An Unexpected Peril Of Collecting

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Since we started living in rented accommodation I haven't been discussing my collections all that much. Given that my main ones, football shirts and Penguin paperbacks are currently in storage. One day we will discover a house that we both like and doesn't reveal itself to be a money pit of faults thankfully before we put pen to paper. But until that comes collecting is on the back burner for the foreseeable future.

However yesterday, in of all places Penarth Tesco, the world of collecting came back along with an unexpected peril.

A word of background first. Companies sell small cheap plastic figure in a particular series, such as footballers for example, in a packet, This small packet will tell you everything you need to know about the figure concerned...expect what the figure within actually is. So there is a good chance you will buy one you have already.

Back then to the action. There was I walking along the aisles of Penarth Tesco when on walking past their small toy section when I noticed a middle aged woman picking up such a packet and starting to feel it.

She saw me and clearly embarrassed explained that this particular set was of Harry Potter characters. Her sons collected it and so the lady admitted she was hooked herself. She had figured that to stop continually buying duplicates she would feel the packet thus would lessening the risk.

From a collecting standpoint it was actually genius. After all unlike say footballers Harry Potter characters presumably had very different shapes to them so it seemed a sensible thing to do.

From all other standpoints however watching a middle aged woman feeling toy packets makes you question her sanity.

And one other thought occurred to me. If her intention was to collect these things for monetary value as well as personal pleasure then presumably she would need two packets per figure. As presumably their value would reduce once they were open.

Until the next time.

No Football On This Blog For A While, Time To Be Very Sully

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

I am conscious that it's been a while since football has made an appearance in this blog. There's a number of reasons for that, working most Saturdays, house hunting and the lack where we live at the moment of a decent internet signal on the TV for BT Sport have all conspired to reduce my footy watching for a while.

However where I live now I'm conscious of a number of football teams that play relatively nearby. Of those that I'm aware of there's Barry Town United AFC, Dinas Powys FC, Ely Rangers FC and Cardiff City. Neither have I forgotten Newport County AFC, Penybont FC and the team I've decided to follow as much as possible Ton Pentre FC. There seemed to be more opportunities to spectate now.

For this Wednesday however in the early evening for a six fifteen kick off I was off to see the nearest team to where we're renting at the moment, Sully Sports FC. Part of the South Wales Alliance Premier League, as I'm sure you knew already. The ground is a tolerable walking distance from where we live, but the journey the journey is awkward so I drove there.

So then part of the Vale of Glamorgan, no hint of my previous seventeen years in the Bridgend area, if it wasn't for their opponents, Pencoed Athletic FC, and I think you can guess where they're from.

To reach the ground you go through the car park, down the path where it's advised that children are welcome but not dogs (fine by me). Everything I should also mention was free.

You then approach the stand but cannot help looking at the pitch first. Or rather beyond it.

The Sea,The Sea

I mentioned to a few people in conversation that this must be the only ground in Britain where the ball boys are also lifeguards. They don't get the joke.

It's then I'm conscious that I've underdressed. The skies were blue when I'd left but now are black. I'm wearing a short sleeve shirt. It's cold, windy and I'm an idiot.

Anyway to the stand....past the container.




At the stand found I had company.

I'd no idea whatsoever

Someone on Twitter told me that it was a Horcrux. Google tells me that it comes from Harry Potter which regular readers will know I've never read out of principle (It's for kids! I'm fifty three). So I'm still none the wiser.

I brought What If? by Randall Munroe to read during the break. But as you will see as I go on I didn't have time to look it. So all I'll claim is to be the first person to have brought a copy of a Randall Monroe book to a Welsh football game. No I'll go further I'll claim to be the first person to have brought a science book to a Welsh football game.

History In The Making

So there was I, a man in a short sleeved shirt in unshort sleeved shirt weather. Only now do I realise how I looked like the weird oddball that evening.

About to Start

So the match, along with my ninety minutes plus of double pneumonia began.

It wasn't long before a man I'd assumed to be the Pencoed Athletic manager was shouting at a player for "quicker communication". He being blessed with never having the need to use a microphone to be heard. Indeed the entire three man management team seemed very emotional. Constantly waving their hands to show where the ball should've gone. Except that is when the instruction was to "open this way" when oddly enough the hand gestures were conspicuous by their absence.

The Sully management team consisted of a small man and his bodyguard type assistant who was the one mainly shouting out orders. Given that he'd the look of a man who would have been the maniac cop in any TV series interrogation of the bad guy I'm sure the Sully team carried out the orders as well as possible.

The Management....Sully are in Red

With about ten minutes of the first half to go. The Sully number ten had noticed that the Pencoed goalkeeper was out of his line and lobbed a ball over him. It was dramatic. It was a goal. It was one nil Sully.

A Few Stills From The Game....Yes I was That Close

Grey clouds Up There

More Goalmouth Action

And it stayed like that until five minutes before half time. Where if I understood it right from the Pencoed fans by me Ash crossed and Dunc connected to score. Could have been the other way round. Forgot that. And as to how, a shot or a header .....no idea....the Pencoed Management team were in the way.

One all is how it stayed at the end of the first half. It all seemed very fair to me. Sully seemed like the team with the skill but Pencoed were the more physical. It made predicting the outcome difficult.

For me though at that moment it didn't matter. I was cold I was hungry I wanted chips.

Now to explain the place to get the chips was a stall by the car park. From there the only view of the match was what was now the Sully goal. I'd expected the break to be fifteen minutes so imagine my shock as the lady was frying the chips when I saw the radioactive orange sight of the Sully goalkeeper. The second half was starting without me.

So there I was. Walking back to the pitch. Chips in hand.

Nice Chips At That

Passing through instruments of sporting torture.



And was just ready to see the ball go into the Sully net. Two-One Pencoed.

From that moment there was a clear change in Pencoed. Winning seemed to make them more relaxed. They were now matching Sully in the skill department. There was I could recall a piece of skill that produced a round of applause from the Pencoed management.

They were happy.

Behind the Sully Goal and The Man In Radioactive Orange

View from seaside of the pitch

The Sully side of the pitch....where most of the second half action was

Final Few Minutes 

With about ten minutes to go Pencoed scored a third. One on one with the radioactive goalie the player elegantly slotted the ball passed him. The best goal of the game.

Party time amongst the Pencoed posse began in earnest. One of the Pencoed management fell over. No one cared. Shots hit the bar. They knew they had won and were playing with the happy abandon of the school playground.

Sully however were deflated and you could see it. Their management hardly said anything after the third goal. They knew it was pointless.

Three one Pencoed was how the match finished. They deserved their victory.

So thankyou Sully Sports FC and Pencoed Athletic FC. For the neutral like me it was an enjoyable game to watch.

I'll just make sure next time I'm in Sully I dress a whole lot better.

Until the next time.

A Nothing Day. Involving A Belated Sausage and Chips, A Harry Potter Mystery And My Women's Football Dilemma

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

It's Tuesday evening I have a plan for yesterday. Wasn't going to be at work so suggested waking my daughter up early and we'd go out and visit somewhere.

"No" says my daughter. Who as a teenager craves the late nights and uninterrupted sleep that the summer holidays provides. And as a teenager no longer follows the rulings of Dad as sacred pronouncements on high but as the start of a debate.

"No" says my wife. For reasons I don't understand.

So I'm outvoted. Also I'm out of ideas as what to what to do when she does decide to wake up. The record so far for this summer holiday has been 11:30.

Come the early morning I wait. Nothing I can do. So watch a bit of TV. Can't do any housework as don't want to disturb her. That's my excuse anyway.

The morning moves to 10am. It's late enough. Going to have a bath. The podcast listened to whilst having a soak is The Football Ramble which I've only just discovered. Tend to go through a podcast from the very beginning. So if I tell you that Roy Hodgson is Fulham manager as they embark on a Europa League campaign and one of the presenters suggests he should be England manager tells you how old it is and how things have changed now.

It's 10:30. Daughter has at last emerged from slumber and asks what's for breakfast. Respond by saying that when I'm out of the bath will call an ambulance as obviously she's unable to walk downstairs and pour milk onto cereal. A teenage laugh, as if to say dad's trying to be funny. But the hint is taken and she goes downstairs.

The phone rings. Daughter answers it. I can tell from the conversation that it's my wife.

"Dad" She asks "What's for lunch?"

Lunch? She's only just started having breakfast and she's talking about lunch?

However I've an answer.

"Sausage and chips".

Last week I'd refused to get her sausage and chips from the chippy because I'd understood that she couldn't have chips because of her newly installed braces. Apparently though this was just for the first few weeks. I'd misunderstood. This was to make things up.

This is met with approval. Still got it.

As the day goes on it appears that she has planned this day by finishing off watching the Harry Potter movies. This disappointed her mother who wanted to watch it with her but I was happy enough she was doing it. After all I wasn't interested. However a mini disaster occurred. One of the discs turned out not to be Harry Potter but the Tom Hanks animated film The Polar Express. A movie seen before when she was younger and I had to feign interest. For the record, though obviously I'm not it's target audience, it was dull.

So where was this missing film? The DVDs hadn't been moved until fairly recently when this Potter viewathon started. It wasn't clear what had happened. I suggested it had disappeared into thin air....like magic. That didn't go down well.

Daughter just ignored the existence of the missing movie and proceeded to watch the rest. So every time I came into the living room during the afternoon I saw hairy wizards.big and hairy wizards,bald wizards,normal looking wizards, child wizards, female wizards, matriarch wizards and Harry Potter and the other two (told you I wasn't interested) turning bigger and older. Was happy enough. That's six less DVDs to fall asleep in front of the TV to.

No idea what to do today (Thursday) but had an idea for Friday evening.Wales women's B team have a friendly against the Republic of Ireland at Rodney Parade in Newport. Had fancied the idea of going with daughter. She however is not interested ("It's Wales.It's women playing" Neither worked.) as she's hoping to arrange something with her friends.

I quite fancy going myself (I'm working Saturday) but the thing that's putting me off is that if people see me, lone man watching a female  football game, they will put two and two together and make x rated. Daughter would have shielded me from that. I know I could tell them the truth and say I'm just like watching football including the women's game. But suspect no one will believe me.

Of course female fans have had this problem as well with regard to male games and for longer. But with the rise of the women's football I reckon I'm not the only man bothered by this. Real equality you might think.

Until the next time

In Which I Realise I'm A Slight Hypocrite

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

It started so simply. There was a news report about the sales of the script of the new Harry Potter play by J K Rowling. I tweeted my incomprehension at how there can be sales of the play before it has actually been performed.

Some people agreed with me, others didn't. But then it all went a little wider. I tweeted that I didn't understand why people bought books containing scripts for plays in the first place for their own pleasure. Essentially what I was thinking was that reading a script makes you miss the nuances of the people involved. You don't get a sense of production,direction and of course acting through reading a play on it's own. However classic the text.

And again. the issue is those people who buy these scripts for their own pleasure, I mistakenly said that this never happens, which is of course wrong. Still the proportion of people who would buy a script when there is the option of a novel, or a biography must be extremely small.Harry Potter being of course an exception by being Harry Potter. As I see it the vast majority of people who buy scripts are either people in the theatre whether amateur or professional or students studying for exams for which they will hate the playwright for ever after should he/she fail.

The responses to that view were equally mixed and basically the matter rested by the good old throwback of agreeing to disagree. Each held to their own positions I of course having the correct one and those who disagreed with me being odd.

But later on that day (and you know what's coming next) I was looking at my bookshelves when suddenly it dawned on me.

I too had books containing scripts of plays

They are, Electra by Sophocles (which I've read and was bored by), a number by that well known Norwegian funny man Ibsen and one containing three plays by J B Priestley (which, if you read this blog regularly you might remember, was bought at a local village fete straight after I'd gone to the local tip so I was smelling of grass and wearing ripped jeans).

One of the "offending" books

The thing that links why I bought these books is that they of course all Penguin paperbacks. Either pre ISBN vintage or those with coloured spines both of which I collect. That is what attracted me to buying them. The power of collecting took over my natural antipathy,

Will I read those books I haven't yet read? Yes I will. Will I buy and read more of these books if they're vintage Penguins? Yes I will. Will I buy these type of books otherwise? Definitely not.

So that's what I am ladies and gentlemen a hypocrite. Albeit a slight one.

Until the next time.

In Which I've A Delayed Father's Day,Claim History With A Poetry Book,Dismiss Civilization,The Best Marian Keyes Book Cover Ever Plus Harry Potter And Football

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

So it's 7am in the morning and I'm already downstairs watching a recording of Friday's baseball match between the Seattle Mariners and the team I support the Red Sox. Wasn't happy because they were losing 7-2. I was also bothered by the high level of twittering this early in the day. Couldn't those birds just fly off and be nosey somewhere else?

Then I hear familiar but unusual footsteps for this time of the day on a weekend walk down the stairs. It was my daughter.

"Daaad" she asked. In that tone I know too well meaning that she wants something. "Can I have the Ipad?"

The night before (actually the morning 1am) I'd caught her using her Ipad in be and confiscated it. Whilst not regretting giving it to her for Christmas a few years back (let's face facts other kids have it so it would damage her to be without one) there are moments when I wonder whether we should send her to hospital to have it surgically removed from her hands.

"No" I reply. To which she turned on her heels and walked back upstairs.

There was I then waiting for my daughter to come down with Father's Day gifts. No returning sounds were forthcoming. Five,ten then fifteen minutes passed. So up the stairs I went.

My daughter had gone back to sleep.

Eventually when properly awake two hours later she did come down bearing gifts. Everything then was alright with the world....for a while anyway.

Being Father's Day I had control of lunch. Decided on a takeaway from a relatively new American style Bar and Grill place near where we live purely on the grounds that we'd never tried it before.

So once I'd gone there. Given and paid for the order. sat and waited for it to be ready. Whilst waiting read the Thirties poetry anthology to pass the time. Therefore I claim to be the first person to read a book of poetry in an American Style Bar and Grill. My place in history is now assured.

Evidence

Finished Civilisation by Clive Bell. Well that was a waste of time. Just a load of waffle to prove to me that he didn't know the difference between Civilisation and Civilised. And when you find some races called "barbaric" and "savages" you get the idea of the author's frame of mind.

Still that means that a new book is needed and it's this.

Number 24 - Marian Keyes - The Other Side Of The Story

An explanation first. To celebrate Penguin's 70th anniversary they brought out a series of modern books but in the style of the original 1935 covers. Hence that is why this book is covered the way it is.

I have a theory, born out of no research whatsoever,that one of the reasons why some female writers of "general" novels don't seem to have a large male readership is because of their book covers. Marian Keyes is a good example of this.

Many years ago I was on holiday in Italy. I'd finished reading the books I brought with me and was looking for another English book to read (shamefully my Italian exists but with the vocabulary of a stumbling two year old). So going into this shop and noticing the group of used paperbacks on offer the only one that was in English was Marian Keyes' novel Sushi For Beginners.

Now if I was in Wales would avoided this book like a car crash. If I had the temerity to have picked it up subconsciously then the swirly lettering, the cartoon figures, the bright colours, the blurb would have been screaming at me.

"What are you doing looking at this? This is not for you. You're a man. Go back to your beer and football". 

I know that you can't judge a book by its cover. But when you pick a book up you have a short timespan to decide whether to buy it or not. The cover suggested another modern Pride and Prejudice chick lit tome, that it was not for me. But, in Italy at that time it was the only one available. So, reluctantly I bought it.

Well I was blown away by how good it was. Funny, witty and indeed deep it was the most surprising thing I'd read that year. The main characters were female. but the men were not either quasi Mr Darcys or evil knuckle scraping types whose sole job in life was to do down women. These were real people. The icing on the cake was that the author had the same contemptuous view of Barney the Dinosaur.

Marion Keyes is a good writer and it was only through circumstance that I'd realised it.

The weather was pouring most of  day so my wife and daughter suggested we watch the first Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone. Without any afternoon football to protect me I reluctantly said yes.

I have studiously avoided the Harry Potter novels in my life. agreeing with the late comedienne Linda Smith that adults who read children's books for their own pleasure are odd and in some cases creepy. I feel as well that when adults do this they're invading into territory they should avoid. Children should have things they call their own.

But here we are, a wet weekend in Wales and I'm watching the movie. I feel as if arriving late for a party not wanting to attend in the first place. What did I think of it? Absolutely nothing, perfectly neutral. But, I am a fifty two year old man, these books were not designed for me and please believe when I say I won't be dressing up in a wizard's costume anytime soon.

And so to the football. Two matches on in exactly the same time. France/Switzerland and the match no UKIP supporter will see Romania/Albania. I watch each match 15 mins at a time. It seemed to work fine. Didn't miss the only goal of the two games from Albania. Nor did I miss the rippable quality of the Swiss football shirt. Glad I don't have that in my collection.

One final thing. The Swiss goalkeeper was dressed in a colour best described as a luminous yellowy green. I assumed he was cycling back to their base after the game.

Anyway.

Until the next time.