover. All of Salinger’s books are odd, in that they are devoid of any real design, per his request. Most are white, with just the title and author name. My copy of Catcher in the Rye was cream, with a sort of italicised title that I guess was meant to evoke scrawled handwriting.

But the book James Thorne bought in 1971 was silver, all over. The only real splashes of colour is the small orange Penguin logo on the front, the spine, and the back cover. Near the top, in simple bold white print, is the title. There is a thin black line underneath, and then the author’s name in the same bold font, but black. The back cover is identical, with no blurb, only a price and a small disclaimer telling you that this edition is not for sale in the USA.

It looks like a prop from a Wes Anderson film, aside from various creases along the spine, and other minor signs of wear and tear from it’s 46 year journey from James Thorne to the bottom of my satchel. The inside is in surprisingly good condition, although the pages have browned like old sepia photographs — dark in the corners and along the edges, but only lightly in the centre. It feels well loved and well thumbed, and it would be impossible to guess how many times it’s been read, or by how many readers. It’s possible James Thorne held on to it for a full forty years before donating it to the charity shop where I found it. Or it could have been passed around endlessly, criss-crossing the country…

I don’t like to buy new books, if I can help it. Not just because I’m a cheapskate… I like the stories that second hand books tell, or hint at. My copy of Franny and Zooey doesn’t tell us much, although my guess would be that James Thorne was an English student, and the book was required reading for his literature course. Although this is based off the date — October being the rough start of the university semester — and the fact that the only books i have ever written my name in have been school books.

Usually, an old book is just an old book. Inscriptions and the like are rare, making hidden treasures all the more valuable. I have a copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that was a film tie-in version, so must have been from the mid-70s. Jack Nicholson’s face was on the cover, or it would have been had it not been covered other with a sticker — a sticker that, for a long time, I thought was of a brass padlock. Only when I got to the middle, did things fall into place. The sticker was a brass shoulder badge of an airline pilot. And in the middle of the book was a big, old-fashioned plane ticket, from Heathrow to JFK — dated 1976. I sometimes wonder if the ticket was a bookmark, and the reader had got bored somewhere over the Atlantic. Or perhaps the reader — as I often do, shoved the makeshift bookmark out of the way as they got closer to the end. Maybe they just needed somewhere to keep their ticket. But they never took it out — it remained in the book, and the book remained forgotten. It’s easy to imagine that this book did stay on the same shelf, until it found its way the bookshop where I found it. It’s hard to imagine any interim readers keeping the plane ticket in place before passing it on — although then again, I did.

Inscriptions are always nice, although often bittersweet. I have a terrible affliction which means, no matter how awful, objectionable, or useless a present might be, I cannot bring myself to throw it away. It feels mean-spirited and ungrateful, even decades after receiving it. So when I read inscriptions that contain birthday messages, and maybe some cute family in-joke, it makes me a little sad. Why did the owner now decide to throw out what was once a thoughtfully given gift?

It’s easier to understand the discarded books with inscriptions from one lover to another. The obvious scenario is the receiver dispossessing themselves from an object too intimately associated with someone they’d now prefer to forget….

More fun — and in many ways, more revealing — are the makeshift bookmarks and other things people simply leave between the pages and forget. Years from now, future readers may stumble across a receipt I’ve used, as my train pulls in to the station and I scramble for something to keep my place before I hurry off, on to the platform. I’m sure I’ve left shopping lists and to-do lists behinds, to puzzle future generations who may try to piece together day-to-day life in the mid-2000s based on the scraps of paper I’ve unwittingly left behind. They will form a picture of a man much more practical than reality, as the majority of my to-do lists feature goals that, however simple, ultimately proved unattainable.

I like the idea of a future reader, decades from now, trying to imagine me based on some inscription or improvised bookmark. I have only one book that has an inscription — a long one, from a friend. And the future reader will imagine us, and our relationship, and probably get it all wrong but he’ll never know, but it’s beside the point. It’s part of the magic of reading, of buying books — particularly old ones. We leave glimpses of ourselves behind, stories within stories, as the book journeys on, from one reader to the next…

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February 17, 2019

Kadinsky’s Floating Head

You’re sitting in an office in Poland several thousand miles from home gazing at a Kadinsky print and something seems familiar and comforting and makes you feel somehow five years old and twelve years old and sixteen years old all at the same time for a reason you can’t quite put your finger on… Something about it transports you back to an idea of the past and it’s kind of confusing until it suddenly hits you that this exact print hung in the hallway of the first house you really remember, and it followed you to a similar position inthe home that took you from boyhood to — if not quite manhood — then something close to it… And there it was again in your final real family home. You have seen this image every day for most of your life. And then here it is again, all these years later, after the loss of the family home and the dissolution of the family… You travel thousands of miles and start a new life in some foreign country and start really beginning to feel like an independent adult, in control, like all of that has finally been left behind…

Kadinsky’s floating, formless head on a background that seems like the basis for every ugly sweater the 1980s produced. And once again you are small and scared and confused… and maybe it isn’t a bad thing. Maybe it isn’t here to remind you of how small and scared and confused you once were and always have been… or at least it isn’t here to make you feel these feelings again. Kadinsky’s floating head is here to remind you of who you used to be and how far you’ve come… It’s there to remind you of who you are… as though this painting knows you better than most of the friends you’ve ever known. It may be abstract and formless, but is this not ultimately the most familiar face of all the faces you’ve seen today? Does it not offer some comfort? Does it not feel good to remember the boy, the child, the teenager you once were? Not necessarily because those were the good old days — although some of them were — but because some of them… maybe even a lot of them… weren’t. Not compared to today…

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