Wednesday, February 22, 2006



the offside rule

wouldn’t it be interesting if, in order to play for a team such as Liverpool, say, or Chelsea, the rules were (indulge me – I inhabit a different planet from this) that you had to have been born and brought up either in the city or district from which the team took its name?
yesterday’s match between Arsenal and Real Madrid had only two Englishmen in it, let alone natives of either Madrid or Highbury, and they were both playing for the Spanish team. Hola.

Sunday, February 19, 2006



rhinotoon

fan-mail is always (well mostly) fun
fan-pics are better:



thanx max!

Tuesday, February 07, 2006



all's well

á propos nothing at all, but in common with all my fellow humans, I have periods when I feel I'm the utter shiznick at everything I do, then I have periods when I think I'm the most pathetic failure that ever walked god's green earth, and then I have in-between periods when I just don't have any opinion on the matter - the green periods, the periods of mellow apathasia - when none of that matters, when I'm just getting on with it, or rather it's being gotten on with, regardless of me and my silly little concerns, and it's all just taking its course.

the strutting periods are fun - the cock-a-doodle-do times when I feel that I'm as sharp as all hell and I just can't do anything wrong - except that it's usually woefully delusional and the thing I think I'm succeeding at will prove, in the merciless light of next week, as vapid and flabby as yesterday's spaghetti ; the woe-is-me-wotta-sorry-thing-am-I periods are as depressingly familiar as February but tolerable, as February is tolerable, because Spring is just around the corner; but I think it's those green periods that are probably the most productive, in that they're the least self-conscious times, and consequently the times when I'm liberated from all those concerns about how I'm doing, because I'm just doing.

it would be nice to be able to engineer those times - alas, the habit of self-judgement is as entrenched as a cruddy old tattoo - and it's in their nature that they just happen, as unsusceptible to arrangement as snow at Christmas, but I can, at least, acknowledge them as reassuring flash-glimpses, as if from the window of a train into the window of a passing house, of how, in some parallel universe, all's well, despite how it might sometimes seem, that all is proceeding as it should, and that I am - that we all are - fulfilling our roles, willy-nilly, whatever they might turn out to have been, with due regard to the contingent and necessary protocols.