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Loss and the Relegation Season

The Carabao cup is not important. But I’m parking my car at the hospital and I cheer as news comes through on Radio 5 that Matt Philips has put Albion 2-0 up. My mom is in a side room on the cancer ward. The Carabao cup doesn’t matter. Accrington Stanley in the second round of the Carabao cup really doesn’t matter. But I’m still busy checking my phone for updates until full-time.

Mom’s happy when I tell her. Three games into the season and we’ve won all three. Haven’t conceded a goal in the league. Mom knows that this is not normal. She’s happy that things are going so well.

Sunday evening and mom’s been moved to the hospice. There’s another patient in her bay, so I sleep on a sofa in a room next door prepared for visitors. On Match of the Day Two I see Albion drop their first points of the season. The now common phrase “Hegazi error” enters my vocabulary. It’s not important, but the Stoke equaliser still hurts.

Mom dies on Tuesday morning. We’re all there. Nothing else matters. Albion won’t win again until January.

Next up are Brighton, West Ham, Man City, and Arsenal : we lose, then draw, then lose, then lose. Then two more draws, nothing going our way. Early leads squandered as we Pulis up behind the ball inviting the comeback. We lose to Southampton and then Man City. Huddersfield next. For the final half hour they only have 10 men. We play as if we have 9. We lose.

When you lose someone you love, everything’s a sign. But mom wouldn’t want this. I don’t understand the signs.

Artist Tai-Shan Schierenberg is in residency at the Hawthorns for a season painting portraits. When Chelsea visit he still hasn’t finished painting the manager. A spineless 4-0 defeat and Pulis is sacked. There must be a joke I can make here about watching paint dry.

Hysteria breaks out among Pundits. Madness to let Pulis go. He’s the man to keep up up. You’re guaranteed 40 points a season. We’ve only picked up 2 since the funeral, though.

I never wanted Pulis. Maybe this is the sign. We all needed him to go.

We wake up to a false dawn. Gary Megson, Sam Field, and a lead at Wembley that we can’t quite hold onto. And then the club appoints Alan Pardew as first team coach. It’s suicide. Unlike suicide, though, it’s not painless. The misery resumes.

It’s better than under Pulis, though, no matter what anyone tells you. We try to win games and manage it three times in three weeks as we turn the page on 2017, the year we lost mom, and 2018 promises us better.

I’m ranting on the 27th of January that football is dead. VAR is here, and of course it’s being used to make sure that decisions go the way of the bigger club. In defiance we trounce Liverpool at Anfield. Mom must be smiling down. Glorious.

But. City again. Southampton again, twice. In between, Pardew takes the squad to Barcelona for some warm-weather training and bonding. Assumed we’d lose to Liverpool and would have a free weekend ahead. So the training is curtailed but the ‘bonding’ isn’t. At the end of a long night of drinking, Gareth Barry, who made his debut against Accrington Stanley back in August and next won a game in January, goes on a taxi ride to McDonalds with Jake Livermore, Boaz Myhill and Johnny Evans. Then they steal the taxi and drive it back to the hotel. We’re like a Knorr product made of nitrous oxide – a laughing stock. Pardew does nothing. The night before, he’d somehow lost his wallet and phone on a night out. Presumably lost his bottle with them.

So, disarray. Another defeat to Chelsea, then Pardew’s told he has two games to save his job. Another defeat to Huddersfield makes it five in a row. We lose 1-0 away at Watford but expectations are now so low that it’s good enough for Pardew to continue. We score first against Leicester and Bournemouth but concede four and two. Burnley deliver our 9th successive defeat; what turns out to be the winner is scored by Chris Wood, the promising youngster we let go back in the days when we were expecting to stay in the Premier League forever. Now there’s a sign.

It’s over. And out goes Pardew. It doesn’t matter.

Stalwart, leader, legend Darren Moore picks up the poisoned chalice for the last six games but everyone knows we’re already down. The run of defeats ends, but we let another lead slip at home to relegation rivals Swansea. Meanwhile, Wolverhampton Wanderers are getting promoted as an entirely new kind of football club designed to bypass rules about third party ownership and financial fair play. Villa are heading for the playoffs captained by John Terry. The bad guys are winning just as Darren Moore, with the purest soul in football, is getting nailed to the cross. And I really miss my mom.

Then everything changes. It’s the 15th of April. We hold out against United at Old Trafford for 70 minutes and then Jay Rodriguez scores. Our fourth league win of the season. Six days later we come from 2-0 down to snatch a point against an otherwise irresistible Liverpool. Then it’s Newcastle away and a Matt Philips winner. It all matters again. Mathematically, we’re not down yet, and results keep conspiring to keep us alive. We all know it’s the hope that kills you, but collective amnesia sets in and the Hawthorns erupts in ecstasy as taxi-thief Jake Livermore scrambles in an injury time winner against Tottenham. Our artist in residence, who started the season with cool indifference to football, is crying with joy in a corporate box and now understands a new form of beauty.

But in the season I lost my mom, we didn’t make it to the final game. On the morning of the 8th of May, Darren Moore is named Manager of the Month for April. With Christ-like humility, he demands that every employee of the football club assemble around him as he is photographed with the trophy. Everyone’s in it together. And then of course the curse hits. That evening, an abject Southampton team that had won as many games at the Hawthorns as Pulis and Pardew put together beat Swansea 1-0 to relegate both the Swans and the Throstles.

Relegation doesn’t matter. As mom did with death, we face it down without wincing. We start the new season with dignity and Darren Moore, and a song – an old favourite – that we haven’t sung for a while. “We all go down, we all go down, we all go down together…”. No matter.

Originally published in Issue 15 of the always beautiful magazine Pickles.

Developing Good Writing Habits : A Workshop

June 22, 2023June 21, 2023 markghollowayLeave a comment

Coming to a Learning Resource Centre room near you : a workshop on developing good writing habits delivered by the man who recently waited until the morning of a deadline to start working on a 6000-word piece of writing. Forget impostor syndrome; this is blatant fraud.

But, since talent spotters don’t required talent themselves, the workshop happens, and I’m happy with how it goes. Hopefully the participants, all conscientious enough to have better writing habits than the facilitator already, are not unhappy.

Usually when I speak about writing I’m using could not should, and there are disappointed looks on the faces of those looking for silver bullet shortcuts that fix all of their problems. Today, though, is about sharing advice from two decades of reading and talking about writing, and should, via those who walk the walk, will make an appearance. The workshop is about the practicalities of getting things done. A reading list will be given at the end, but the aim is for participants to leave with useful action plans, not (even) more things to read.

First, so that we don’t just spend our time complaining about how difficult writing is, we talk about the pleasure of writing. Imagine that. I ask everyone to think of a time when they took some pleasure in their writing. When was it? Where did it happen? What were they doing and how did the pleasure manifest itself? Who else was involved? Were they writing with or for someone in particular?

To my pleasant surprise, the pleasure conversations flow, and people look happy as they talk. After struggling to interrupt and bring the conversational buzz to a close, I ask for words that describe the pleasure they’ve been recalling. I suggest “clicks” for myself: the happy chatter of my fingers on keys as writing – as typing – flows through me. “Flow” is a word I’ve heard used in the room, and I’m expecting it to be the top answer, but we generate quite a list: space, time, and enjoyment; but also self and freedom. This is going well. I was anticipating perhaps more of a focus on the sense of achievement that writing can give us, but this would have missed the point: achievement is about happy outcomes and not the pleasure – however rare or fleeting – we take in the act of writing.

They get it. Now onto the main event: the bad stuff. I ask everyone to think about what they would like to achieve in or with their writing. What goals and desired outcomes are they harbouring? Can that be quantified in word counts, chapters, assignments, or publications? And then the question that represents the centre-point of the workshop: “what’s standing in your way?”.

Everyone, it seems, has much to say, and they talk. Lots of productive articulation of the challenges and barriers, met with familiarity and empathy. It feels like the kind of group therapy that I was imagining this session would be. Five minutes later, we have a list of barriers to writing in a shared Google document. Some take more teasing out than others, but the participants are thoughtful, honest, and earnest in explaining what they want to explain.

Self-confidence (inner critic bringing you down) / perfectionism
Focus / distractions (including other responsibilities)
Time
Space
Getting started
Not resting : overloading the brain / body / self
Mood
Not having the discipline (?) to narrow down from all the stuff
Lack of clarity of thought about your writing
Lack of interest
Lack of energy
Frustration / lack of ‘skill'

Now, I say, I’m going to speak for a few minutes. I’ve prepared five principles and strategies for overcoming barriers to writing. The hope is that in combination they offer solutions to all of the above, though I’m not promising anything.

As I go through my five points, I wonder why I always have to use odd numbers. Odd.

Write ‘little’ and often. Break it down.

I explain that I’ve typically suggested writing little and often – particularly about reading and responses to reading – as a way to get started with university / academic writing. Indeed, as a principle it’s been the building block of pretty much every EAP or Academic Skills course I’ve ever developed. But it also occurs to me that little and often is just as useful for ‘expert’ writers as it is for novices. Recently Pat Thomson tweeted about how the 1000th post on her brilliant blog Patter would represented well over 1 million words in total for her site. Small steps; huge footprints

Put a fence around your writing time / space : make your writing the priority it deserves to be.

Here, I tell the participants, I’m saving them £12.99 and four hours of time which could be spent in the sparkling company of Paul Silvia, whose book How to Write a Lot basically advocate for nothing more sophisticated (or profoundly impactful) than establishing a writing schedule. Silvia encourages us to block out writing time in our diaries as if it were a regular one-to-one class. In this class, however, we are both teacher and student. No decent teacher would ever cancel such a class, and only the worst kind of student would fail to attend. Protect time, and we get writing done: 250 hours per year is just an hour a day with weekends left free for, well, weekend stuff. An appropriate space – without distractions – is equally important, of course, and I share Silvia’s fondness for Stephen King’s advice that all a good writing space needs is a door that the writer is willing to shut.

I was imagining that this would be the principle that spoke most directly to the barriers to writing that participants would list, and I suspect that it addresses the biggest issue for most people. My third point, however, seems to connect to a much wider range of the items listed in our Google Document.

Be realistic : you won’t ’flow’ every day but you don’t need to; editing is writing and writing is editing.

Dominic Lukes explains the whole “editing as writing” point better than I can and Silvia is also excellent on being realistic. Some days are a grind; sometimes you know your juices aren’t flowing, so it’s better to spend your time editing something you wrote previously (which might even inspire the juices into movement) or tidying up your references. Silvia is uncompromising in arguing that there is no such thing as writer’s block; if you’re not writing, he says, it’s because you’re not writing. Which brings us to:

Be purposeful : set targets; get it down; get it done.

This links to breaking tasks down into sizeable chunks (see 1 above), of course, but it’s also about free writing (or even speaking) where necessary. Getting stuff down on paper, or recording a short conversation with yourself, is writing. It will need editing, and some of what you splurge out might find itself deleted on your next juiceless session, but your car won’t take you very far if you don’t start the engine.

Build / find / use your community.

I have a lot more to say about this, but for this workshop, I simply try to remind the room that our writing goals inevitably involve other people, since we have to hope that at some point someone will read and perhaps even like whatever it is that we’re writing. So, it’s worth thinking about the audience, finding a critical friend, or building a group of people to share time and space with for any number of worthwhile activities, whether that’s just being in the same protected space in which to get some writing down, forming a writing circle for sharing and peer-critiquing, or co-authoring for publication. Other people aren’t just good for our writing, they’re indispensable.

I ask everyone to have a think about my principles, and how they could be turned into strategies for overcoming whatever barriers are holding them back. As if to prove my final point about the importance of interaction with others, I then encourage everyone to share their thoughts via conversations, and again the room is filled with meaningful chatter and buzz. I think / hope I see people writing down imperatives to themselves, resolutions, and plans. There are exchanges of phone numbers. A WhatsApp group is set up for siloed scientists in need of a peer-group. Our time together is coming to an end for the morning, but only one person is in a hurry to leave to the room, and I happily buy her excuse that she has a meeting to attend.

As the conversations continue, I try to cross-reference my principles to the barriers we identified earlier and share my thoughts as the end-point of the workshop. In consultation with the group, we arrive at this:

Focus / distractions (including other responsibilities) 2
Time 2
Space 2

Lack of energy 3

Not resting : overloading the brain / body / self 1, 2, 3, 4
Frustration / lack of ‘skill’ 1, 3, 5
Getting started 1,3
Self-confidence (inner critic bringing you down) / perfectionism : 3,5
Mood 3, 4, 5
Not having the discipline (?) to narrow down from all the stuff 4
Lack of clarity of thought about your writing 4,5

I wonder how much this is for me as much those who signed up for the workshop. How am I going to implement strategies to overcome my barriers based on my five principles? This blog post is an attempt at just getting it done; just getting something done; and possibly reaching out to a community? If anyone ever reads this far, I’d love to know…

When the net ripples

June 23, 2020 markghollowayLeave a comment

oowamya?

It has become clichéd for footballers to talk about whether or not scoring a goal is better than making love; Paul Ince even claimed that tackling was better than sex, which raises more questions than it answers, not least in relation to the importance of wearing shin pads. No doubt in the modern game scoring off the field is becoming easier than on it, thanks to a combination of enlightened defensive tactics introduced by foreign managers and Chinawhite’s door policy, but — with apologies to the cliché police — certain similarities remain hard to ignore. The glorious anticipation. The rising excitement. A moment of ecstasy that subsides into mere joy, accompanied by a soundtrack of thrilled exclamations and stifled screams of delight. And the analogy doesn’t end there. Note the guilt and self-loathing that attacked Shaun Wright-Philips within seconds of his sneaky “solo-effort” against Chelsea. And in 1998 I’m sure I saw Fabien De Freitas roll…

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God Save the Queen. We mean it man

June 22, 2020June 23, 2020 markghollowayLeave a comment

Eurovision 2014 has been won by a bearded lady. I repeat, Eurovision 2014 has been won by a bearded lady. The entertainment bar has been set pretty high this year, and the World Cup in Brazil now has to deliver an enormous amount of excitement if it’s ever going to eclipse the image of the bristles on Austrian diva Conchita Wurst’s beautiful scary face. Austria haven’t qualified for Brazil, which is a shame, because if they had they would have been forced by FIFA directive 873c to play Conchita’s “Rise Like A Phoenix” (ironically only narrowly beating Hungary’s “Dive Like a Uruguayan for Eurovision glory) instead of their regular national anthem “God Save Paul Scharner” before all three of their fixtures. Now, the closest we’ll get to some Conchita time is if Christiano Ronaldo has his Gillette Mach 3 confiscated at Lisbon airport and goes all Peter Withe in the knockout stages. Lovers of international music need not despair, however, as the pre-match national anthems have the potential to salvage any world cup. Here are 7 elements of national anthems to celebrate in Brazil:

Pure unadulterated pride

There’s nothing like a good stirring national anthem delivered with pomp and force to get the blood pumping before a match. Statisticians have uncovered a direct correlation between the neutral’s attachment to any nation and the intensity with which players clutch or beat their chests while singing their national anthem. It is for precisely this reason that the Chile squad of 1998 managed to convert more neutrals to their cause than any other football team in history; indeed, the Chilean national anthem was bellowed out so passionately by Zamorano et al before the Italy game that three Azzurri midfielders spent the first half playing for Chile.

2.Jauntiness

Some countries take themselves too seriously and insist upon having solemn, austere and grand national anthems, but this has been scientifically proven to damage their chances of winning a world cup. How many world cups have the solemn-anthemed Japan, Russia, and South Korea won between them? None at all, the miserable trophiless bastards. Thanks to the adorable philanthropist Vladimir Putin, however, Russia have now adopted YMCA as their new anthem and will proudly wave rainbow flags to it before all of their matches in Brazil, thus making them this year’s dark horses. But there’s stiff opposition, because 2014 will be the World Cup of jaunty national anthems. The hosts lead the way with a tune so twirly and swirly that that listening to it is the musical equivalent of eating a Curly Wurly on a really fun rollercoaster. Indeed it’s so catchy that Brazil supporters have a tendency to keep singing their jaunty anthem even after the brass band are out of puff, a phenomenon that ITV are already calling a samba carnival of a cappella madness. Italy, Brazil, and Uruguay have the three jauntiest national anthems in the world and share 11 World Cups; Greg Dyke has made enquires with Buckingham Palace to see if he might be able to change the English national anthem to the theme tune to Captain Pugwash before Roy’s boys fly to South America.

3. Violence and intolerance of others

Let’s kick racism out of football. Yes. And let’s kick violence and intimidation out of football while we’re at it too. Of course. Although we do encourage teams to line up and sing songs about their own national and racial superiority, threatening wherever possible those of other races and nationalities. The fifth most commonly occurring noun in the anthems of the 32 qualifying nations (translated into English where necessary) is blood, and the fourth most common verb is die. The French anthem contains the ominous oath “may impure blood water our fields” and the Mexican anthem contains a very thinly veiled threat of death to any non-Mexican who sets foot upon “our soil”. If fans were this threatening during a match, they might face a stadium ban. With pre-match brass band accompaniment, however, it’s all fine.

4. No connection whatsoever to football

National anthems have very little to do with football. The most common nouns in the lyrics to be heard this summer are God, land, glory, and homeland, and the most common verbs are love, live, and witness. All these words are notably far more at home in the titles of American TV series than in the build-up to a football match. The most common adjective is “free”, though sadly it’s never found alongside “kick”. Foot references are few and very far between: Ecuador mentions “victory’s heel” and Mexico is watchful of its enemy’s “sole”, and sadly snail-paced Diego Lugano’s request to have the Uruguayan national anthem changed to “These boots were made for walkin’” is a lame rumour that I’ve just made up.

5. School assembly

National anthems before football matches satisfy our mad lust for school assembly nostalgia. As in school assemblies, any live performance of a song before a football match must involve the following features, as stipulated by FIFA Ruling 468b:

i. the melody should be played at a random speed

ii. nobody present must know when to start singing

FIFA also demand (in Ruling 914d) that each participating squad should have at least one player who does one of the following during the playing of their own anthem:

i. Mumbles into his own chest

ii. Closes his eyes

iii. Pretends to sing but clearly doesn’t know the words

iv. Loudly shuts random snatches of lyrics

v. Looks bewildered by the very concept of music being played by a musical instrument

Again, the similarities with school assembly hymn-singing are conspicuous. And this is not the only connection between school assembly and the singing of national anthems. After World War One, the Treaty of Versailles stipulated that Germany had to take its national anthem from a hymn selected randomly from English Primary School assemblies. It is a matter of speculation whether, had Germany won World War Two, English children would now have to sing the Scorpions’ “Wind of Change” in school assemblies.

6. The utter shitness of “God Save the Queen”

Just as one day every Englishman must accept the fact that the only thing golden about the golden generation were their Rolexes and their Grahams, so too must he accept that “God Save the Queen” is the shittest of all National Anthems. It’s a national embarrassment. It begins with just one note played about 70 times, but not in a cool knowing electronica style or even a fun Harlem Shake style, it’s just slow monotonous dross. We should have known that Gary Neville was going to be a good TV pundit because he was always the one too smart to engage in the shit anthem in any way. God Save the Queen, my red arse, he was probably thinking. No, the taxpayers are saving the Queen, and for what? To be charged £15 to walk around three rooms of Buckingham Palace only to find that her choice of carpets and wallpaper is even worse than Steven Gerrard’s choice of when to slip over.

By the way, you odd people that attend England games instead of staying at home and signing a cyber-petition against the existence of Tom Cleverly, your recent attempts to sing “God Save the Queen” DURING matches has been frankly embarrassing and you are urged to learn the words to “Abide with me” instead.

7. Booing

A lot of people believe that England fans drown out opposition anthems with booing because they are disrespectful xenophobic hooligans, but this is not the case at all. It is simply too traumatic to hear how good other national anthems are when you’re stuck with “God Save the Queen” (see point 6). The French national anthem is so rousing and cool that it even managed to steal a scene from the peerless Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. England fans simply do not need to be reminded.

Of course it’s not just the English who see fit to boo other countries’ anthems. Still bitter about that whole Treaty of Versailles business, German fans have been known to boo a little, most notably in alliance with their Italian cousins (there’s something unnerving about that combination of words) before the 1990 World Cup Final. The Argentinian national anthem is played and the boos reverberate around the Stadio Olimpico so loudly that it’s possible that the brass band are joining in. Look it up on Youtube. The camera pans along the Argentina eleven and not one of them manages to sing a word of the anthem. Then we see Maradonna and he’s furious, fists-clenched, as enraged as Zamorano is proud, and shouting the word “whores” at everyone and anyone.

No doubt in the near future, the World Cup will follow the inglorious paths of the Champions League and the Premier League have its own anthem. At the time of writing, rumours that this anthem will be the Flying Lizards’ cover of “Money” are yet to be confirmed; other options include the yet-to-be-written “All hail Blatter, whose palms are truly greased” and the far catchier “Ode to <insert sponsors name here>”. If a World Cup can be hosted by Qatar, then the England Football Team can be ordered to sing “I feel like chicken tonight” before getting knocked out on penalties by Bosnia and I’m Lovin’ It Herzegovina. 2014 might well be, then, our last chance to enjoy the audio-visual treat of the pre-match National Anthem. Don’t be like Stevie G. Don’t let it slip.

Seven things you can learn about football from movies

June 21, 2020 markghollowayLeave a comment

At 19, Michael Owen had won the Premier League Golden boot twice and was one year away from winning the Ballon D’Or. And he’d never read a book. He revealed this, ironically enough, while being interviewed at the launch of what some might call his premature autobiography, Michael Owen In Person. Not only this, he’d only ever seen the whole of ONE film, and that, bizarrely enough, was the Jamaican bobsled comedy Cool Runnings. Michael, you should have managed a couple of football films at least. You like the number 7, so here are 7 things you could have learned:

1. Nobody wants you to become a professional footballer. You and all your potato-faced mates have supported Sheffield United since forever, and you’ve got a once-in-a-lifetime make-or-break trial first thing in the morning, but what’s more important? Playing football for your beloved Blades and becoming a wildly successful millionaire footballer, or drinking some more pints right now. It’s a no-brainer. Neck it Sean. When Saturday Comes, we want you hungover like the rest of us. Oh, and watch out football-playing girls if your furious family are all racial stereotypes. You can forget about Bending it like Beckham; get to your room and wait for an arranged marriage, or whatever we like to imagine they do in your fictional minority culture.

2. It’s all about dribbling. Good footballers dribble. They dribble from one end of the pitch to the other and then side-foot the ball into the net. Close control has no role to play in the dribbling. Watch Dorothy in Gregory’s Girl weave her way through a typically sprawling Scottish defence, the ball never more than, say, a metre away from her toes. And she’s a girl! In America, not only girls, but weedy boys (Kicking and Screaming) and Soccer Dogs can achieve similar glorious success with lame dribbling montage after lame dribbling montage, believed to be known in the industry as “the Wanchope sequence”.

3. Substitutes take penalties. Your debut will be as a substitute, quite possibly only days after your trial (which for some reason took place in an allotment). If you get on the pitch and the ref points to the spot, it doesn’t matter that nobody in the ground knows who you are. You’re taking it. (To see this work really well in a movie, hunt out the Brazilian film Linha de Passe. You’ll end up forgiving the implausibility and possibly wanting to watch The Italian Job again…erm…spoiler alert, kind of).

4. Sometimes you’ve got to take one for the team. The team needs Sylvester Stallone to go in goal so that he can help us all escape at half time. All you need to do is rest your arm between two planks while Michael Caine stamps on it. Your response? “Try to make it a clean break”. That’s the spirit.

5. Nazis are evil. Look at the way they cheat in Escape to Victory. The constant fouling, the bribing (or something similar, probably) of the ref. Pele’s broken ribs. There’s something strangely sinister about those Nazis. I can’t put my finger on it, but it might be the swastika and lace-up collar combination on their shirts.

6. Stoke City are worse than the Nazis. OK, so this is inference, but if we’re ever going to get anywhere in life, we all have to agree that what Stoke City want to do to our beautiful game is just as bad as what Hitler wanted to do to Europe. At least the Germans don’t try to throw the ball into the Allies’ net. At least the Nazi major stands up and applauds the beauty of Pele’s bicycle kick. Not even the Nazis would boo a player for having the audacity to get his leg broken by Ryan “not-that-kind-of-lad” Shawcross.

7. Football is joyful. The games lesson scene in Kes captures it perfectly. Even in bitterly cold weather with a ball that stings and a sadistic bully of a teacher, in spite of all the inherent injustice, a game of football is a joyful event. See the magical scene in the Swedish film Tilsammans, when the entire hippy commune is out playing football in the garden. Everyone can join in, no matter how hairy, sad-faced, or confused about their sexual orientation they are. It’s truly joyful. Compare this with any orgy scene in any film and you’ll see that yes, football is better than sex, and unlike sex it actually improves once children become involved.

And this is what you should have learned from movies Michael Owen. It’s not about your huge salaries and your helicopters, properties, racehorses, and your embarrassing prospectus. It’s definitely not about ending your career in the reserves at worse-than-the-Nazis Stoke City. It’s all about the joy.

• Michael Owen in Person is available from £0.01 used on Amazon, where readers have awarded it 4 ½ stars. You might also be interested in the similarly inspiring titles Gerrard: My Autobiography and, err, Carra : My Autobiography. Who says Liverpool are no longer a great club?

Thoughts on writing tutor notes

June 6, 2014 markgholloway

Nigel Slater changed my life. Or rather, his recipe for chicken wings with lemon and cracked black pepper did. I was once a shamefully unashamed fussy eater, who barely cooked or thought with any imagination about food, and I rarely even glanced at Slater’s cookery column in the Observer Magazine. But something about those glossy, sticky wings caught my eye – and my appetite – back in 2003. I followed the recipe myself and miraculously pulled out an identikit glossy sticky feast from the oven, the warmth and aroma showing me that extra magic that no Sunday supplement ever could. And I was converted: to cooking, to eating, and notably to Nigel. I followed his column avidly. I bought Real Fast Food and started to build a repertoire: penne with walnuts and gorgonzola, chicken breast with pesto and mozzarella, scallops with lime and coriander. Every recipe delivered what it promised and what I craved. It was easy; it was fun; it was delicious. And Nigel’s words guided me generously throughout. Despite my complete lack of expertise, he never talked down to me. He taught me to notice the changing sights and smells in my pan, and helped me to understand the consequences of however I was choosing to slice and chop ingredients. He coaxed me into making my own choices with his subtle suggestions: substitute the walnuts with pine nuts; try rosemary instead of thyme; if you’re daring, melt the cheese in the pan rather than under the grill. Never any pressure, just encouragement to follow my own senses.

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Academic writing is…

June 4, 2014 markgholloway

I recently blogged whimsically about metaphors, the post kickstarted by some thoughts on an EAP sequence on the subject. Here I am simply to summarise some metaphors for academic writing (or writing from sources to be more exact) that I have encountered in my work:

AN ESSAY IS A CONTAINER : The essay contains ideas. If it only contains opinions without support, it’s empty. It’s also important not to over-fill it. (more here – but personally I find this metaphor links the sense of direction and purpose essential to effective academic writing)

AN ESSAY IS A JOURNEY : The writer needs to guide their reader to a destination worth visiting. If the writer begins by establishing what the destination is, why it is worth visiting, and what route will be taken, the reader is genuinely guided and will persist with the journey. Without this guidance, the reader may become lost and unmotivated.

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When the net ripples

June 3, 2014 markgholloway1 Comment

Facing the goal-vs-sex question in an uber-glamorous Metro interview in 2009, Ian Wright suggested that a player’s given answer would reveal a lot about their sex life. But actions speak louder than words. What could be more revealing than the behaviour we see in the seconds following a goal? Does it give us a glimpse of the goalscorer’s inner sexual soul? The lover within? The footballing world was shocked to learn of the extent of the shy and understated Ryan Giggs’ lascivious wassails, but wasn’t that hairy celebration against Arsenal a giveaway sign of the wild lothario hidden inside the wholesome yoga-toned frame?

How far can we push this analogy? Gary Lineker raises his hands to the heavens after equalising against Germany and we glimpse the joy of a man bedding a woman way out of his league. Jurgen Klinsmann’s self-deprecating dive to celebrate his debut goal in England suggests a man who’s not afraid to laugh while on the job. He’s the kind of guy who will happily joke about his own phallic inadequacy or erectile dysfunction, no matter how seriously Pele tells him to take it. There’s a heartbroken female somewhere in Manchester who thought she saw love in Emmanuel Adebayor’s eyes as he was bearing down on her, only to realise later that he’d only had sex with her to spite his ex. Meanwhile Alan Shearer, whose name is of course an anagram of Vanilla Shag, must be as bland in the bedroom as his punditry on Match of the Day; that drab salute tells you it’s going to be the same every time, and why shouldn’t it be? Who cares how many positions Prince can do in a one-night stand if our Alan can do the one so perfectly well?

The crass and superficial among us might look to countries like Italy andSpain for the hot-blood of Latin lovers inherent in goal celebrations. But then we see Francesco Totti sucking his thumb, longing no doubt for the pre-sexual innocence of his mother’s lap. And despite the rimming connotations ring-kissing might trigger in a filthy British mind, in Madrid it signifies Raul’s loyalty and love for his wife and his Real. Cross the Atlantic to stereotypically hot South America and the image that comes back is even more wholesome than that of Raul caressing the third digit on his left hand: Bebeto’s arms rocking the baby son he has yet to hold. They’re good boys those Brazilians. They belong to Jesus, and God knows sex is just for procreation.

I won’t risk wandering into the homo-erotic by wondering about the significance of Roger Milla’s rhythmic hips, or Lomana Lua Lua’s gymnastic flexibility. And it’s perhaps best not worth considering any possible links between Finidi George’s “pissing dog” celebration and either bestiality or showers of a golden variety. Ipswich supporters will of course attest to seeing Finidi take the piss without any goals available to celebrate. For legal reasons I probably shouldn’t mention the fact that Michael Owen’s celebration after scoring against Argentina in 1998 always put me in mind of a jewellery-jangling Jimmy Saville; recent revelations have obviously taken that connection to horrifically dark places. Darker still is the image of having sex with a cocaine-snorting Robbie Fowler, an eye-popping on-something Maradonna, or even a robotic piss-streaking Peter Crouch. Feel free to cross out the words “a robotic” and “piss-streaking” from that last sentence, unless of course you are currently wearing a short skirt and queueing up outside Chinawhite (in which case, save your eyeliner for later; you’re going to need it).

Just as lovemaking should be spontaneous and free, so surely must goal celebrations. Search Youtube for Stjarnan FC of Iceland and you’ll find a catalogue of elaborate and expertly choreographed celebrations, performed by pretty much all the outfield players together, to which my words can do little justice. With names like bicycle, toilet, rowing team, and birth, the celebrations make for an impressive montage, and the guy who plays the hooked fish in fishing deserves some kind of award, but at the risk of coming over all Jimmy Hill, this is certainly not something I want to see creeping into the English game. Players get booked for diving into the crowd in case doing so incites violence. Pretend to have a dump after scoring against Millwall and I think you pretty much deserve the ensuing violence.

Anyone with a soul will of course point to the brilliance of Jimmy Bullard’s piss-take of his then-manager Phil Brown, sitting his teammates down and giving them a telling off after scoring against Man City. And no English man can remember Gazza and the dentist’s chair without heartstrings tugging and yearning for happier, more innocent days. So perhaps the choreographed celebration isn’t quite the post-goal equivalent of premeditated rape after all. But ah, I’ll reply, have you not forgotten Didier Drogba playing the corner flag as a guitar with Florent Malouda standing behind him playing a tiny air drumkit? The only sexual equivalent as embarrassing would be to walk in our parents engaging in rubber-clad S&M, and realising that your dad is the letterbox rather than the postman. Pre-planned group celebrations: no thank you.

Of course there are some footballers who celebrate goals with such aggression that you fear for the damage they might do in more amorous peaks of excitement. I suspect that the queues outside Temuri Kestbaia’s bedroom door are pretty short, for instance, and not just because he once wore the foul orange shirt of Wolverhampton Wanderers. Sex and violence are not a pleasant combination, and as a society we should all be concerned that someone somewhere might have had sex with a golf-club-wielding Craig Bellamy, a spiteful revenge-fuelled Ruud Van Nistelory, or a machine-gun-toting Robbie Keane (see also Rob Earnshaw — which starts to raise concerns about short footballers in general).

At a time when it’s our duty to be outraged by anything we don’t truly understand, we of course have to consider an ambiguous and hitherto unknown (at least inside Upton Park where it was “unleashed”) French gesture named after a dumpling (obviously) to be as shocking as the more recognisable salutes performed in stadia by Paulo Di Canio and Giorgos Katidis. While it must be terrible for a post-coital Mrs Di Canio to open her eyes and see her lover gazing wistfully at his Mussolini poster, spare a thought for anyone who has to spend the climax of any sexual encounter looking at Nicholas Anelka’s bored and miserable face. Anelka’s Quenelle has opened up a can of worms so ambiguous that if you tickle them in the middle, they smile at both ends, but surely his best defence against accusations of hate crimes is the fact that hatred is an emotion and there has never been any time during his career at which Anelka has looked capable of expressing an emotion. It does at least make sense that one of his best friends is a comedian who isn’t funny. It’s difficult to imagine Klinsmannesque laughter in Le Sulk’s bedroom.

Any psychoanalyst worth their salt will tell you that the sexual proclivities of the adult can be traced back to childhood (I’m making this up — I don’t even know if psychoanalysts accept condiments in payment for therapy). One of my earliest childhood memories of a goal celebration was the epic ecstasy of Marco Tardelli streaming away from the half-volley he’d just unleashed in the 1982 World Cup Final. But Tardelli’s body language is more reverential than sexual, and it’s clear that goals of great beauty and magnitude are spiritual, not corporeal. They belong to a higher power. I knew this for sure, of course, when Darren Bradley’s screamer flew in against Wolves in 1993. The sexual equivalent could only take place in heaven itself, quite possibly with a cherubic Wayne Fereday plucking away at a harp on a nearby cloud.

With the choices I’ve made in life up until now, I’m not expecting to ever have sexual intercourse with a footballer. But if life had panned out differently, I’d want my lover to be confident and in control, assured of their own brilliance and magic. Brian Laudrup, resting on his elbow after equalising against Brazil, perhaps. Cantona with his collar up, unmoved but radiating magnificence after a goal of rare rare beauty against Sunderland. Well, I would.

A beautifully illustrated version of this piece can be found in Issue 8 of Pickles Magazine.

Who’s in the room? Metaphors I teach by

June 2, 2014 markgholloway

My daughter opened her bedroom door this morning, and with it a world of opportunities. She’d snatched at the handle before but never quite managed to turn it. Happy and fearful in equal measure at her achievement, she turned to me and reached for my hand before taking a step out into the dark hallway, like the world’s cutest bunny about to set foot on the first sheet of white snow of the winter.

So, a doorway into a world of opportunities. “A metaphor. Things are looking up” to borrow words (and another metaphor) from Spooner in Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land. I read No Man’s Land at secondary school (and loved it, not least for the brilliant swearing) but didn’t begin to understand it until much more recently. I also learned about metaphors at secondary school, and have also only recently begun to give them more thought.

At school I learned the difference between a metaphor and a simile. A metaphor is when you say that X is Y; a simile is when you say that X is like Y. My daughter opening up a world of opportunities is a metaphor, but when I compare her to a cautious yet excited rabbit, I’m using simile. This distinction is useful if we want to point out the shortcomings of others, since nothing could make us feel more intelligent than smugly telling a friend or colleague “that’s not a metaphor — it’s a simile”. If we want to try to be even smarter, though, linguistic analysis provides a further distinction between a metaphor and a metonym. A common example of a metonym would be when Wall Street is used to refer to US financial markets (a place representing what goes on within it) or when we are told potentially bizarre pieces of information like “I’m parked in the multi-storey”. Rather than respond with “No, you’re not, you’re sitting here in Café Rouge with me” we understand that the speaker is using the controller of an object (“I”) as a representative of the object itself (“my car”). Here we are in the realm of metonymy, because in context, there is a salient link between the driver and the car. Suggesting that the traffic outside Café Rouge is crawling past would also be metonymic (since movement is a property of traffic and crawling is a slow form of movement), but to suggest that our lunch hour was crawling by with all my tedious talk of semantics would be a fully-fledged metaphor, since physical movement is not a property of time. Now, if like me you’re ever-so-slightly confused about the difference between metaphor and metonym, you can perhaps stop acting like a smartarse because you know that neither of them is a simile.

Continue reading “Who’s in the room? Metaphors I teach by” →

Reading a story tweet by tweet

May 30, 2014 markgholloway

I like Jon Ronson. I never realised quite how fascinating a person he is until his recent appearance on the Richard Herring Leicester Square Theatre Podcast (RHLSTP!)

After that interview I started following Ronson on Twitter, and yesterday he appeared on my timeline with a series of tweets that move from curiosity to despair in under a thousand characters:

I don’t twig what “swimming” might infer initially, and I suspect that Ronson doesn’t either. I’m thinking more along the lines of the “ooh look at that interesting eccentric” that pops into your head when you see an old man going for a January dip in the pool on Hampstead Heath. But events become very dark very quickly. And the narrative is very brief, even with the throwaway detail of the conversation about Steinbeck, and the now inappropriate interruption of a message delivered to a different audience in a different tone and for a different purpose.

Ronson’s decision not to stand and gawp is admirable. We all tut at the rubbernecked voyeurs who slow down to pass the unspoken tragedy of a mangled car on the hard shoulder, but our tutting tends to be at its loudest when we’re being held back in a queue, and strangely absent when we take our own turn to pass by and stare with gory thrill and that sense of there but for the grace of a god that I don’t believe in…

Ronson takes the righteous path by walking away: there’s nothing he can do to help; there’s nothing anyone gains from his presence as a spectator. And he leaves the story hanging. Now laden with dark symbolism, it’s all over too quickly, and I feel guilty for wanting to follow the story to its conclusion. The writer walks away but I’m still peering back to work out what’s going. My curiosity is not sated. ”

“I’ve gone” bears incredible weight. When do we ever say “I’ve gone”? “Gone” reflects the absence on a person or thing from the location and perspective of the speaker “She’s gone” means she’s no longer here. But it’s unfeasible to state “I’m not longer here”. With “I’ve gone” Ronson is both absent from and present at the scene. I read and I am there too, but not there at all.

When Ronson appears on my timeline again today I catch the final tweet in a sequence that contextualises and completes the story. It’s heartbreaking and it’s eerie. And my timeline presents it to me in reverse, like an episode of Columbo: the brutal facts first; the background and explanation following piece by piece. And this is not the author’s intention. The medium is dictating the way I digest the message. And again I feel guilty. For all the heartbreak, I feel another thrill of the new. I have never read a text in this way before. And how often do we ever experience that?

Ultimately, though, the message here renders the medium insignificant. Ronson links to a newspaper article, again poignantly brief, telling the story in three paragraphs that quickly dissolve into isolated sentences. The poor girl beside them, looking away. Not returning our gaze.