It’s never their fault, they’re always the victims, it’s never their fault…..

I wrote at some length here last month about the Suarez/Evra affair.  Since then, Liverpool and Manchester United have played one another at the Dipperdrome (2-1 to them in the Cup) and at Old Trafford last Saturday (2-1 to us in the League).  Happily there will be no further meetings this season.

As for the football; neither game was particularly memorable for what happened during the 90 minutes, but both were notable for the toxicity of the atmosphere around the game and between the principals in the build-up and aftermath of each.

In many ways, it’s hard to know what to say about this whole sorry mess.  Despite my profound dislike of Liverpool FC  and my general antipathy towards Merseysiders as a ‘breed’, even I have been astonished by the public relations ‘car crash’ orchestrated by the club over this affair.  Wherever they have had the choice to make between a correct decision and an incorrect one, they have unerringly screwed up, to the general amazement of the watching millions around the world.  The damage done to the reputation of this once-great club is incalculable and the repercussions will continue to resonate long into the future. Yeah, like I could give a toss….

As for Suarez, who lied about what he said to Evra in front of the FA Commission and presumably maintained his innocence to everyone at LFC who closed ranks and supported him, he has now doubled his jeopardy by lying to everyone -again - about shaking Evra’s hand before the Old Trafford game.  Clearly the man has a problem with the truth, but then most of us realised that anyway.  Suarez is obviously a talented footballer with a number of fatal flaws, but you could say the same of George Best or Diego Maradona, not that Suarez is as good as either of them. 

Evra meets Suarez; the handshake that never was

For me the pantomime villain of this whole dismal business is Kenny Dalglish, who was himself a great player, but who has demonstrated the deft interpersonal skills of a constipated grizzly bear in the way he has handled the media scrum that erupted over this affair.  Dalglish’s default mode with the media is one of grumpy mistrust – even more so than Fergie – and this has, of course, always played well in the red areas of Merseyside. 

They love nothing more than to gather round a storage heater of an evening and nurse a sense of betrayal and self-pity.  The whole world is against them and the media and the FA are in Fergie’s pocket.  It’s all a conspiracy designed to prevent King Kenny’s hordes from re-assuming their rightful position at the top of the footballing tree. Et cetera, et cetera. Yawn.

Dalglish’s stupidity – and this has been much in evidence –  has been to nail his colours to the mast of these self-pitying fools and to place too much trust in the word of Suarez.  He has stoked the fires of resentment that never really go out on Merseyside and has played the ‘Scouse’ card for all it’s worth (not much, actually).  For those in thrall to ‘King’ Kenny’s siren song, it’s a well-trodden road that leads from Huyton to Heysel and on to Hillsborough.  To the rest of the world, it just makes them look like a bunch of self-deluding idiots.  The point is that Dalglish obviously went so far out on a limb for Suarez, dragging the self-pity brigade with him,  that he made Suarez believe that he could basically get away with anything and would still retain the backing of the club.

On Saturday, the United fans were singing (to the tune of ‘Sloop John B’)  ”It’s never your fault, it’s never your fault; you’re always the victims, it’s never your fault.”  That’s about right in my book.

Dalglish : Bang out of order in his Sky interview

What happened in the wake of Saturday’s game – Suarez refusing to shake hands with Evra, Dalglish’s belligerent post-match interview with Sky, Fergie finally coming out of his shell to condemn Suarez as a ‘disgrace’ – was as inevitable as it was pathetic.  The ‘New York Times’ - the second largest shareholder in the Fenway Sports Group who own Liverpool – came out with a piece suggesting that John Henry and the Boys from Beantown needed to get their act together to salvage something from the wreckage of Liverpool FC and there was a similar piece in the ‘Boston Globe’.  With the stench of racism drifting down the Mersey and across the Atlantic, it wasn’t long before FSG finally decided to act.

Suddenly, after months of stony silence, statements were appearing on the LFC website faster than fleas jumping off a dying rat.  Suarez apologised for not shaking Evra’s hand, Dalglish apologised for escalating his normal grumpiness into outright hostility in his interview with Sky and waffled on about ‘conduct not befitting a manager of Liverpool’ or words to that effect.  Then, hilariously, we got a statement from Liverpool’s Managing Director, Ian Ayre, a man hitherto so invisible that it’s a wonder people weren’t picking up black eyes by walking into him.  The (Hitherto) Invisible Man rebuked Suarez for lying to the club – a pity he didn’t do so a few months ago – and blathered on a bit about the responsibilities of anyone playing for Liverpool FC.  All too little and too late because as the United fans reminded Suarez throughout the second half of Saturday’s game, ‘we know what you are’.

Ian Ayre finally puts in an appearance

Now, apparently, Liverpool’s shirt sponsor, Standard Chartered, are cutting up rough.  They were being lined up as a potential major investor for the possible new Dipperdrome in Stanley Park, but with relations between them and LFC currently as frigid as the February weather, any such deal is looking a remote possibility.  Amazing how quickly things start moving once the money men get involved.  Dalglish, Suarez and Ayre no doubt had their arses kicked and were obviously told by FSG to get out there and eat some humble pie – something we all knew would happen eventually.

Even so, I took little pleasure from something I knew would happen in the end and that is because,  in the final analysis, one bloke has apologised for not shaking another’s hand, another bloke has apologised for being rude to a TV interviewer and the Invisible Man hasn’t apologised to anyone.

The media are lowering the curtain on this one now, mainly because anyone unconnected with LFC or MUFC is probably bored shitless by the whole matter and though it retains a certain fascination for the hacks who must deal with the likes of Dalglish, Ferguson and Suarez on a daily basis, even they know that people just want this to end.  Even United’s response to the multiple Liverpool apologies indicated an eagerness to move on…

Understandable, but a pity nonetheless, if only because there are so many important issues that remain unresolved.  Such as……

1. Suarez was wrong to make racially charged comments to Evra and wrong not to apologise – preferably immediately.  He has still to apologise for these comments.

2. Liverpool were wrong to come out so publicly in support of the Uruguayan over such a sensitive issue  and even more at fault when they chose to wear those pikey t-shirts before the Wigan game.  So much for ‘Respect’…

3. They were wrong in condemning  the findings of an independent commission that found Suarez guilty, especially after he admitted to using the term ‘negro’ in the specific context in which the word was used.

4. Liverpool FC were even more at fault in questioning Evra’s credibility as a witness.  Where do they stand with that now that Suarez has been exposed a a serial liar?

5. Dalglish was wrong to suggest that all the ‘facts’ had not emerged from the commission’s hearings (despite their exhaustive report), yet Liverpool FC didn’t have the balls to mount a proper appeal and let the world see what those ‘facts’ were.  We’re still waiting….

6. Liverpool fans – all partisan considerations aside – were wrong to victimise Evra further by booing him throughout last month’s FA Cup clash at the Dipperdrome.  Then again, did we really expect anything different?

7.  Dalglish was wrong to once again claim Suarez should not have been suspended in the build-up to Saturday’s game.

8.  Suarez was wrong to snub Evra’s offer of a handshake

9. Suarez should not have lied to the club about his intention to shake Evra’s hand

10. Dalglish was wrong  not to condemn him in the immediate aftermath.

11. The intervention of the Fenway Sports Group was anaemic until their ‘income streams’ came under threat.  What does this tell us about their attitudes to issues like racism?

It remains to be seen whether or not Suarez and Dalglish can survive this disastrous episode.  Had Liverpool not got through to their first Wembley final in years then Dalglish’s position might be under greater threat.  He has shown himself incapable of dealing with complex non-football issues like this and may do well to survive the internal blood-letting that will surely follow – particularly if the Standard Chartered deal sinks into the Mersey. 

His second term as Liverpool manager is likely to be defined by this affair and you would not bet against him walking away for a second time.  Don’t think there would be quite as much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments this time, because on top of the whole Suarez / Evra mess, there’s the issue of his judgement when it comes to shelling out bucketloads of cash for the likes of Downing, Carroll and Henderson.

As for Suarez, good footballer though he is, his credibility is completely shot after this catastrophic episode.  Like Tevez, he has gone from hero to zero in pretty short order and if Liverpool get a reasonable offer for him from a Spanish or Italian club in the summer, I would imagine that all parties will grab it with alacrity.  His career is going to be forever mired by this episode and his relationships with future team-mates, let alone future opponents – particularly if they’re black – are going to be, at the very least,  tricky.

The Waltons go to Jurassic Park

I will admit firstly that I am a sucker for a decent sci-fi series.  I get lured in by whizz-bang trailers full of monsters and lasers and all that stuff and before I know it I am knee-deep in something that is essentially the televisual equivalent of a McDonald’s hamburger.  Only occasionally does something genuinely engaging come along.

And so it has been with Terra Nova, which ran on Sky last autumn and which has just been spoonfed to me on DVD by a friend with a warped sense of humour.  He’s like me – just can’t resist these trashy sci-fi potboilers.  I think his rationale was  that if he was going to suffer, he wasn’t going to suffer alone.

Briefly, Terra Nova is a story of time travel to a past but parallel Earth.  Parallel is good, because it means none of that nonsense about changing the future because you swat a butterfly in the Cretacaeous past. 

The story centres on the Shannon family – hunky Dad, sexy Mom and three kids – the sulky boy/man of about 18, the gawky teenage princess of about 15 and the saccharine brat of about 7.  They are all dreadful actors but  ludicrously photogenic and unbearably wholesome.  It’s like the Waltons moving to Jurassic Park. 

The Shannon family emoting furiously in ‘Terra Nova’

The story starts in 2149 in an overpopulated, polluted and dying Chicago where the annual ‘pilgrimage’  of about 100 souls back to the Terra Nova colony via the one-way time portal represents a ray of hope for the crowded masses.  Having more than 2 kids is a crime punishable by prison time and Dad the  Chicago cop ends up in the slammer after the family apartment is raided by the Population Control storm-troopers.  Mom gets off the hook because she is a super-talented doctor and some three years later she is invited to go to Terra Nova with 2 of her kids.  All that is needed is for tough, resourceful Dad to break out of prison ( a doddle, apparently) and smuggle himself into the ‘pilgrimage’ party with the youngest child stashed in a giant backpack.  It’s the kind of thing that I’m sure we’ve all experienced; my uncle used to boost me over the walls of football grounds when I was a mere tadpole so he didn’t have to pay for me and this isn’t much different really; just a bit more high-tech.

Anyway after a bit of drama and lots of thunderous music, they get whooshed through the time portal back to 85 million BC or whenever.  They duly arrive in a kind of sub-tropical version of Centre Parcs.  The Terra Novans live in twinky little chalets behind a big fence.  The fence is to keep out big and noisy dinosaurs who live in the forest and a bunch of renegades who, like the Elves of Lothlorien, live up in the trees and all look like extras from ‘Mad Max II’.  Their purpose in splitting away from the main colony emerges as the story meanders on, but I won’t vex you with the labyrynthine complexities of it all.  The renegades are sort of at war with Terra Nova, but there’a actually a bit more to it than that.

Steven Spielberg is involved with ‘Terra Nova’ as an Executive Producer; every now and again he does some slumming in the world of TV and has previously done so to better effect with 2002′s ‘Taken’, which ended a bit inconsequentially but was actually quite gripping for most of its run.  Spielberg often gets berated for some of his soft-focus, Hallmark  Card sentimentality, particularly about family life among the American bourgeoisie and, for however much he may be held responsible, the Shannons of ‘Terra Nova’ are right up there with the sickliest of his creations. 

The teenage boy gets involved almost at once with a pretty racy bunch who distil their own moonshine out in the woods and with one girl (called ‘Sky’ for pity’s sake) in particular.  He’s at loggerheads with his controlling Dad, but in the end they discover (shucks) that they really love one another and even get into some manly hugging before the series ends.  Middle daughter is a bit more of a straight arrow and she hooks up with a ramrod-straight military type with a crewcut who gets up when Dad enters the room and calls him ‘Sir’.  Mom just oozes maternal love for her brood and has no problem ejecting hunky Dad from the marital bed when the little one can’t sleep.  The little one, of course, gets the cheesiest lines and she is pretty much off the scale on the cute-ometer.

More troubling is the fact that the colony is presided over by an Action Man alpha male cum benevolent dictator – the first man through the portal - who makes all the big decisions on behalf of the colonists; no town meetings and no democracy here.  We’re just supposed to take it on trust that he has everyone’s best  interests at heart.  Richard Nixon would have loved this show.

Of course, we’re also supposed to be fascinated by the various plot-twists and the regular run-ins with dinosaurs and renegades, but I found myself distracted by quite a few of the assumptions made in the basic set-up of the plot - they’re either derisory or deeply suspect.  If this is Spielberg’s world-view, I’m glad I don’t live there.  Whatever happened to the Bill of Rights?

One of the CGI dinosaurs in ‘Terra Nova’ – not the most dangerous animals in the show.

What’s good about ‘Terra Nova’ are some of the set piece action scenes, the great scenery (Australia, apparently) and the CGI beasties.  However, it’s the hackneyed humans with their toothpaste smiles, their empty heads and their deeply conservative values who are the most dangerous of the animals we encounter in ‘Terra Nova’.

Remarkably, Fox are considering commissioning a second season….

 

 

United’s Glass Ceiling

Last season, I wrote lengthily and lovingly about United’s U-18 Academy youngsters and their run to the FA Youth Cup Final where they ultimately beat Sheffield United over two legs.  That was a special group of players and it’s actually slightly depressing to reflect on their apparent progress – or lack of it - since that balmy night at Old Trafford back in May.

Sir Alex Ferguson, so the orthodox United mythology goes, has always given youth its chance.  Pundits always mention the much-heralded ‘Class of ’92′ that featured the likes of Ryan Giggs, Nicky Butt, David Beckham, Paul Scholes and Gary Neville and how Fergie offloaded established players like Hughes, Ince and Kanchelskis to make way for the youngsters in the 1995-6 season.  However, in the years since then – apart from the recent emergence of Danny Welbeck- the only domestically-produced youngsters to have made any impact on the first team are Wes Brown, John O’Shea and Darren Fletcher – none of whom, I would say, are in the same class as Beckham, Scholes etc.  In any case, Brown & O’Shea have moved on and Fletcher’s career seems to be in the balance due to his ongoing illness.  Welbeck is looking promising, but is still a work in progress.

In my view, there has been a ‘glass ceiling’ for young players at Old Trafford since the mid-90′s.  We have produced and developed a number of youngsters who showed huge initial promise , but for one reason or another never quite made it and were sold on.  Into this category would come players like Chris Eagles, David Jones, Febian Brandy and Giuseppe Rossi.  Eagles and Jones are still playing Premiership football at Bolton & Wigan respectively, whilst Rossi has become a major goalscoring force in La Liga for Villareal. 

Sometimes, there are clear reasons why players don’t make it and Febian Brandy is a case in point.  He was attached to United from the age of 9 and looked like an absolute world-beater, playing in various youth tournaments and scoring goals for fun.  He was lightning fast, but was also a big lad for his age and that helped him muscle past smaller defenders, but the problem was that Febian had probably done most of his growing by the time he was 15.  From that point onwards, he could only watch as smaller defenders got bigger and stronger whilst he just stayed pretty much the same.  He’s still only 22, but last time I looked, was without a club. 

Febian Brandy – currently unattached

Rossi was of a similar build, scored masses of goals in the Reserves, but the arguments against him  also usually revolved around his diminutive stature – ‘not big enough or tough enough for English football’ was the customary comment, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped a player like Jermaine Defoe from having a long and successful career with West Ham and Spurs.  Since he went to Spain, Rossi has become a full Italian international and a bit of a goal machine for Villareal, though has been less successful of late.

Jones looked like a nailed-on future United stalwart; a left-footed midfield organiser in the Roy Keane mould, though thankfully a bit less volatile.  He  had spells at Preston (on loan), Derby and Wolves, but has now landed up at Wigan and finds it hard to get into a struggling team.  Chris Eagles went to Burnley and has now moved to Bolton, where he is having some success playing as an orthodox right-winger.  He still looks a good player, too, but like Jones and Rossi, was never really given a chance to establish himself in the first team at United.

Chris Eagles – never really given a chance at United

The usual response here from those who defend United’s policy towards emerging youngsters is  ’If they were good enough, they’d have made it into the first team.’  However, the issue here is opportunity – or the lack of it. 

Darren Fletcher – now sadly and possibly permanently sidelined by illness - is a beneficiary of  Old Trafford’s ‘glass ceiling’.  For years, Fletcher was jokingly referred to as ‘The Godson’ by malcontent United fans.  Many people were so mystified by Fletcher’s constant opportunities in the first team that the theory was that -given his Scottish roots – he must be Fergie’s godson.  Certainly, though Fletcher did eventually emerge as an energetic if not very creative midfielder – what Eric Cantona would typify as a ‘water carrier’ – this was a process that took years to come to fruition.  During that time, Fletcher took over from the departed Phil Neville as the butt of the fans discontent.  I have been at Old Trafford and heard a huge collective groan when his name was read out on the teamsheet before a game.

The point here is that Fletcher was given multiple opportunities to nail down a first team place, even when his contribution quite clearly did not merit this.  Fergie liked him for whatever reason, so he got into the team.  Jones, Eagles and Rossi were never given more than a fraction of the opportunities that Fletcher has had.  Who knows how much they could have achieved at United if they had been among Fergie’s favourites in the way that Fletcher was (and Jonny Evans  is)?

Which brings me to last year’s FA Youth Cup winners.  Most of the team have now ‘moved up’ to the Reserves, where most of them continue to prosper.  Midfielder Ryan Tunnicliffe has been loaned out to Peterborough for the season and goalkeeper Sam Johnstone  also had a spell on loan at Scunthorpe.  Quite clearly, some of these players need some time to settle in at this level – both Jesse Lingard and Larnell Cole are hugely promising but both are still growing and need to ‘fill out’.  However, there were a few of the team – specifically, Paul Pogba, Ravel Morrison and Will Keane – who were ready to take a up a place in the first team squad and  – indeed – all three have seen some action in the first team this season.  They, along with Tunnicliffe, were the outstanding players in last year’s Youth Cup winning team and they presaged a bright new future for United’s Academy players.

However, that future has not really happened for a variety of reasons.  Ravel Morrison’s off-field activities have been well-documented and he has now been sold to West Ham in the January transfer window.  For all his silky skills, I think we have to accept that there were too many issues in Ravel’s private life for him to ever really make it at United.  Clearly the club has kept the lid on a lot of this in an effort to protect the player and it could be that the truth will never be known.  Under such circumstances, getting away from Manchester was probably a necessary step for Ravel, but you do wonder whether he will handle the temptations of living in London any better.  No doubt the tabloids will keep us informed about this.

Paul Pogba is a midfielder of massive promise.  Tall, athletic, mobile, inventive – the comparisons with a young Patrick Vieira are fully justified.  He has seen more first team action than any of the others, but is clearly dissatisfied – and with good reason, in my view. 

Paul Pogba – overlooked in favour of Jones, Cleverley & Scholes

Whatever Paddy Crerand and other apologists may say, there is little doubt that United’s midfield is the weakest area of the team – and has been so for several years now.  Last year we won the title without ever having a settled midfield – Carrick, Scholes, Fletcher, Park, Giggs, Gibson and even O’Shea were rotated regularly – a strategy that we just about got away with in the Premiership, but which was ruthlessly exposed by Barcelona in the Champions League Final last May.  In the summer, the club lost Paul Scholes to retirement and were reputedly in pusuit of Inter Milan’s Wesley Sneijder – a move that never happened for whatever reason.  In a revisionist comment made after the Sneijder move had broken down, Fergie said  ”If we hold Paul Pogba back, what’s going to happen? He’s going to leave in a couple of years’ time when his contract is finished. We have to give him opportunities to see how he can do in the first team. He’s got the ability, the physique and the athleticism.”  Exactly, Sir Alex, so why haven’t we seen more of Pogba in the first team?  Pogba clearly – and justifiably - feels that he’s not being given a decent shot and according to whichever tabloid you believe, is destined for City, Inter, Juventus, Arsenal or wherever.  Pogba has seen returning loanee Tom Cleverley rocket past him and into the first team (and the England squad), he has seen central defender Phil Jones deployed in a midfield holding role and has seen Paul Scholes come out of retirement, whilst his own opportunities have been minimal.  You don’t need to be a genius to see why the young Frenchman is so disilluioned with life at United.

In some ways it’s been even worse for Will Keane.  At the start of the season, as a striker, he would have seen Rooney, Hernandez, Berbatov, Welbeck, Diouf, Owen and Macheda ahead of him in the pecking order and must have despaired of getting any first team action at all.  He did finally get on for a few minutes in the home defeat against Blackburn and was on the bench against Stoke the other night, but much of that is down to Macheda (loan) and Diouf (permanent) having departed and injury problems with Rooney and (surprise, surprise) Owen.  He continues to bang in goals for the Reserves, but the likelihood of him getting a decent run in the first team seems as remote as ever. 

Will Keane – will he ever get a real chance?

So, Morrison has gone, Pogba could be on his way and Will Keane is kicking his heels in the Reserves – for now.  So much for the FA Youth Cup winners heralding a brand new dawn.  In fact, the young players making a splash at Old Trafford have either been bought in (Jones and Smalling) or were out on loan last year (Cleverley & Welbeck).

So what of this year’s crop of hopefuls?  A couple of the Youth Cup winning team – Tyler Blackett and Gylliano van Velzen – were suffciently young to carry on in the Academy this year.  Otherwise, Paul McGuinness has had a new crop of youngsters to contend with, among them the sons of some famous Dads;  Nick Barmby’s son, Jack,  is a striker-cum-winger and Luke Hendrie, son of ex-Middlesbrough midfielder John, is following in Dad’s footsteps in central midfield.  Welsh striker Tom Lawrence made a few  appearances late last season and looks promising, but other than that it’s all change for the U-18′s.

Results were poor early in the season – consecutive defeats to Portsmouth and Southampton to open the season and since then a bit patchy.  Centre-half Luke McCulloch has emerged as a lynchpin and Jack Barmby has scored regularly in a team that seems to have only the (relatively) diminutive Sam Byrne as a central striker. Tom Lawrence seems to have been out with injury for most of the season, so the team seems to have got by using a plethora of wingers and midfielders, often playing with Byrne on his own up front. 

The defending FA Youth Cup holders got through their third and fourth round games at Altrincham against Torquay (4-0) and Derby (2-1)  – games I managed to miss for one reason or another, but last night’s 5th round game against Swansea at the Liberty Stadium represented perhaps their greatest challenge to date in this year’s tournament.

Like the United first team, the U-18′s are going through an injury crisis of their own, with (apparently) up to 10 players unavailable for last night’s game.  Even so, the Youth Cup seems to have worked some kind of alchemy on the team yet again – or more likely the coaching of Paul McGuinness , Jim Ryan and their staff is beginning to have a real impact.  Working forward from the back, Tyler Blackett (who captained the team) seems to have acquired a little more discipline to compliment his undoubted talent and athleticism and had a storming game at centre-back.  Charni Ekangamene, born in Antwerp, but of Congolese descent, seemed for so long to be in search of a role within the team, but now seems to have settled in well at left-back.  In midfield, Luke Hendrie produced a top-rate performance, whilst diminutive Norwegian Mats Daehli combines guile and speed to great effect.  Van Velzen looks a far better player than he did last year and has now added better decision-making to his undoubted ball-playing skills.  Jack Barmby has looked good and scored regularly all season whilst Sam Byrne has now started to find the back of the net as well.  All in all, the team produced a top-rate performance and looked a far more cohesive unit than they did when I saw them last. 

Tyler Blackett – a commanding figure in defence

Swansea’s youngsters don’t play in the Academy League, so were a bit of an unknown quantity.  Even so, they put out Liverpool earlier in the competition so were clearly not to be under-estimated.  They had a proven goalscorer in James Loveridge and left-back Jandir Zola also looked a good player.

The first 40 minutes of the game were fairly even and fairly open.  Loveridge probably missed Swansea’s best chance, heading over from about 6 yards with the goal at his mercy, whilst at the other end, Swansea goalkeeper Davies had to dive at Jack Barmby’s feet to prevent United from going ahead. 

In the end, the game probably hinged on a three-goal United blitz in the seven minutes leading up to half-time.  First, Cypriot centre-back Nicolas Iannou sent a long, hopeful ball forward which Barmby, who’d stayed onside, got to before Davies.  With the goalkeeper committed and the goal untended, Barmby’s careful left-foot shot from the edge of the area  just beat the retreating Zola to give United the lead.  Less than two minutes later, a brilliant, if risky backheel by Blackett in his own right-back area, followed by a surging run and incisive pass, enabled Mats Daehli  to beat Swansea’s offside trap and race away, drawing Davies before squaring the ball into the path of the onrushing van Velzen who could hardly miss – a wonderful ‘team’ goal.  Then, on the stoke of half-time United got lucky when Barmby’s mishit shot struck Byrne on the heel, spun into the air and dropped perfectly for the Irish striker to volley home from close range. 

Into the second half and though Swansea markedly upped their game, United were still creating openings, due in no small part to Swansea’s tendency to overplay the ball at the back and then lose it in midfield.   After 49 minutes, a fine crossfield foray by full-back James Weir led to van Velzen finding enough space on the edge of the Swansea area to stroke  a low left-footed shot beyond Davies and make it 4-0.

Loveridge did pull one back for Swansea just 4 minutes later.  Blackett’s weak clearing header was probably his only error of a Man of the Match performance, but Loveridge had time to control the ball on his chest and send a low volley past Jon Sutherland and in via the inside of the post. 

Substitutes James Wilson and Josh Harrop came on and made a considerable impact with both denied after fine runs and despite Swansea pulling a goal back, United continued to look the most likely to extend their lead.  That eventually happened just a minute or so from time when Blackett bulletted home a free-kick from the right-hand edge of the area.

So, a 5-1 victory for United and they move on to the quarter-final where they will play either Charlton or Tottenham at home.  The team do seem to be coming together impressively since I last saw them and though they may lack the truly outstanding individuals of last year’s group, they have clearly made good progress under Paul McGuinness’ wing. 

The Three Wise Men?   (L-R) Ferguson, Ryan and McGuinness

The likelihood is that by the time this crop reach the stage where they are agitating for a first-team place, they will have a new manager to impress; hopefully one who will walk the walk as well as talking the talk where young players are concerned.  Blackett and Barmby currently look the best candidates for rapid promotion through the ranks and it would be nice to think of them joining the likes of Pogba, Keane, Lingard and Tunnicliffe in the United first team squad.  However, like me, they are probably approaching the future with hope rather than optimism.

Another milestone……

Yesterday, this blog quietly crept past 100,000 hits since its inception way back in September 2009. 

Those were t’ days when you could go out with a 50p coin in your pocket, drink 12 pints of embalming fluid, eat 3 Chicken Bhunas and still have enough left to get a stretch limo home……

Well, maybe not; nostalgia, as has been well-documented, ain’t what it used to be.  Even so,  I do seem to have churned out a lot of verbiage and doubtless some drivel along the way and I really must thank all visitors, but in particular serial offenders, for dropping in to keep that remorseless counter ticking over. 

I can’t actually say that I never thought I’d reach this stage because for much of its existence I never really considered the  ’life’ of the blog.  Just moved on to  the next post …and yet here we are still.

Right now, I’m feeling a bit like a neglectful parent because, due to well-documented issues dealt with at some length in recent posts, I just don’t have much time or energy left for blogging .  I’m not going to reproach myself too much about that, simply because this is after all a blog, not a daily newspaper. 

Things will, eventually, settle down again I’m sure, leaving me with more energy for lots of other, less onerous things, including blogging.  We’re now into Winter’s ‘dog days’ and Spring is just around the corner, so there is light at the end of the tunnel in most respects.  Here’s to the next 100,000….

Stuff……

Just when I’d really like to be blogging away about how Gnidrolog’s  album ‘In spite of Harry’s toenail’  is a touchstone of Western civilisation or words to that effect, I find myself beset by the need to clear my Dad’s house of a lifetime (two lifetimes, if you count my Mum) of stuff….

Now, I already have stuff problems of my own, notably with cd’s and to a lesser extent with books.  When I decided to go over to cd’s from vinyl, I rejoiced in the fact that I had managed to create a huge amount of space in the house and that these new shiny silver discs with their economical dimensions were surely never going to become as oppressive a problem as those big boxes of LP’s.    Jump forward 15 or so years and all the space once occupied by clunky crates of vinyl is now taken up with smaller crates of cd’s.  The economy of scale offered by cd’s has just encouraged me to acquire more of them, so in essence, I now have a larger quantity of music taking up the same space as before.  Hmmmm….

With books, it’s not quite so bad, but I can nonetheless boast an impressively tall  and increasingly unstable ziggurat of unread volumes next to my bed, which, should it ever collapse on me during the night, would probably result in a severe case of concussion.

All of which goes to show that for people like myself with a magpie disposition, you could probably rehouse us into a 25-room mansion and we would still – over a period of years – manage to fill the place up with stuff.

In some respects, I am fortunate to live with someone who is of a quite different viewpoint; the partner sees herself as some latter-day Gandhian ascetic who only needs a spare loin-cloth and a packet of B&H to keep her happy.  As in many things, she’s not totally consistent about this, having a weakness for jewellery, cosmetics and handbags to name but a few conspicuous items, but she is generally happier to be less burdened with stuff than I am.  I am always being encouraged by her to ‘sacredly cleanse’ the various cluttered areas of my life – my wardrobe, my cd collection, my books – and it’s sometimes hard to make her understand that the stuff I have accumulated over the years is somehow intrinsically bound up with my personality and forms an essential part of the way in which I see myself in relation to the rest of the world.  Well, that’s my excuse anyway – another view would be that all my stuff is like a big security blanket that helps me maintain the illusion that everything is under control and that I actually do know what I’m doing.  As if….

Of course, all of this comes from somewhere, and – unsurprisingly – I get it from my parents, both of whom were magpies up to a point.  However, with them there was definitely an extra dimension that I think is probably peculiar to people who lived through the wartime years.  This can probably best be summed up by the phrase – and it’s a phrase that I heard both of my parents use on numerous occasions – “I’ll hang on to that/those; it/they might come in handy.”

So now I am reaping the whirlwind of stuff that my folks accumulated in this house over the 28 years they lived here together and the final 7 years my Dad lived here as a widower.  Having an appreciation of things that ‘might come in handy’ perhaps suggests an almost prescient appreciation of potential future needs, but as I’m finding, it’s more like an obsession with being prepared for any and every eventuality, no matter how unlikely. 

I’ve already written here about how, after my Mum’s death, I was (partially) clearing out her kitchen and found several large tupperware boxes crammed full of those little sachets of sugar that are available in cafes and motorway service stations.  My Mum would undoubtedly have accumulated these on my parents’ many post-retirement caravanning holidays and I can see the way her magpie mind would have justified this consistent and systematic pilfering of sugar.  She knew perfectly well that neither she nor my Dad used sugar, except perhaps on breakfast cereal – something they ate only rarely, so there was little point in keeping any sugar in the restricted storage space within their caravan.  On the other hand, it was not unknown for them to entertain other caravanners for a cup of tea from time to time and those people might be users of sugar, so having a few sachets handy would be a good thing.  So far, so logical, but then the wartime hoarding mentality, not to mention the something-for-nothing mentality obviously kicked in and what started out as a piece of common sense rapidly became a full-scale obsession, eventually requiring tupperware boxes and cupboard space.

Now that I am having to clear the entire bungalow, what I am finding is that my sugar sachet experience was just the tip of a candy-coated iceberg.  It’s becoming abundantly clear that my folks kept just about everything, treating the house as a repository for the accumulated stuff of their lives.  However, whilst their previously-mentioned prescience about the things that they kept because they might ‘come in handy’ perhaps hints at  an organised approach to their squirrelling, what I am now finding is that there was a total absence of such an approach. Obscure cupboards and unused shelves became spaces where stuff could be shoved in a fairly haphazard manner and it has become customary for me to find small and often broken ornaments filled with assorted detritus – for example, fuses, perished rubber bands, paper clips, foreign coins, keys (to unknown locks), 50-year old letters from obscure or unknown persons, old passport photos, yellowed newspaper cuttings featuring useful gardening or household tips, recipes clipped from old magazines and so on.

Larger receptacles such as cardboard boxes may feature tourist brochures for somewhere in Scotland or Switzerland, theatre programmes, football programmes, single gloves, plastic flowers, broken Christmas decorations, 30-year old credit card bills, postcards from friends or family, invitations to weddings of people I’ve forgotten or never heard of and desiccated chunks of that weird green foam that florists use (or once used) for flower arrangements.

A cupboard occupied principally by a well-lagged hot water tank was additionally filled with dozens and dozens of tea-towels and hand-towels, washcloths and threadbare old tablecloths, all of which had over the years been stuffed in there and had slowly forced themselves down and  around the tank like an extra layer of lagging and had been slowly compressed into almost sedimentary layers of exhausted cotton and towelling. 

Wardrobes were another horror show; odd slippers, dozens and dozens of ties, wildly kitsch sixties jackets, multiple old cagouls that had somehow become stuck together, so that they were like some bizarre gore-tex sculpture, weird hanging contraptions that dangled from the inside of wardrobe doors as receptacles for shoes and more stuff…..as if any extra space were needed.

And so it goes on.  A peculiarity of the house compared to the others in the vicinity – all built in the early ’70′s – is that my Dad’s place was built by the builder for himself; he lived there for 4 years before selling the place to my parents in 1976.  As such, it’s bigger, has more garden and – in particular – has a  small room (maybe 8 feet wide and 15 feet long) leading off the main living room which could, in another lifetime, have been a small bedroom or, more likely, a study.  Instead, my Dad slowly turned it into what I called (somewhat inappropriately) his ‘glory-hole’ .  It all began well enough, with large and capacious shelves for books, files and the like, but as the years rolled by and the  shelves filled, the floor-space eventually became covered with boxes, pieces of old (and frequently broken) furniture and, in the end, random piles of papers and junk.  By the time I started in on it about 3 weeks ago, it was barely possible to open the door and it took me the best part of a week just to clear a path to the shelves at the far end.

Thus far, I have found some real gems among an awful lot of shite.  On the plus side, there were some really old family photos that I’d never seen before of relatives (most of them long gone now) taken during the war years.  In amongst that were letters from LMS Railways in Leicester detailing aspects of my Dad’s glorious and brief  Casey Jones career before he got into teaching, love letters from my parents to one another before and just after their marriage, a letter from my maternal Grandmother to my Mum at her workplace a week after she’d stormed out with my Dad, begging her to come home and begging forgiveness for the terrible things that had been said (she never went back) and finally a letter written by my maternal Grandfather to my Dad’s parents, turning down their invitation to my parents’ wedding on the basis that there had been too much ‘lying and deceit and insulting behaviour’  from my Mum & Dad for them to accept.  Dramatic stuff and though I knew the stories I’d never seen the documentary evidence.

However, for every piece of genuinely interesting stuff I’ve had to wade my way through piles and piles of detritus – most of it prompting the question ‘Why on earth did they keep this?’  About 50 address books – most of them unused, zillions of tourist pamphlets from Salzburg to Saltash to Salt Lake City and a whole box of postcards going back to the 60′s – some of them used/received, others unused/blank.   In another pile were about 150 postcards of Inveraray Castle – all of them unused, all of them identical.  Shelf after shelf of VHS videotapes, boxes of audio cassettes, boxes of 35mm transparencies – the footsoldiers of obsolescent technologies.  I’d already disposed of my Dad’s classical cd’s and old vinyl and there were some favourite pieces like Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’  which he had on cd, LP and audio cassette.  Well you never know….

However, if I needed a metaphor for this whole process, it would be a plain terracotta flowerpot that I found tucked behind a curtain on a windowsill in this overstuffed room.  In it were some pieces of World War 1 shrapnel that my Dad picked up on a trip round the Somme battlefields about 20 years ago.  Apparently, farmers in north-east France still plough up thousands of tons of this stuff every year – they call it the ‘Iron Harvest’ – and they tend to leave it lying by the side of the fields for Bomb Disposal (in the case of munitions) or for the tourists (in the case of less lethal artefacts) to pick up – which is exactly what my Dad did.  He’d picked up several random pieces of very heavy metal, including what was recognisably the remnants of a horseshoe,  and was clearly transfixed by these souvenirs of a war that fascinated him even though it had ended fully 6 years before he was born.  Kept around as a conversation piece for a few weeks after their return from France, the shrapnel had finally been lodged in a random flowerpot, dumped on the windowsill of this room and forgotten.  Twenty years of sun and oxygen and condensation have done their work and most of the shrapnel has by now disintegrated into powdery red dust, which poured out of the hole in the base of the flowerpot the minute I picked it up.  So much for history.

Still, you never know when you might need a few handfuls of rust…might come in handy.

Goofy and Worzel’s Big Adventure

So, ‘Goofy’ Suarez has copped an 8-match ban and a fine of about half a week’s wages for making racist remarks to Patrice Evra during the October fixture at the Dipperdrome.  I actually took the trouble to read large chunks of the 115-page FA Commission report on this whole affair and what struck me most was the level of detail they had gone into over Goofy’s remarks to Evra and his responses.  Apparently this was in order to make it ‘appeal-proof’ and the exhaustive investigations into what was said, by whom and what the cultural or linguistic nuances of that might be would appear to leave Liverpool with very little room for manoeuvre.

In any case, it was clear whilst watching the game that Pat was extremely upset about something that Goofy had said to him.  He kept looking across to the United bench, as if for guidance.  It was abundantly clear that Suarez was trying to wind him up.

All in all, having read large chunks of the Report, there seems little doubt that the case is proven.  Suarez probably isn’t any more of a racist than any other footballer, but he did seemingly use racist remarks  to Evra on this occasion in an attempt to get him booked (he succeeded) or sent off (he didn’t).

Mr Suarez

Who knows how many more ‘undocumented’ cases like this happen at all levels of football during any given season?  Goofy’s mistake was that he picked on the wrong guy.  Gaining an advantage in key games like Liverpool vs United is par for the course and winding up opponents is axiomatic if you think you can needle or unsettle your opponent and provoke them into a rash challenge or injudicious foul.  Through the years, there have been a number of high-profile players with ‘short fuses’ – Denis Law, Roy Keane, Joey Barton, to name but three – who have doubtless been on the receiving end of barbed comments from opponents that were similarly calculated to unsettle and enrage.  It will be interesting to see if there is an increase in this kind of complaint from now on.

What has been far more interesting throughout this whole affair has been the relative responses of the two clubs and their managers.  Fergie and the United camp have been at pains to stay out of it, by and large.  This is fair enough; after all the case was being brought by the F.A., not by Manchester United F.C..  Fergie’s only comment on it was that they were supportive of Evra’s standpoint.

Predictably, Liverpool’s response – and that of  their manager in particular – has been far more of a comedy turn.  The ghosts of Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley must have been spinning in their graves at some of ‘Worzel’ Dalglish’s comments. 

Apart from trying to discredit  Patrice Evra’s testimony due to the totally unrelated incidents that took place at Stamford Bridge in 2008 – whilst conveniently neglecting to mention Goofy’s ban for biting a (black) opponent whilst playing for Ajax in 2010 - Worzel has lost considerable respect among the wider footballing community due to the one-eyed parochialism of his responses.  His attempts to plug into Liverpool’s well-documented ‘victim culture’ via Twitter  to ensure that Goofy ‘never walks alone’ (yawn…) have recently been in full flow after L.F.C.’s recent defeat at Fulham – in particular his response to the chants of the Fulham fans about Goofy’s behaviour.  Suck it up, Kenny, because, thanks in no small part to your public utterances,  the terrace wags around the country will be reminding Suarez of his misdemeanours for as long as he remains a Liverpool player, no matter your affronted outrage.  The only surprise is that Dalglish hasn’t yet taken issue with the fact that both of the F.A.’s ‘linguistic experts’ who advised on Goofy’s use of ‘Rioplatense’ Spanish were attached to the University of…..you guessed it…Manchester.

 United fans, of course, have predictably already developed a parody of Liverpool’s ‘Just can’t get enough’  Suarez song that makes their views on his behaviour perfectly clear.  Should he play at Old Trafford in February, we will undoubtedly be treated to lengthy renditions of this.

Then there was the whole business of the Liverpool squad (and manager) wearing cheap-looking Suarez t-shirts before the recent Wigan game.  Showing solidarity with a team-mate is one thing, but to do so in such an ostentatiously public display is quite another.  Contrast that with the way in which United dealt with Eric Cantona’s ban for assaulting a mouthy idiot in the crowd at Selhurst Park back in 1995.  We all knew – and the club publicly acknowledged – that Eric shouldn’t have done it, but we all supported him anyway – if only because it swiftly became clear that Eric’s target was the worst kind of Sarf London moron.   However, once the seagulls had abandoned the trawler to his fate, the whole thing was quietly taken in-house and he was supported behind closed doors – a concept that Worzel doesn’t seem to have grasped.    

Mr Dalglish

Consider the scale of the screw-ups and the enthusiasm with which everyone connected to  The Dippers has managed to paint themselves into a corner over this issue: first, there have been frequent testimonials from Goofy’s team-mates to the effect that he isn’t a racist, but that is something that he was never charged with.  Add to this Worzel’s attempts to discredit Evra and engage with all those miserable, self-deluding Scousers who have chips the size of Pier Head on their shoulders and think that everything is an anti-Liverpool conspiracy,  plus the sheer embarassment now being felt by Goofy’s advisors who set him up with all kinds of do-gooding anti-racism initiatives in South Africa and elsewhere.  It’s almost beyond belief that a major football club could miscalculate so badly over an issue of such seriousness.

Liverpool’s players and staff have publicly gone out on a limb for Luis Suarez, but now the rest of us get to watch them squirm as the penny finally drops and they realise that they are going to have to back down and eat humble pie over this.  Their aggressive stance and their belated understanding that they were just making things worse with each successive public statement will make the inevitable, eventual climbdown even more hilarious.  If I were Evra, I would insist that Suarez is made to apologise publicly in the middle of Moss Side at 10:30 pm on a Saturday night.  I’m sure then that we would see some of the speed and movement for which he is so famous.

Postscript 04 Jan 2012

Well, well, looks like I over-estimated the capacity of Liverpool F.C. to see beyond their own parochial interests and regain a little dignity from a situation that has left their reputation – and that of Dalglish and Suarez in particular – in tatters.

But no; the wagons have been pulled into an even tighter circle and they have decided to move on without any  apology to the affronted party, without any acceptance that Suarez was guilty or that their response to this problem has often been crass and inappropriate in the extreme. It’s not often that I am guilty of over-estimating Liverpool F.C., but here is one such occasion.  Mea culpa.

Had the situations been reversed, I would like to think that my club would have had the wisdom and humility to see that more was at stake here than just their own narrow interests and over-developed persecution complex.  As mentioned previously, they did so back in 1995 over the Cantona Affair and managed to handle it just about right.  When Cantona returned after a much longer ban, it was with a sense that justice had been served and that he could resume his career with a clean slate.  He did so and although his absence probably cost us the Premiership Title that year, the following year we did the Double with Cantona scoring a brilliant winning goal in an otherwise drab FA Cup Final against Liverpool.  Eric won numerous Player of the Year awards and both player and  club were feted for their phoenix-like revival.  Football moved on.

Can’t see that happening with Goofy, no matter how good a player he is.  Liverpool’s aggressive and unrepentant stance over this sorry affair will ensure that upon his return, Suarez will no doubt be treated as a Martyr and another member of the pantheon of Merseyside Victims  at the Dipperdrome, whilst everywhere else he will be treated as a racist, even though he probably isn’t.  Last night, the City fans were singing ‘Where’s your racist gone?’  to their Scouse counterparts and this will no doubt continue for the rest of this season and probably beyond.  Serves ‘em right, frankly. 

Dalglish and Co may reject the views of the F.A. Commission, but the ‘Court of Public Opinion’ has already made its mind up and though Patrice Evra isn’t exactly a popular figure outside of Red Manchester, most people – except for Dipper fans - understand that he had a genuine grievance here; one worthy of some contrition and some kind of apology from Suarez and LFC, neither of which it seems will now be forthcoming.  This was a moment for Liverpool as a club and for Suarez as a human being to show a little class and even I am surprised at how far short of the mark they have fallen with their intransigence and their arrogant, delusional self-interest.

It will be interesting to see how the F.A. respond to the scorn poured on their Commission by Worzel in particular; if managers can be charged with Disrepute raps for abusing referees, surely Dalglish has a case to answer for his arrogance and contempt towards the governing body?  On the other hand, the F.A. may just want to let the whole thing quietly subside.

Another curious aspect of this concerns the total silence of  LFC’s American owners over this issue.  NES probably have a greater appreciation of ‘race’ issues through their involvement with Baseball in the USA and you would have thought that a little of their accumulated wisdom might have trickled down from on high and into the ears of Dalglish and the players.  John Henry will know that this affair has left a severe dent in Liverpool’s reputation, and further damged their relationships with both the F.A. and with Manchester United.

The latter is a real concern as what used to be a healthy local rivalry becomes increasingly toxic by the year.  Suarez is due to be back for the Old Trafford game next month and I would imagine that police forces in Greater Manchester and on Merseyside are already gearing up for what is likely to be a powder-keg of a day.

Post-Postscript 14 Jan 2012

To use an over-used cliché, you couldn’t make it up…

Just when the F.A. thought that things couldn’t get any worse, we get what must seem to them to be the F.A. Cup Fourth Round Draw from Hell…..QPR v Chelsea and Liverpool v United.    Just when they were hoping that the whole ‘racism in football’ issue would dry up and blow away.  No chance of that now.  Suarez, Evra, Terry & Anton Ferdinand  are back under the microscope.

  To be honest, I have been in a state of shock about this for the last 10 days.  At the very least, these fixtures – especially the Liverpool/United tie – raise a whole raft of issues that will no doubt mean that any and every public utterance from either side ahead of the Cup game will be subject to intense media scrutiny.  From here, with a favourable wind, I can almost hear the sound of sacrificial knives being sharpened in the Street of Shame.

Suarez has issued a half-arsed and general ‘apology’ that satisfied nobody and merely highlights his and his club’s contempt for  Evra, the F.A. and Manchester United – and probably in that order.  Fergie has commented sarcastically about Liverpool’s predilection for making large and empty public statements.  Clearly, his view is that ‘peace talks’ at board level will not alleviate the tribal toxicity that Dalglish et al have let loose – and he’s probably right. 

Things are coming to the boil and by the end of this, the result of a couple of football matches (the Cup game and subsequent Premiership game at Old Trafford in early February) may be the least of our worries……

The safest bet – being as ITV will almost certainly broadcast the Cup game live on free-to-air TV  – would be to play it ‘behind closed doors’, but that would undoubtedly be seen as an acknowledgement by the football authorities that the fans are out of control and the police and stewards will be able to do little or nothing to control them if there are any flashpoints.  No doubt if that should prove to be the case, Kenny Dalglish will be as disinclined to accept any responsibility as he has been throughout this whole sorry mess.  Pretty classy for someone who witnessed at first hand what happened at both Heysel and Hillsborough.  

If the abuse one (black)  Oldham player got from the Kop during a recent cup tie is anything to go by, what kind of reception can Patrice Evra expect to get – assuming he is picked to play?  And if he doesn’t play, what does that say about the levels of snarling vitriol that Liverpool FC have effectively sponsored and encouraged throughout this affair?

You would like to think that Liverpool and United fans alike will be aware of the fact that – more than ever – the world will be looking on and  that they will consequently show some restraint and some maturity.  However, Dalglish and Liverpool have already set the tone ahead of this match and in an atmosphere of resentment, loathing and parochial prejudice, does anyone seriously believe that an outbreak of peace is likely? 

When you’re Smile-ing; listening to The Beach Boys…..

Trying to get back into the normal run of life after all the emotional disruption of the last few months, so catching up with some music seemed as good a way as any of doing so.  Had a pile of things stacked up and decided to start with one of the longest-running sagas in the annals of post-Beatles recorded music – the finally-released ‘Smile’, the epic Beach Boys album from 1966-1967.  This has now been made available as a 5 CD Box Set,  a 2 CD ‘Highlights’ package,  on vinyl, double vinyl and (doubtless) every other format and permutation imaginable .  Being a sucker for punishment and a long-time fan, I have inevitably opted for the Box Set 5 CD version.

Books will be - in fact they probably already have been - written about the whole  ‘Smile’  saga – and herein lies the problem, because it would be impossible for this album to ever live up to the hype that surrounds it.  Not that what we have here is at all unfamiliar.  Many of the songs from ‘Smile’  – ‘Wind Chimes’, ‘Vegetables’, ‘Surf’s Up’ , ‘Heroes & Villains’ and others  - were released in one form or another by The Beach Boys during the late 1960′s or early 1970′s and in any case, Brian Wilson has already issued his own version of ‘Smile’,  released 7 years ago.   And that’s to say nothing of bootlegged versions of the ‘original’ album, one of which I bought from a stall on St Albans Market at least 10 years ago.

So, it would be reasonable to ask why this after-the -Lord -Mayor’s-Ball  official release has created even a moderate stir, and to explain that requires a look at the whole Beach Boys story – especially the crucial period from 1965-1971.

The thing about The Beach Boys is that  they were both naff and cool at the same time.  In the early days, there was always something geeky and awkward about the band as individuals, with the sole exception of drummer Dennis Wilson, who seemed a conventionally good-looking Californian scruff.  The other Wilsons, Carl and Brian, always tended towards porkiness even as young men.  Al Jardine was scrawny and Mike Love was rapidly losing his hair, something that he tried – fruitlessly – to disguise with various hats and elaborate comb-overs.  On stage, they affected camp candy-stripe shirts and white trousers and seemed to borrow heavily from the rock and roll traditions of the 50′s.  Judged on image alone, they weren’t in the same ballpark as The Beatles or The Stones and over and above all that, multiple songs about fast cars and surfing were never likely to resonate overmuch with a young teenager growing up in the East Midlands.

This being the case, everything hinged on the quality of the band’s music and that was always special.  Even the early rock & roll inspired romps like ‘I Get Around’ were a cut above the norm because of their superbly arranged vocal harmonies.  These suggested a level of musical sophistication that was well in excess of the requirements of the material the band  were churning out. Subsequently, once Brian Wilson began to flex his compositional muscles with songs like ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ or ‘In my room’, what rapidly became clear was that  in musical terms The Beach Boys were a substantial cut above most of their contemporaries. 

Even so, whilst Wilson’s compositional chops were a decided asset, the band’s influences were not exactly what you might expect.  If The Beatles were inspired by early Motown and the Stones by post-war Chicago blues, then The Beach Boys’ influences, Elvis and Chuck Berry aside,  were straight out of white Norman Rockwell suburban Americana.  On one level, whilst that meant Gershwin and Sinatra, it also meant preppy favourites like Doris Day and The Four Freshmen, all  growing out of  the  gauche, crewcut, bobby-sox awkwardness of post-war white American teen culture.  Years later, the band would release Bruce Johnston’s  open love letter to this whole era – ‘Disney Girls (1957)’ on 1971′s ‘Surf’s Up’.  They did so without any apparent sense of irony  or regard for the prevalent counter-cultural zeitgeist.

 ”She’s really swell
Cause she likes
Church, bingo chances and old-time dances”

Well, gee whizz, fellas……it’s a long way from there to Woodstock nation, but the same album also featured eco-anthems like ‘Don’t go near the water’ and openly experimental songs like ‘Feel flows’…..would the real Beach Boys please stand up?  By this point, it seemed that not even the band knew who they were or what they wanted to be.  However, I’m getting ahead of myself here….

As mentioned,  what set The Beach Boys apart from Jan & Dean and the other surf groups of the mid-60′s  was Brian Wilson.  It was Brian who, as a child, had led the way in teaching his brothers to sing harmonies.  It was Brian who, throughout his stellar career as a high school quarterback had continued with his musical studies, it was Brian who drove The Beach Boys on to greater and more ambitious projects despite growing unease among other band members – particularly Mike Love.  Finally, it was Brian who led the band out of their collective comfort zone and into uncharted waters like ‘Pet Sounds’ and ‘Smile’.

The Beach Boys in one of their stage outfits; probably around 1964

Brian stopped performing regularly on stage with the band in 1965, with first Glen Campbell and then Bruce Johnston taking his place.  Fear of flying seemed to be the immediate cause of this, but whereas The Byrds used a similar problem as a lever to force Gene Clark out of the band at around the same time, The Beach Boys were savvy enough to realise Brian’s value to the band.  He had swiftly moved on from niche songs about surfing and hot rods to a growing collection of more personal songs that revealed his vulnerability and sensitivity and it was these songs – ‘In my room’, ‘The Warmth of the Sun’, ‘Help me Rhonda’ and the like – that were turning heads around the world.

So Brian stayed home with his piano and his thoughts whilst the rest of the guys headed off round the world to fly the Beach Boys flag.  In many ways, the removal of the pressure of live performance released the brakes on Brian’s talents and the work he did at this time took the band’s music to a whole new level of sophistication.  They had by this stage already recorded basic tracks for an intended new single, a version of an old folk tune called ‘Sloop John B’.  Careful listening reveals a broadening of the band’s instrumental textures - now it wasn’t all Phil Spector-ish organ and guitar; there were glockenspiels and piccolos and other less discernible sounds lurking in the mix and the overall quality of the production had been cranked up a notch or two.

It was always said of Duke Ellington that although he played very good piano, his real instrument was his Orchestra and with Brian Wilson, it would probably be fair to say that although he played piano and sang well, his real instrument was the recording studio.  Brian wasn’t a great instrumentalist per se, but he had a great ear for innovative arrangements and a vivid imagination.  With the band away touring, Brian began a collaboration with lyricist Tony Asher early in 1966  and around the same time also went into the studios with ‘The Wrecking Crew’, an assemblage of L.A.’s finest session players, to lay down the backing tracks for ‘Pet Sounds’.   

A previous Beach Boys box set ( Good Vibrations – Thirty Years of The Beach Boys)  included a ‘bonus disc’ of some of the sessions (and the between-takes studio chat) that created ‘Pet Sounds’ and they offer a fascinating glimpse of  a confident Brian deploying an astonishing range of musical instruments including oddities like bass harmonica, ocarina, contra-bassoon and harpsichord.  The impression you are left with is that the use of such a wide palette of instrumental colouration was no accident, nor was it a wilful embrace of novelty for the sake of novelty.  Yes, Brian Wilson comes across as a kid let loose in a toyshop, but this kid seemed to know exactly what he wanted and exactly what he was doing.  Even if he didn’t, the results - when ‘Pet Sounds’ finally came out later in 1966 – justified all the complexities of instrumentation and arrangement.

The full story of ‘Pet Sounds’ could detain me here for hours, but it’s ‘Smile’ that I’ve been listening to, so I’d better restrict myself to observing that  ‘Pet Sounds’ marked a sea change in Brian Wilson’s development as a composer/arranger and also in his relationship with the rest of the band.

They returned from an Asian tour to be presented with a ‘fait accompli’ of six backing tracks for the new album with Tony Asher’s lyrics ready to be sung and only the vocal harmonies to be worked out.  This did not go down well with some of the other members, notably Mike Love, whose musical conservatism led him to question why the band should abandon the successful formula of surfing & car songs that had propelled them to worldwide success.  From ‘Pet Sounds’ onwards, Brian was effectively ’on probation’ as far as Love was concerned and though the band would continue to follow their Pied Piper, they would do so only as long as the hit singles continued to flow.  From hereon, Brian was part of the band but was also apart from the band, his growing use of drugs was starting to have an impact and the mental unravelling that would blight his career was only just around the corner.

In some respects, by 1966, Brian Wilson was no longer looking to his fellow Beach Boys for inspiration – they probably didn’t understand what he was trying to achieve and in some cases (Love) were openly hostile to it.  His peers were now the likes of The Beatles and if ‘Pet Sounds’ was directly fuelled by Brian’s response to ‘Rubber Soul’, then ‘Smile’ was probably Brian’s attempt to match ‘Revolver’.    Subsequently, the fact that ‘Smile’ was shelved was partly because of Brian’s sense of insecurity about his own work when confronted  with ’Revolver‘ and ‘Sgt Pepper‘ .  One of the problems here was that unlike Lennon and McCartney, Brian had no-one to compete with or to bounce his ideas off.  The ‘guys in the band’ had just become his ‘voices’ as The Wrecking Crew had become his orchestra.   As late as 1968, The Beatles would still audition one another’s songs by getting together with acoustic guitars and sitting round playing their new songs for the rest of the band.  For Brian Wilson, it was a much more solitary path and he was way ahead of virtually everyone else in his field.  The Beatles had George Martin to lean on, Smokey Robinson’s arrangements were taken care of by in-house Motown arrangers but with The Beach Boys, the songs, the production and the arrangements were all down to Brian.  No wonder he cracked in the end.

Brian plays his new stuff for the rest of the band….

The link between ‘Pet Sounds’ and ‘Smile’ was ‘Good Vibrations’.  Originally slated for inclusion on ‘Pet Sounds’, Brian decided that he wanted to do more work on it, so it was held back…and held back….and….

Early sessions for the song date back to February of 1966, fully 8 months before it was finally released.  It has been estimated that it cost 50, 000 dollars to make – a colossal sum at the time for just one song - and involved no less than seventeen recording sessions in four separate studios during the spring and summer of 1966.  Tony Asher supplied the original lyrics but these were later replaced.  Mike Love gets a co-writer’s credit but given his generally negative attitude to ‘Brian’s New Direction’, it beggars belief that he could have authored some of the song’s wilder flights of lyrical fancy.  At one point, Love allegedly dismissed the song as ‘avant-garde shit’ and as the passing years have revealed him to be – amongst other things - a man who has an over-developed sense of his own importance, it hardly seems likely that he would pour such scorn on anything for which he might be held partially responsible.

Whatever the case, ‘Good Vibrations’ was released in October of 1966 and probably changed perceptions of The Beach Boys forever.  In the UK, it was received with reverence by BBC and Pirate DJ’s alike – I can recall one informing us that this was ‘what the future will sound like.’  For all its innovative stylings, it was still recognisably a Beach Boys single and it fairly  hurtled up the UK singles chart to give the band their first British # 1.

Some-time Beatles and Byrds publicist Derek Taylor described  ’Good Vibrations’  as a ‘pocket symphony’; an apt description, especially as it hints at an internal structure of different ‘movements’ with differing moods.  The song was certainly a landmark on many levels – for one thing, it was probably the first truly ‘psychedelic’ hit record but more significantly in the light of what was to come, it represented a new way of making records for Brian Wilson.  ‘Good Vibrations’ was recorded in sections which Brian then assembled, rather as you might put together a pre-fabricated building.  This was not necessarily ground-breaking, but what changed with ‘Good Vibrations’  was that rather than being edited out to create the impression of a seamless performance, the ‘joins’ between the different sections were not only left in but were almost exaggerated.  The classic example here is the section where the band softly sing “Gotta keep those lovin’ good vibrations / A happenin’ with her” and repeat it several times before plunging back into the main chorus.  This section begins abruptly with only a quiet organ and softly plucked bass before the voices come in.  At the end of 2011, it doesn’t sound like much, but in 1966, it was.  

‘Good Vibrations’ was a huge success for the band all over the world and it gave Brian Wilson the license to pursue this approach with his next project, which was to be called ‘Smile‘.  For this project, he enlisted the support of Van Dyke Parks, a Los Angeles session musician who had recorded with The Byrds and written songs for bands like Harper’s Bizarre.  Parks had a reputation for witty and literate lyrics and Brian Wilson decided that he was the man to help him with ‘Smile’.

Brian Wilson in the studio with Van Dyke Parks, 1966

In the loosest terms, ‘Smile‘ is  that dreaded beast, a ‘concept album’, but only in the same way that ‘Sgt Pepper’ is.  Both albums are really just an umbrella for a group of songs that (in the case of ‘Sgt Pepper’) we have grown used to hearing run together in a sequence  - the lack of tracking between the songs on ‘SPLHCB’ creates the illusion of a unified structure, but there is actually little connection between the suburban angst of ‘She’s leaving home’ and the ensuing acid-fuelled whimsy of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ .  It’s the same with ‘Smile’; not much connection between ‘Heroes & Villains’ and ‘Wind Chimes’, except that they were both part of the ‘Smile’ project.

What makes ‘Smile’ interesting in 2011 is not so much the flimsiness of its over-arching concept as its massive grab-bag of influences,  the continuation of Brian’s ‘cut & paste’ approach to recording, the way in which it drove a wedge between Brian and the rest of the band and his eventual decision to relinquish not only the album but his role as The Beach Boys pioneering leader.  What’s interesting about the 5 CD Box is that a whole CD is given over to version after version of ‘Good Vibrations’ (or parts of it), whilst another disc is mainly taken up with multiple versions (or part-versions) of ‘Heroes & Villains’.  Both of these discs are – in my view – for serious ‘anoraks’ only. 

After ‘Good Vibrations’, Brian Wilson’s next big project was indeed the epic ‘Heroes & Villains’, a song that to my ears is every bit as awe-inspiring as its predecessor, but which was ultimately ditched in its original ‘expanded’ format and  released as a stripped down and re-recorded single later in 1967 after ‘Smile’ had been shelved.  Brian spent just as much time noodling with this  one as he had with ‘Good Vibrations’ , but the ‘finished’ version available to us on ‘Smile’ has extra sections which render it disjointed amid an already slightly chaotic soundscape.  More than anything else it was Brian’s failure to produce a version of ‘Heroes & Villains’ that satisfied him for a single release that led to the release of ‘Smile’ being put back and ultimately cancelled.  You have to ask, what was Brian doing messing with these 2 songs for so long?  Here is the point at which an experienced ‘outside’ producer could maybe have had a positive impact on a fraught situation in which arguments between Brian and the rest of the band were becoming commonplace.  Whether an ‘outside voice’ could have helped or not, we’ll never know. After the re-recorded single version of ‘Heroes & Villains’ failed to match the success of ‘Good Vibrations’, Brian effectively gave up his attempts to emulate The Beatles and began his long retreat from the public eye.

So, apart from ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Heroes & Villains’ what is there to excite us about ‘Smile’?  Sure, there are some other fine songs – especially  the luminous masterpiece of  ‘Surf’s Up’, but my own history forces me to see that as being part of the wonderful 1971 album of the same name, which featured a partially re-recorded version of what is one of Brian Wilson’s greatest songs.  The original version of ‘Wind Chimes’ certainly knocks spots off the weird, revamped version that eventually came out on the late ’67 ‘Smiley Smile’ album.  However, what has to be said about ‘Smile’ is that it signally fails to leap out of the CD drive as a full-blown classic as Brian Wilson intended.  It comes across as more of a curio, a fragmented collection of  toytown whimsy,  half-songs and embryonic ideas that actually reflected the collective state of the whole band in 1967. Wilson would no doubt argue that he never properly completed the project and that this new release has been assembled from a series of unfinished fragments that don’t really do the material justice.  Well, maybe….

Whilst those of us who were old enough were out enjoying 1967′s  ’Summer of Love’, The Beach Boys – and Brian Wilson especially - were falling apart.  Brian had (consciously or inadvertently) excluded his bandmates from the creative process and was clearly happier in the studio dealing with the likes of Van Dyke Parks and The Wrecking Crew.  The rest of the band, with Bruce Johnston aboard as Brian’s doppelgänger had, meanwhile,  effectively become their own tribute band, long before such things were ever thought of.  A stronger, braver Brian Wilson would have officially parted company with the band at this point, leaving them to their surfing and car songs, whilst pursuing his own star as a solo artist.  However, Brian wasn’t strong – his mental health was already poor and for whatever reasons he was unable to sever the umbilicus connecting him to his brothers.

Drugs may have been another contributory factor in Brian over-reaching himself but the rift between himself and the other band members was at least partly down to poor judgement on his part.  The hours he spent fine-tuning endless versions of ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Heroes & Villains’ was a strategy that was never going to play particularly well with a group who were slogging their way round the world and had fundamental concerns about where Brian’s new conceits were taking them.

The received wisdom about ‘Smile’ was that Brian wanted it released but the others wouldn’t agree – after all, he eventually recorded it and toured with his own version in 2004.  Having now heard what will be seen as the ‘official version’, no matter its unfinished nature, I would have to say that I have some sympathy with their reluctance and it really doesn’t matter which of them blackballed it up until now..  As I said at the outset of this piece, no matter how good it was, ‘Smile’ was never going to live up to all the hype that has slowly built around it over the intervening 40-0dd years.  More than anything else it reveals a band in the process of disintegration. 

It cannot be a time that any of The Beach Boys remember with much affection; after all, the mid-60′s is littered with the carcasses of post-Beatles bands who never made the transition from pop to rock.  Seen from a 1967 standpoint, The Beach Boys must have feared that they were about to be eclipsed by all these new young bands who were coming through with their long hair and outlandish names – The Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Spirit – and that was just in California.  None of them could have foreseen the way in which the band would rehabilitate themselves in the 1970′s with albums like ‘Surf’s Up’ and ‘Holland’ , let alone a series of triumphant live shows such as the one I witnessed them give at a packed and sunny Wembley Stadium in June of 1975.

Last year I wrote about the best gig I have ever attended – The Blue Nile at Birmingham Town Hall in 1990, as you asked – but The Beach Boys at Wembley is # 2 on that list and though Brian Wilson was not there, his songs were and a band I had never considered to be a top live act produced a show for the ages.  Not only that but they did so amidst some pretty serious company – great sets by Stackridge, Rufus, Joe Walsh and The Eagles (aided and abetted by both Walsh and Jackson Browne) had already established a buzz among the capacity crowd.  The sun beat down; it was perfect weather for a Beach Boys gig and – augmented by some seriously good session players (including Chicago’s early producer, James William Guercio) - Carl & Dennis Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine came out and set the place on fire.  What’s more, Brian Wilson’s absence didn’t mean that Mike Love’s greasy MC routine was allowed to dictate the setlist – they played ‘Sail on Sailor’, they played ‘Surf’s Up’.  they even played some avant-garde shit called ‘Good Vibrations’.  Summed up, they were little short of sensational and it must have warmed the cockles of their Californian hearts to hear 100,000 sunburned kids bellowing the chorus to ‘California Girls’ into the London skies.

Carl Wilson at Wembley Stadium in 1975

As a footnote, I should probably point out that The Beach Boys were actually a last-minute replacement for Stevie Wonder, who had been taken ill.   I wonder how much top-of-the-bill Elton John regretted the decision to book The Beach Boys as he had to follow them on stage. Poor dear didn’t stand a chance.  In the years since, I must have spoken with 100 people who were also at that gig and I have yet to meet one that stayed to the end of Reg’s set, even though he had Steely Dan’s Jeff Baxter playing guitar for him that day. 

That glorious day at Wembley is the way that I would like to remember  The Beach Boys.  Listening to ‘Smile’  in 2011 is, by contrast,  like wandering through the rooms of a dusty old house where no-one has lived for 45 years;  it’s fascinating and exhibits moments of brilliance to match anything that had come before, but whether it’s the ‘unfinished’ nature of the songs or some other factor, it just doesn’t cut it as an overall project.  In the end , it remains for me just an interesting peek into Brian Wilson’s world shortly before all his dreams came crashing down, denying him his health and denying us the work of a true genius.  Sure, it’s been great to see him back in recent years performing and playing the old hits, but you do wonder about what might have been….

The Long Goodbye

‘Closure’; a much abused and overused word in these days of celebrity mag confessionals and all-too-public grief.  Even so, if the cap fits, I guess even an old curmudgeon like me has to wear it and closure was what my Dad’s funeral was supposed to bring me yesterday.  I’m not sure when this was supposed to happen or whether I was supposed to hear a thunderous cosmic slam as the portals of my Dad’s life closed for a final time, but whatever the case it didn’t happen.

I’m able to believe that for those more peripherally involved,  yesterday was a perfect opportunity to say goodbye to an old friend and I’m happy for that to be the case.  For myself, though, I am still faced with a house full of memories and photos and junk that will have to be cleared once Christmas and New Year are over and done with.  Whether or not I am able to put it all behind me once that is done remains to be seen.  Maybe my closure will come when I have cleared the house and walk away from it for the last time. Or not, as the case may be.

Saying goodbye to my Dad is proving to be an elastic process.  In most respects, I was saying goodbye when I last visited him in hospital on December 1st, just an hour or so before he died, and although the subsequent shenanigans with the Coroner’s Office, the post-mortem and the ensuing tests on tissue samples were irritating, they caused me stress mainly because I was starting to think that I wouldn’t be able to get my Dad buried before Christmas rather than due to any squeamishness about them carving lumps from his internal organs to try to ascertain what actually killed him in the end.

I wrote here last time about him dying of old age; his body just giving up on him after 87 years of reasonably faithful service.  Unsurprisingly, the post-mortem tests revealed a plethora of ailments that could have or did kill him – hypertensive heart disease, ischaemic colitis and so on, but by sheer chance, when I returned to the hospital where Dad died to collect his belongings, I ran into the very Doctor who had refused to sign off on cause of death, triggering the whole post-mortem farrago.  He had the good grace to shake my hand and express  his sympathies, so I quickly reconsidered my initial instinct which was to offer him a sarcastic ‘thank you’ for all the ludicrous delays I was now contending with.  I asked him if he knew of the post-mortem test results and he didn’t, so I told him.

When I mentioned the colitis, he nodded his head rapidly and expressed the view that this was what had probably killed Dad.  Ischaemic colitis is a condition that arises when the heart is not getting enough blood to the bowel and the whole colon essentially starts to disintegrate. This, he said, would also explain the chronic diarrhoea that plagued my Dad for the last 4 months of his life.

Well, gee Doc, glad that your curiosity has been satisfied and don’t worry about holding the whole process up for a week.  Oh well….

In the end, because of all the delays, there was something of an unseemly scramble to get my Dad buried before everyone disappeared into a blizzard of tinsel & turkey.  After problems with the medics and the  bureaucrats, it was time for problems with the parish priest.  This elderly gentleman is almost a stereotype of the  old-school, high church, aloof and slightly batty Church of England vicar.  Local rumours of ‘problems with the Diocese’ seem to indicate that he has been banished to this remote corner of Northamptonshire just to keep him out of the way.  Whether that’s the case or not, he presides over churches in two adjacent villages and nothing happens in those churches without his say-so.  In any case, my Dad had been on the Church Committee with Father W. (he’s very ‘high church’ and  likes to be called ‘Father’) and wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to conduct his funeral.

I have a bit of ‘previous’ with Father W.  He conducted my Mother’s funeral some 7 years ago and outraged me (though not my Dad) by treating it as an opportunity to deliver an extended commercial for the Church of England.  That day, his opening remark was ‘We are gathered here today to celebrate the life of Jesus Christ’ – guaranteed to raise my hackles – and it sort of meandered downhill from there.  I was torn between grief and anger and though I had ‘kept things together’ up until that point, I just broke down in floods of angry tears in the churchyard as my Mum’s coffin was lowered into the ground.  Of course, I understood even through my anger that Father W’s problem was that he didn’t know my Mother at all.    My parents had been commuters who worked in a neighbouring town and only spent weekends in the village. What’s more, they were off caravanning as soon as holiday time came around – and even more so once they retired.  More significantly still, they were not churchgoers,  so Father W. was always going to struggle to  say anything of consequence about my Mum or her life. Even so, all the dreary cant and endless invocations of various parts of the Holy Trinity just left me suffused with a cold rage and the whole thing just felt impersonal in the extreme.

Anyway, once my Mum died, Dad became much more involved with village life and especially with the Church.  His time serving on the Committee meant that he’d got to know Father W. pretty well, so I was more optimistic that we might get some personal reflections in amongst the usual ecclesiastical waffle.

However in order for any kind of service to take place, the funeral directors had to get hold of Father W. and this was easier said than done.  This is a man who is renowned for not answering his phone unless he’s so inclined, doesn’t have an answerphone and doesn’t use a mobile.  It took the funeral directors nearly 36 hours to track him down, but I have to say that when I finally did get to discuss the details of the service with him, he was sweetness and light personified.  Couldn’t have been more helpful and clearly had a warm regard for my Dad, so I approached the day of the funeral with a little less trepidation than had originally been the case.

My Dad organised my Mum’s funeral, so I’ve never been so intimately involved in the process before.  I spent the night beforehand alone at my Dad’s bungalow, partly to get a head start on any urgent administrative issues  that I would need to deal with before Christmas and partly to be on hand in case anyone rang about the funeral.  During Dad’s final illness, I spent quite a lot of time on my own in the house and I have to say I found it a very spooky experience.  Not spooky as in ghosts, just uncomfortable and too solitary for the way I was feeling.  It’s never been a house for which I had any particular fondness – I didn’t grow up there and was living in Copenhagen when my parents moved to the village in 1976.  The house is an anodyne 1970′s bungalow with small rooms, thin walls and woeful decor that my folks somehow never got around to changing.  This was a sign of their use of it more or less as a ‘pied-à-terre’  – somewhere they could just dump the accumulated detritus of their lives whilst they got on with work or with holidaying,  and it really remained that way until my Mum died in 2004. 

By that point,  Dad was too old to make any major changes, though as part of his ‘moving on’ process, he did at least have the hopelessly dilapidated kitchen replaced with one of the usual identikit modern versions.  However, for him, the kitchen was the room in which he felt least comfortable.  That had been my Mother’s domain and until she died,  I would doubt if he cooked more than a handful of meals for himself in nearly 40 years – no wonder he came to rely so completely on microwaveable ‘ready meals’ from the supermarket.

The part of the house in which my Dad felt most comfortable after Mum died wasn’t actually in the house at all, but was the garden.  Except in the dead of winter, Dad would spend hours out there every day and he loved it dearly.  I arrived in fading daylight and looked out on to a bleak and chilly landscape in which some of his gardening tools still lay out on the patio where he had left them.  The bird table and its associated feeders looked empty and forlorn – the garden itself seemed to be in mourning.  A pot on the patio had been blown over by the wind and a random impulse sent me out into the fading winter light to set it upright again.  As I did so, the phone began ringing in the house and before I could get to it, the answerphone kicked in.  I stood, transfixed, as my Dad’s familiar baritone voice echoed along the empty hallway; a proverbial ‘shivers up the spine’ moment for me.  One of my first tasks that evening was to re-record the outgoing message – I just didn’t want to hear that (literally) disembodied voice again.

Overnight storms matched my mood as winds buffeted the house throughout the night.  However, the morning of the funeral dawned cloudless and calm with a watery sun struggling to offer some warmth in the December chill.

The Partner & the Princess were travelling down from Birmingham and other friends were coming from even further afield.  Two of my closest friends flew down to Luton from Glasgow and  were the first to arrive.  Soon the house began to fill up with friends and I was kept busy making cups of tea and coffee and climbing into a suit and tie – never my attire of choice, but there was never any other option here.

Soon enough it was time to take the short stroll down to the village church.  It’s a stocky building with a square tower, built from the honey-coloured local stone and can be seen from pretty much anywhere in the village.  Various people were milling about outside including – extraordinarily – my half-Danish ex-girlfriend with whom I’d been living in Copenhagen when Mum and Dad first moved into their bungalow.  I hadn’t seen her for well over ten years and although she had mailed me to say that she was coming,  it was still slightly astonishing to see her chatting to the Princess as though they’d known one another for years.

There was a surprisingly large ‘walk-up’ attendance from the village – people who my Dad had known from Church and other social events.  I predicted an attendance of about 30 and it was instead nearly 50.  Father W. was dressed for the weather in a voluminous black cape and biretta.  We shook hands as we waited outside for the coffin to be brought into the church, then followed it in.

As the first hymn ended, I was wondering what kind of show we were going to get from Father W. and to begin with the portents were not good.  In the most reasonable and mellifluous of sing-song tones, he worked his way through what seemed like a series of interconnected prayers and homilies that appeared to make some sense to him, though I soon tuned out and waited patiently for him to finish.

In the end,  I decided that his approach was akin to the improvisations of a jazz musician;  someone like John Coltrane would carry round in his head a repertoire of stock riffs and phrases that he would mix up and weave together into apparently seamless solos and it occurred to me that Father W. was essentially doing the same thing.  Here he was with his soft, gentle voice and his  cut-glass accent, spinning together random sections of  comforting doggerel into what he obviously hoped would be  a message of faith and hope and salvation via Mother Church.

Eventually, he finished and gave an offhand introduction to ‘ a member of the family.’  The  Partner got up to read the Eulogy that I had written to deliver myself until I was persuaded otherwise by a number of people.  They were right because I’m fairly sure that I would have been unable to get through it without breaking down.  The Partner did a magnificent job, telling the story of a few select episodes from my Dad’s life; there was a little sadness, a little humour and a lot of pride for a life well lived. 

The Partner sat down – no applause; it’s too traditional a church for that - and we waited.  Father W. had retreated to a seat near the choir-stalls and though we couldn’t see his face, there was the unmistakable feeling around the church that the old bugger had dropped off.  The Princess wasn’t about to wait, so she got up and launched into a Victor Hugo poem, which is essentially an extended metaphor about watching a ship recede from the shoreline towards the horizon, before finally making the point that on another shoreline, someone else is watching it arrive.  Simple, but effective and she read it very clearly in a strong enough voice to guarantee that Father W. would be woken from his nap.

As indeed he was.  Thankfully, at this point, he launched into some warm and seemingly heartfelt comments about my Dad that seemed to reflect the person we had all known.  After that, it was more holy-rolling extemporisation from him, a New Testament reading that passed me by completely and a second hymn, then the organist struck  up ‘Nimrod‘ from Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’, which was the music to which my parents left the church at their wedding back in 1948 and to which my Dad left it now. 

Quite a few of the village folks left at this point, but there were still about 30 at the graveside for the interment.   This is the point at which I lost it at my Mum’s funeral and pretty much the same thing happened here.  What I realised is that I am fine until I see someone else breaking up and then I can’t hold back the tears.  This time it didn’t happen until the coffin was in the grave and people were scattering dried rose petals on top of the coffin.  My friend Jenifer came walking towards me and I could see her face crumpling into tears as she got to me.  Before we knew it, we were hanging on to each other for dear life and the tears were flowing. 

Holcot Church – journey’s end for both of my parents.

Afterwards, everyone convened at ‘The George’, an old coaching inn in the nearby village of Brixworth - well, I say ‘everyone’, but Father W. never showed and there were hardly any of the villagers there either.   They’d been at the church for my Dad but really had no interest in the incoming mob from ‘furren parts’ , so didn’t show up at the pub, which is actually fair enough as far as I’m concerned.  The rest of us – Birmingham friends, Glasgow friends,  the partner’s relatives, my old school friend John who now lives in Shropshire and my ex-flame from Copenhagen – made the best of things on a freezing day and as is often the case, the mood was cheery – and the home-made Leek & Potato Soup was terrific.

As for closure….we went back to the house after the ‘reception’ and Jenifer remarked on how full of memories and photos and a lifetime of accumulated ‘stuff’ the house is.  My Dad’s presence fairly screams from the walls. 

So, no closure yet and not for a good while I suspect.  For now, because I face an immense task in sorting and clearing the house and dealing with Dad’s affairs, I decided that in order to have any kind of Christmas at all, the best thing to do was simply to shut everything non-essential down and lock up the house until the New Year.  As I’ve said here previously, my feeling is that there will be precious little of the accumulated stuff of my parents’  lives that I will take away with me, but who knows what I will find once I start delving?  I plan to clear the house over an extended period – for one thing I haven’t yet decided whether to sell or rent it – and I want to do it in a considered fashion, rather than treat it as an exercise in clearance on an industrial scale.

When I finally walk away, that will be all that I take into the future for the benefit of any grandchildren I may yet have and for their descendants.  At that point, there just might be some closure, but I suspect that there will be none until then.

Moving into the undiscovered country…..

Not much blogging of late as I have been somewhat preoccupied with my ailing 87-year old Father, who finally died a couple of days ago.  It was nearly 7 weeks since he had gone into hospital, so I had plenty of time to prepare myself for what eventually became an inevitability.  Ultimately, what my Dad died from was really just old age; different parts of his body were wearing out at the same time and it was this ‘cocktail’ of  bodily exhaustion that gradually ground down his resistance.  However, this vaguely holistic view of his eventual demise cuts no ice with the bureaucrats who staff our National Health Service, as you will hear in due course….

Before I get into that, I want to digress sufficiently to tell you about my Father’s final day – in fact I should probably start at the beginning of his ‘final act’. 

Briefly, he had languished in Northampton’s busy General Hospital for 5 weeks.  He was admitted having vomited blood, something that was seemingly triggered by an oesophageal tear just above the stomach.  That was fixed quite quickly and  after a week he was moved from a High-Dependency Unit on to a General Surgical Ward and appeared to be getting better.  However, he then suffered a major setback, contracting  a ‘c.difficile’-type bug which created huge amounts of an infectious diarrhoea that triggered my gag reflex every time I went into his room.  Knowing what I do now, I understand that he was actually ill with multiple ailments; swollen kidney due to a blocked urethra, progressive deterioration of his heart, to say nothing of the problems he was suffering throughout his alimentary tract.  What the bug did was to weaken him appreciably, making it very difficult for a man of his advanced age to recover and making it more likely that any kind of innocuous ‘event’ could tip him over the edge. 

According to the Consultant overseeing his case, he then entered a period where he neither improved or deteriorated – in the words of the doctors treating him, he had ‘plateaued’.  The diarrhoea abated but never stopped and in searching for the cause, they duly discovered a raft of other problems, as mentioned.  After 5 weeks, the staff in Northampton clearly felt that they had done all they could for him medically.  He just lay there, day after day, usually lucid, occasionally confused but always weak.  With the pressure on beds in NHS hospitals, they are clearly under greater pressure than ever to produce tangible results.  Wheel ‘em in, get ‘em better and wheel ‘em out would seem to be their modus operandi.  My Dad’s case just didn’t fit their ‘template’ at all, but on the other hand, he was far too ill to go home. 

What they did was to move him ‘sideways’ to Danetre Hospital in Daventry.  It’s a bright, modern facility that was only built in 2006.  Their real job is to rehab stroke victims and those recovering from serious surgery, ready for a return home.  They also have a small ‘wing’ dedicated to palliative care for terminal cancer patients and it was to a room on this wing that my Dad made his last journey.   I must pause long enough to pay tribute to the dedicated men and women in both hospitals who tried in vain to get my Father back to health.  We are hugely lucky to have the NHS in this country, but the reality of my Dad’s situation was that no-one could really work out what to do about or with him. 

The staff at Danetre were great and he certainly got better care there than in Northampton.  He was warm, comfortable and well cared for.  On the other hand, the Palliative Unit at Danetre is specifically designed to be an oasis of calm, whereas the wards at Northampton are much busier and the staff consequently more overworked.  Despite the peaceful surroundings, my Dad didn’t fit Danetre’s ‘template’ either and one of the doctors there told me that they would review his case in a couple of weeks and that if there was no significant improvement, he would have to be ‘placed’ in a nursing home.  I was loath to discuss this with him as I knew such a move would crush what was left of his spirit.

As mentioned in a previous piece, I was advised by the hospital to stay away from Danetre for most of the first week my Dad was in there as I was suffering from a heavy cold, which, had he picked it up, would in all probability have rapidly morphed into pneumonia or something far more serious.  Having been ‘thus ‘quarantined’ for the best part of a week, I could immediately see, when I did get back to visiting,  that he was now ’sinking’ and that he didn’t have much time left.

And so to his final day.  I got a phone call from the hospital in the late morning to say that his condition had deteriorated.  They would give me no ‘hard information’ over the phone (as it transpired, they didn’t really have any) but did at least concede that this latest downturn was potentially life-threatening.

Fortuitously, the Princess was off work that day and equally fortuitously, the Partner managed to find a hole in her busy schedule, so we travelled to Danetre ‘en famille’, arriving in mid-afternoon.  When we got up to the Inpatients Unit, the nurse met us and told us that his condition had improved since the morning and that he had both drunk and eaten a little and was quite lucid.  When we went in, he was dozing but soon woke up and became as ‘engaged’ as I had seen him since his early days in Northampton General.

He seemed keen to check on a few tasks that he had asked me to carry out some weeks beforehand.  He wanted to know about the state of his house.  He wanted to tell the Partner that he wanted her to have his car.  We assured him that everything was OK and that he shouldn’t worry.  Looking back it now feels like he was checking off items on a final list.  Looking back it seems like we were giving him permission to go.

The Princess even managed to persuade him to eat some mashed-up peaches and whilst she was feeding them to him, I slipped out to question the nurse about what had happened to him that was serious enough for her to call me.  She told me (a sign of things to come) that she wasn’t sure, but that they thought it might have been ‘some kind of cardiac incident’.  There would be a review in the morning she told me, after which someone would call me to let me know their thoughts.

We left shortly afterwards and stood in the corridor outside the room chatting with one of the staff.  I looked back in and saw my Dad lying there peacefully with his eyes closed and still clutching the bottle of  spring water I had left him with.  Quite on impulse, I walked back into the room, kissed him on the forehead and told him I loved him, then left.  At the time, I couldn’t have told you why I did it, but it seemed absolutely necessary to me then and I am so glad I trusted my instincts.

It had been a really positive visit and though I had no expectations of a Lazarus-type recovery, I was glad that we had all been there to catch him on what had seemed to be a good day. We drove home along the A45 through Coventry’s rush-hour traffic and finally got back  here at about 6:20.   At 6:30, the phone rang and the same nurse I’d spoken to about an hour beforehand told me that Dad had died about ten minutes earlier.  My main sensation was astonishment that he had been chatting away to us  quite animatedly only just over an hour previously and now he was gone for good.  At that moment, my main feelings were relief that his travails were over and that he died with dignity in a caring environment where he felt comfortable with the staff and the place, rather than in some anonymous ‘Care Home’ where he knew no-one and could not expect the same degree of professionalism or competence from those looking after him.

In the light of what has happened since, the only ominous note was that the nurse could offer no insights about what it was that had finally killed him.

I rang the Funeral Directors that same evening and set the wheels rolling for the formalities.  Danetre has no facility to store bodies so Dad was taken to an undertaker in the town and I was told that he would be collected and brought back to Northampton the following day.

The following morning (Friday), I  rang the Registrar’s Office and booked an appointment to register the death on the following Monday as they couldn’t find me an appointment slot that day.   I spoke to a woman in my Dad’s village with whom he served on the  Church committee who promised to contact the local Rector with a view to officiating at my Dad’s funeral.  I rang his few surviving friends and broke the news to them.  I spoke with several of my own friends as well, who were quick to offer condolences and help.  The most difficult call was to Dad’s sister who lives in the north-east of Scotland and with whom he had a major falling-out last year.  They were never reconciled and she was devastated by the news.  Still, as I pointed out to her, he was a churchgoer and so is she, so if what they profess to believe in is true, she would have a chance to patch things up with him in the Great Hereafter.  Don’t think she was much consoled by my crude amateur metaphysics, somehow.  Still, as I told her, they were both a couple of stubborn old curmudgeons and therefore equally to blame.

By mid-afternoon, things were coming together nicely.    I had arranged to drop into Danetre, en route to Northampton,  to collect Dad’s belongings and the Death Certificate, the Rector – an elderly, Runyonesque, old school  Church of England  windbag (to be quite honest) - was on board, Dad’s body had been retrieved from Daventry and a day and time had been tentatively set for the funeral.  Sorting this out, followed by Dad’s ‘affairs’ and then, finally, his house is going to be a mammoth task and there’s only me to do it, but I was feeling quite pleased about how smoothly this first bit had gone.  I should have known better.

About 3 pm, the phone went and it was one of the doctors who had been treating Dad at Danetre.  I told him that I had spoken with the Ward Clerk earlier to arrange to pick up my Dad’s personal effects and the Death Certificate, at which point he informed me that there would be no such Certificate for me to collect.  This was, he informed me, because he was not in a position to definitively identify the cause of my Dad’s death, which, under English law, automatically triggers a post-mortem, to be carried out, in this case, by doctors acting under the direction of the Office of the Coroner for Northamptonshire.

In immediate terms, this was a major irritation as any and all funeral arrangements have now had to be put on hold and I am currently in a limbo from which only the Coroner can release me.  Until the body is released back to the Funeral Directors and a Death Certificate issued, I am unable to do anything at all and I have no legal right to challenge this decision.  The various Coroners around the country are apparently answerable only to the Queen. 

The man responsible for this wretched state of affairs is, of course, not the doctor at Danetre, but the late Harold Shipman who faked numerous death certificates he issued whilst practising as a G.P. in Todmorden and Hyde.  The full extent of Shipman’s killing spree has never been fully revealed, but it is thought that he was probably responsible for the murder of around 250 people between 1971 and 1998.  Since the Shipman case, the rules governing doctors issuing death certificates have been tightened up considerably and to set down ‘Old Age’ as a cause of death is no longer a viable option.

And so, my Dad, who spent 7 weeks in hospital being poked, prodded and pummelled, scanned, screened and scraped is now set to be sliced and diced in order to find out probably not very much at all.  I  know that some people would find it traumatic to think of their father’s body being treated in such a fashion, but I will confess to feeling fairly unsentimental about the empty shell that remains after my Dad’s essential spirit had departed.  Even so, I think it only goes to show something that we all know full well; which is that the law is an ass at times and that sometimes a bit of common sense has to prevail.  I have not quite abandoned all hope that this will be the case with my Dad and that over the weekend the Northamptonshire Coroner (in her infinite wisdom) will have an attack of the aforementioned common sense. 

Dad was 87 years old  after all and it’s not exactly rocket science to know that he was weak and suffering from a range of quite serious ailments (for a man of his age and medical history).  His poor body was just worn out and I fail to see that the cause of medical science is going to be much advanced by this farcical piece of posthumous butchery.  Aside from anything else, it places an unreasonable delay on the process by which  myself, my family and my Dad’s friends have  the opportunity to say a final goodbye to the old fella and achieve a little peace ourselves.  No prizes for guessing who I’ll be calling first thing on Monday, though as is the case with bureaucrats all over the world, I doubt that the troubles of a handful of ordinary people will perturb their pressing need to get their paperwork in order.

Catching up with United…….

An enforced day of rest today; I have quite a heavy cold, so visiting my Dad in his new ‘pied-à-terre’ in Daventry (see preceding piece) is out of the question; his defences are low and I am currently too infectious.

As a consequence, I was able to catch up on United’s current crop of young players in this morning’s U-18 Academy League game against West Bromwich Albion, then shoot off to Asda to get some shopping in before returning in good time to watch the first team who were featured in the teatime kick off at Swansea.

Last year I was able to follow the development of the U-18′s from a collection of gawky misfits to cultured FA Youth Cup winners, but this season it’s been more difficult to keep in touch with things.  In truth, the U-18′s looked a ragged bunch at the start of the season, losing successive games to Portsmouth and Southampton.  I suppose we had been spoiled by last year’s ‘bumper crop’, most of whom have now ‘stepped  up’ to the Reserves and in some cases to Carling Cup action with the first team.

I suppose I should really start with the Reserves, as they played Wigan at Altrincham on Thursday night.  In the end, they got a comfortable 4-1 win against a young Wigan team, thanks to goals from Ravel Morrison (2), Zekky Fryers and Davide Petrucci.  Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Wigan’s team was that one of their subs was Johan Cruyff’s grandson.  Where do the years go?

All of the best players from last year’s FA Youth Cup team seem to be progressing satisfactorily in their first full season in the Reserves.  Goalkeeper Sam Johnstone and midfielder Ryan Tunnicliffe are both out on loan, but most of the rest are still there; Will Keane, Ravel Morrison and Paul Pogba are probably the obvious ‘stars’, but players like Jesse Lingard and Michael Keane are now developing nicely as well.  The real problems are likely to start at the end of this season when the fact that they’ve been handed a first-team squad number will no longer be enough to satisfy them.

Ravel Morrison; 2 goals against Wigan for the Reserves

I feel particularly sorry for Will Keane, who has 7 strikers (Rooney, Hernandez, Diouf, Owen, Welbeck, Berbatov and Macheda) standing between him and a first-team slot.  Keane is a genuinely gifted striker with a great eye for goal and an uncanny ability to create time and space for himself in even the most crowded of penalty areas.  Hopefully Fergie knows what a gem he has on his hands here and will give him his chance. 

Paul Pogba is (apparently) less content to await the manager’s pleasure and has reputedly refused to sign a new contract until he gets some guarantees about his future at the club – and personally, I think he’s right to do so - Pogba is 18 , an age at which Ryan Giggs was pretty much a first team regular. If I were Ferguson, I would have him on the bench all the time now.  He’s clearly ready for the next challenge and is surely destined to become a great midfielder wherever he ends up.  The first and most pressing task is  to ensure that his future lies with United.  Midfield is undoubtedly the weakest area of the first team right now and they could surely profit from having someone of Pogba’s precocious talents available on a regular basis.  Whatever they have to offer him to secure his services for another 5 years or whatever will almost certainly turn out to be money well spent.

We may learn more when United take on Crystal Palace in the next round of the Carling Cup, the week after next.  At least half of the team who cruised past Wigan will be hoping or expecting to get the call – and rightly so.

It was a bright, cold but sunny morning at Carrington as United took on West Bromwich Albion in the U-18 Academy League.  It turned out to be an exciting game with the outcome in doubt until the very end.  The Junior Baggies look like an exciting crop, whilst United’s youngsters, though improving, are still a work in progress.  The team’s outstanding players this year have probably been skipper Luke McCulloch (apologies for calling him ‘Sean’ in a previous piece) who is a calm and powerful presence at centre-back, left- or centre-back Tyler Blackett, who played in the Youth Cup run last year and wingers/strikers Tom Lawrence and Jack Barmby (son of former Spurs striker, Nick Barmby).  Lawrence was missing this morning, but the other three all played. 

United’s opening goal after twelve minutes came due to a piece of quick thinking by Barmby.  Fouled in the centre circle as the Baggies back line pushed up, he got up quickly and played an instant free-kick into the path of onrushing Norwegian midfielder Mats Daehli, who took it on and beat the ‘keeper from the edge of the area with a composed finish into the bottom corner.  Albion responded strongly and striker Alex Jones had a goal disallowed for offside before winning a penalty which he himself converted just 3 minutes after Daehli’s goal.

The rest of the game was played at a furious pace and United got most of whatever Lady Luck was dishing out today.  West Brom had another goal disallowed before half -time and in the second half had a good shout for another penalty dismissed by the referee, who sent off Albion’s Jamie Edge for dissent around that incident – red cards are something of a rarity at this level.   Later on, United keeper Liam Jacob fumbled a cross on to the post and then re-gathered the ball, with the Baggies players protesting vociferously (but unsuccessfully)  that the ball had crossed the line. 

In the end, the game was settled by a second goal from Daehli.  Blackett got away down the left and slung over a long cross to the back post where the unmarked Norwegian arrived in time to carefully volley home off the underside of the crossbar.  Had he just blasted the ball, it would probably have come down in an adjoining postcode.  And that was that, though you had to feel sorry for the Baggies youngsters, whose performance  definitely merited a point.

Mats Daehli; 2 goals for the U-18′s against WBA

And so to the first team who had what looked like an awkward fixture against Premiership newbies Swansea City,  currently sitting comfortably in mid-table.  Fergie named a strong team, with Carrick and Giggs in central midfield and Park and Nani on the flanks.  United scored early; after 11 minutes, Giggs intercepted a poor clearance and drove into the area before squaring the ball into the path of Hernandez, who expertly steered the ball into the net despite being slightly off-balance as he struck it.

And to be honest, that was pretty much it.  United seem to have adopted the old Arsenal tactic of 1-0 being enough and they never really looked like adding to that early goal until late on, when first, Phil Jones hit the post with a cross-shot and then Nani curled a shot just wide.  Swansea pressed hard in the second half, but in truth, ex-Chelsea starlet Scott Sinclair had their best chance when he missed an open goal in the first half and that was as good as it got for them.

Hernandez scores the only goal against Swansea

But whatever happened to the Great Entertainers who swaggered through the early weeks of the season, swatting Arsenal aside 8-2 and looking as though they were going to take the Premiership by storm?  It seems as though Fergie’s response to the Derby Day hammering has been to revert to a kind of crabby pragmatism which might win games but is deathly to watch.  Of course, with City winning at home earlier, anything but a win would have resulted in a sharp decline in the noise from the Noisy Neighbours as they accelerate away into the distance.  This was like a performance from a difficult away European tie.  Effective, perhaps,  but entertaining ? Only if you find toothache entertaining…