Joe Strummer remains an icon. His death from an undiagnosed heart defect fifteen years ago, continues to be mourned worldwide.
As the frontman of The Clash, the ‘only band that matters’, he became a spokesman for disaffected youth, a mouthpiece for angry punks and left-wing activists alike. John Mellor came from private school, via art college and a bizarre working-life where he had aspirations to become a musician while earning a living as a grave-digger. He became Joe Strummer, the quiffed-up rockabilly rebel of pub-dub band The 101’ers. Through the mid-seventies he channelled Johnny Cash and Gene Vincent, his famous pneumatic legs shaking along to the rock and roll. It is Strummer’s lifelong obsession with socialism and equality that marks him out as a true standard-bearer for the Working Class. The Clash were art-school finesse crossed with menacing street-tough, clad in leather, safety pins and more spikes than a Vietnamese booby trap. They sang about people. As the sobering yin to the Pistols’ raging punk yang, they became the social conscience of raucous rebellion. Joe Strummer wrote the songs. His dedication to highlighting drug abuse, unemployment and the alarming decay of Britain during the Thatcher years was second-to-none. His songwriting partnership with guitarist Mick Jones blossomed from angry, edgy punk passion into a whole host of musical styles. This culminated in the iconic London Calling album from 1979 and Sandinista! the following year- two albums that helped The Clash in general and Joe Strummer in particular- escape the shackles of spokesman for a generation to be bona fide rock and roll musicians. His legacy after his death has been phenomenal. Every year, there is a Strummercamp Festival; his memory celebrated in New York, London, Granada and Scotland; an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alongside his great heroes; a mural in downtown Manhattan; everything short of a statue. He went from being a pub-rocker with rotting dentistry to one of the most important-and quotable- musicians there has ever been. “Without people, you’re nothing.” said Joe, always staying in touch with his folky, socialist ways. Yes, he was a contradiction and there are less-than-complimentary stories about his womanising and alcohol consumption, but he was human, not quite a God. Fifteen years on, the world still seems a duller place without the Brylcreem and battered leather of punk rock’s greatest export. With Christmas just a few days away, let’s join together and Letsgetabitrockin’ to celebrate this iconic and inspirational punk prophet in shades. The future is unwritten. Cheers, Joe.
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Squad GoalsConsidering that gloriously gorgeous day out in our nation’s capital was a little over a year ago, it is very alarming to see the negativity and frustration surrounding Grimsby Town FC.
It is very much deserved as well. The club has gone from having a team that wanted to play for us, wanted to see us back in the league and busted a lung to win us the promotion final. Now we have a manager that seemingly focuses on not losing rather than anything else, a chairman that needs a personality transplant and a team that are barely willing to run through a wall of jelly rather than a brick one- just like Diz, Pearson, Bogez and co would’ve done for each other. It’s very easy to say- ‘if we kept that team together, we’d be doing better’ but football doesn’t work like that. Some of those players deserved their chance higher up the leagues and even the most vehement Hurst Out brigader can’t begrudge him his move to a club with better ambition. Or maybe they can. Who knows what goes on in Town fans heads these days? I’m not very quick to blame the players. They are trying. I keep seeing comments and tweets from supporters saying that most of them are just at Blundell Park for the wage and they couldn’t give a flying haddock about how the team, its fans or the town feels about the club. I feel that’s a bit unfair. We have seen some mercenaries in the Mariners ranks over the years and these are players that are low on goals, confidence and, crucially, quality. Mercenary; adj- Person(s) concerned primarily with the making of money and not their profession- think Barry Conlon or Scott McGarvey if you’re of a certain vintage. Then again, it could all be so much worse. We could be in a position like Stockport or York, seeing our club congealing in a non-league gutter like day-old kebab grease. Yes, all these scoreless matches are getting on everyone’s nerves, but we have to keep thinking that it will all come good. Swindon at home tomorrow could be the start of a glorious new dawn. Unfortunately, the pessimist inside me says that it’ll probably be a turgid, wade-through-treacle spectacle with no goals and no atmosphere. I was gonna talk about Fenty. Then I realised that my moaning about him on the internet is not particularly productive. It’s unlikely he’ll read this and go “Oh look, this lad wants me to go, I’d better go.” So, I’m not gonna waste word count on it. (Oh, alright then. #FentyOut) It is gonna be hard to remain positive. I’ll see my fellow Mariners at the park tomorrow, hopefully we’ll see three points and, if we’ve secured 3 points, that means we’ve deffo scored a goal. It could go in off someone’s arse in true Tony Crane-style for all I care. I’d love to see it bobble fortuitously off the back of Sam Jones’ quiff. Our very own Duran Duran tribute member always looks a threat, so I don’t know why Slade persists with Scotty V. He’s much-maligned and needs a goal to boost his confidence. The general morale of the team must be hitting Titanic depths, in other words, their collective confidence is trickling timidly towards the bottom of the deep blue. Goals goals goals. We’ve seen a bit of a slog so far, ‘Sladeball’ and a sluggish series of soporific substance. Only the team can save themselves from further humiliation. Come on, lads, you can do it. Can anybody pinpoint a time in their lives when they just knew things were gonna be better?
I’m pretty sure I wrote summat like this a while back (when I could be arsed to blog regularly) but I was thinking just the other day of how my life changed the day I landed on the sun-saturated paradise of Laganas, on the isle of Zante. Greece is the word. Have you heard? That holiday in the late summer of 2015 saw me go into it in a downbeat mood. My coat of many colours had clearly run in the wash and my fine robes were a tattered, monochrome rag of working-class Northern misery. Okay, so maybe not that bad but you get it? I had been unemployed since leaving school in the darkest and deepest recession the country had seen since the nineteen-thirties. I felt angry, forgotten and stuck in a never-ending cycle of dole, dope and despair. It really does make you think. There were times when I used to scrape together 2p coins to pay for the bus, as soon as uni kicked in and I got my student loan I used to splurge on such expensive items as Heinz beans (no more of that smart price shite!). I really must have been skint if I thought Heinz beans were a luxury. Where was my pot to piss in? Oh yeah, I didn’t have one. Anyway, I saved up some money to go on a lad’s holiday, as I have previously bored you with in many blog posts from the past. We got zonked in Zante and I came back feeling like something had changed. Something inside so strong. What have you done today to make you feel proud? I’ll tell you what. Coming back to dreary old Grimsby made me really appreciate the time you have as a carefree adolescent hopping over the Med on the back of a student loan. When those days are gone then at least you have your memories. Even if the liver has dried up like a prune in the Sahara and the women are repulsed by the hair growing out your nostrils. Fast forward a year. I had my first proper girlfriend, my first proper job. To add to that, I had a date to see the Stone Roses playing in Manchester and my football team had just been promoted after six years in a turgid and tough period of non-league football. Nathan Arnold’s goal to seal it at Wembley will be forever burned in my hippocampus forever. I wonder about the multiverse theory and if you really do have a proper life planned out or if you just hop on and off various alternative universes. (Univi? Universes? Doesn’t matter) (Quick note- maybe Omar Bogle would have joined a different team than us on this alternate universe and fired them to promotion instead. That is hardly worth thinking about.) Amsterdam was my next port of call. It was a long time coming. The city of Ajax, van Gogh, tulips and all the ganja I could smoke had been beckoning me for years. I just needed someone to experience it with. Laid in the sun out in Vondelpark, absolutely blazed to the world, I felt a sense of blissful, almost cosmic, alignment. My universe had reached perfect tandem with the axis of time and space. If that sounds silly, just remember: I was as high as a balloon on Pluto. The mixture of mind-bending substances, being in love and the general good cheer of the year would later come crashing down in a vignette of deceit. But, then, at that moment in time, Vondelpark was where I was supposed to be. Moving on again, I graduated from university this summer. Another landmark milestone to tick off as I near my 24th birthday. I am now the owner of a degree in Creative Writing and no matter what those Tory shit no-marks like Boris and Theresa May think, they cannot take that away from me. The reason I’m telling yer all this is because I often wonder whether all this would’ve happened had I not made that choice to take part in the trip to Zante. It’s like in that film Sliding Doors where you either get on the train and live your life, or you miss it and miss out. To use a phrase I first heard after that delightful Wembley win in May 2016: “Life is a madness.” Would I have ever visited Amsterdam with a girl I met had I made the decision to go to, say, Sheffield university and not Manchester? Could I have seen the Roses, Courteeners and a play-off final victory all in the same year had I not put my money in George’s hand and said: “That’s for Zante”…? Life could’ve gone off on an altogether different tangent. A more uneventful and soulless wave on the space-time continuum. Spooky. Who knows? But it’ll drive you mad if you think about it too much. To the next year, I welcome it. There are so many goals to achieve, still so much more to experience, places to visit, people to meet and many a bevvy in hand (I am regularly seen in various Wetherspoons around the North of England). I’m excited. So should you be. Also, yes, this is a “proper” blog post. I know its rarer than finding a virgin in Scunthorpe. Enjoy it. Life is a madness. It’s been a while but here we are. You are about to embark on a reading mission of serious proportions. You know what mate? I’ve been busy doing stuff so blogging has taken a backwards step.
It might surprise you to know that my general alcohol consumption has been in absolute freefall. Remember how many of my blog posts begin with me being drunk, about to go out and get drunk or have some sort of alcohol-fuelled madness to go through? Well, those days of party party party have become spread further apart than Donald Trump’s brain cells. Speaking of the President, his hair like a ginger Mr Whippy perched on top of his caramel coloured face, he’s been at it again. He claims that them NFL players that have been protesting against the national anthem are cowardly and don’t deserve to represent America in sport. Wake up, Trumpton. They don’t agree with the sickly sweet practice of placing your hand over your heart and pledging allegiance to a country that goes ordering other countries about, pal. How would you like it if I came round your gaff and said ‘do this, do that’, pacing all up and down the Oval Office declaring I was the Big I Am? Your face would be red, sir. Or orange. I’m all for protesting and making a stand. Just the other day at Lincoln train station, I gave a proper Paddington stare to a rude member of staff who was smirking at a lad in front of me. The lad paid for an advance ticket and the train was late, meaning that, by the pathetic rules of this jobsworth and his capitalist workplace, he had to pay for another ticket at full-price. The smirking smeghead behind the counter was adamant that rules were rules and he was so condescending that, had it been me, his eyes wouldn’t have been in his sockets, let alone rolling them at me. You see, a much stronger person than me (and more confident) might have barged through and given this twat their whole arsenal of rhetoric and inspired injustice. I’m getting there though. Just the other day, I showed my immense displeasure at a queue jumper by burning a hole into the back of his head with my eyes. I’m an Englishman, of course, it’s not a common sight to see people standing up for themselves with words. Trains have become a complete fuckcycle for me lately, to be honest. Poor scheduling, terrible service and overpriced tickets can make you seethe as you step onto the train. But does anyone ever say anything to the train company about it? Of course not. Centuries of social, emotional and physical repression have made Brits scared of confrontation, feel alienated by making a stand and a lot of us refuse to complain despite the inescapable build-up of pressure in our minds that someone, or something, has completely and utterly pissed us off. Right, anyway, moving on. You may have noticed that my usual go-to topic of Grimsby Town FC has yet to be mentioned. Now it has. We’re fairly useless and always will be. Enough said about the club the better, sometimes. My new favourite things in the world are the music of Shack, a fantastic nineties Liverpudlian band that have more bangers than a Lincolnshire barbeque and I’ve become a little bit obsessed (again) by Margot Robbie. I know how interesting my life is. It needs to be documented more. New blog post before Christmas, I hope, although with my track record of putting out opinionated prose, I can’t make any promises. Okay, so this could become a real thing for me. If I start writing about the little things that do my head in then this could be part one of infinity.
But, sometimes it’s good to get your rants off your chest and shove them into the information superhighway for other people to enjoy, agree, hate or send abusive responses to. I have to admit, it has been a bit of a struggle trying to whittle down the many, many, MANY foibles of life that utterly make me angry but I’ve done it. For now, anyway. #1. A Nation of Hypocrites We all know that the government is full of shithead Capitalists who want nothing else but to keep us in our pre-approved social positions. That sort of thing will never change until we organise a revolution. The most irritating aspect of all that is the bare-faced cheek in which they lie to us. They’re hypocrites. Theresa May, for example, she might be a shoe-loving, bowl-headed old bag with skin like a basketball, but she’s also a Massive Hypocrite. How you can hold onto power of a country that categorically voted against you is ridiculous. Yet, we as a nation have yet to get our heads together and do anything about it. There are many people out there, including some of you reading this (and I offer myself as an example of this) that will rant and rave until the lights go off about how the government is fucking us over and we’re nothing but the victims. Yet most of us would still rather gossip at the water cooler about Kim Kardashian’s arse or how much Neymar earns in an hour. What I’m getting at is that we moan about the hypocrisy of the establishment like it’s a huge problem that needs erasing yet as soon as the time comes when somebody like me asks ‘what the fuck are we gonna do about it then?’, the country falls silent and it is no longer a major issue. Contrary to what a lot of people think, I don’t hate Britain. I just hate some of the things that Britain stands for. We, as a nation, have historically invaded or colonised the majority of the existing planet. We sneer at organizations like ISIS (with good reason) or the Nazi party, all the while we practically invented the whole ethos of world domination. India, Australia, South Africa…all of these places once fell under the iron fisted rule of Great Britain and yet we look down our noses at other cultures and despotic crackpots like Kim Jong-un or Robert Mugabe who are merely following the blueprint that we drew up over centuries of colonial oppression. So, there, I said it, we’re all hypocrites. #2. Social Media A bit of a weird one. I’m all over social media, forcing my opinionated writing upon you. However, in that hypocritical British way, social media has changed communication between human beings forever. We no longer know how to talk to each other, in what way to be polite or flirty or serious without giving a crying laughter emoji or writing LOL. I believe that social media is important, it has becoming a force that civilisation could barely do without and it does do a lot of good. Crowd funding, charitable work, reconnecting old and new, bringing people together, all of that. There’s another ‘but’ coming here. It’s them people. You know the ones. The kind of people who spend every living second glued to their phones, tablets, laptops and become such experts at interacting over the web that they become incapable of personal communication. Yes, it is entirely your prerogative what you post on your profile and I’m sure someone, somewhere, really DOES care that you ate a ham sandwich at dinner then took a photo of said sandwich. There has to be. But is that really what the internet was invented for? A precious commodity such as electricity being used up on keyboard warriors and selfie princesses. There are some people that struggle to pay their leccy bill that they want just to keep warm or light their kids bedroom so they can finish their homework. For other people, they spend hours of every day scrolling up and down, looking at meaningless memes and downloading porn (not me, I swear). It just seems like there is some sort of imbalance somewhere. It’s such a shame because social media could be so much more than a place to pick up casual sex, post pictures of your ugly kid and tell the rest of humanity that you love your boyfriend. Christ. #3. The Wind I know that a nice breeze can be an absolute lifesaver when you’re parched and roasting like a fish that has jumped out the water and landed on a blistering hot concrete slab in Greece but there’s a limit. For most types of weather, you can do some sort of safeguarding to make it more bearable. If it rains, you can have a brolly or put your hood up. If it’s sunny, you can swap your cable knit for a t-shirt. If it’s snowing, then you can dig out last winter’s gloves and scarf to protect yourself from the chill of the freeze. But wind, nah. There is nothing you can do to make it seem less windy. When I was younger and not so lazy, I used to cycle everywhere. I cycled through rain, through snow, through hot days and cold but when it was blowing a gale- as it usually does down by the seaside- then I used to feel like the world was against me. If I could get rid of any weather, then it would be that. I understand that wind is just as important for the general appeasement of the universe, but, like I said, there’s a limit. Then again, I can imagine any potential readers I have that live in the sweltering humidity of a village in Borneo would probably worship the wind. Us British people really do have problems like no other nation on Earth, don't we? So, there are three things that annoy me to varying degrees of irritation. Feel free to send me your own suggestions; feel free to send me your own error-strewn, grammatically challenged messages of unappreciation for my blog. I welcome it all. Notes From A Small TownFootball. The national sport. The ninety-minute match that captivates the imagination of billions of people worldwide. Why do we love it so much?
Grimsby Town is a behemoth of banality. If you think about it. Unless you’re from the area, like myself, then they would hardly seem a team that makes anyone else sit up and take notice. That’s what is so special about it. Identity, that’s what it is. No matter what you’ve done, where you’ve been, who you’ve slept with behind the bins at your local, you are welcomed into the pack as a football fanatic. I have been a Mariner since 1998, a whole nineteen years of misery and mystery. Like I said, it’s an identity. For the first time this season, I will be a season ticket holder. There are two reasons why I have never bought one before: 1. I have been unemployed and skint most of my life and 2. I spent the last three years living away until the summer when the season finishes. That changes now, I will be back cheering on the black and white army towards glory or failure as part of the tribe. The Pontoon Stand opens itself up and absorbs you into its electrifying agenda. No matter how boring the match, the result or the weather, football fans will sing. They might not all sound like Alfie Boe when they belt out Abide With Me or any of the myriad football chants, but they all have the same thing in common- they are all, well, common. That is not an insult. I am common. I am from Grimsby. I stand in the pulsating pack of Pontooners that prod and probe and prickle the visitors from Accrington to Wimbledon. It’s the mentality that you’re all in it together that drives the fervent passion. We’re not that good. We know it. I’d rather support a side that regularly lets you down but has heart and soul at its core than a successful mega-club with their billion-pound advertising contracts in Malaysia and succession of foreign managers taking the fans for a ride any day. Honestly. The Premier League means absolute chicken and stuffing* to me, if I’m being truthful. *rare, possibly the first-ever recorded, example of Grimbarian Rhyming Slang. Chicken and stuffing = nothing. It’s a different ball game (I mean, it’s not, it just feels like it ‘cause Town can’t pass the bloody ball) in terms of heroes and villains. We’re not gonna have a player scoring the winning goal in the Champion$ League Final. We have had players stay for the duration and thus have become iconic and cult heroes in the area (John McDermott, Tony Ford, Paul Groves, Jackie Bestall etc.). This is where my club is inherently different to the money-grabbing leviathans that play their tiki taka tripe to a mass of prawn sandwich eating solicitors on a Saturday, or Sunday, afternoon. I always seem very angry. I guess it’s just my honest and combative writing style. My first footballing idol was Danny North. The ginger Grimbarian that grabbed goals. He played for the club when I was a teenager and was the first real home-grown star that I’d witnessed. When he left in relegation year (2009/10) it was a real shock. I felt he would’ve given it everything and more to help the club back into the League. He’s just signed for Clee Town now, so he’s at least back in his beloved borough. Players like Northy have been few and far between in recent years. Of course, the 2016 play-off final winners will be forever in my heart and memories as THE TEAM but the situation the club got itself into was deplorable from both a business and political viewpoint. We should never have allowed ourselves to slip from out of Division One to out of the entire league. A club that, when I was a young boy, regularly upset the odds and stayed in the upper echelons of the pyramid began to stagnate and slip into a debtor’s nightmare. Spiralling money woes, mercenary loan players looking for a pay day and a series of diabolical decisions from up top saw the great club plunge the briny depths of *shudder* non-league football for the first time in a century. We’d replaced the glitz and glamour of places like Coventry, Ipswich and Notts Forest for the mud, nettles and Thermos flasks in godforsaken spits of land such as Yeading or Histon. That, of course, coincided with me leaving school. It’s like a slow drip of bad luck. I leave school just as the most evil and divisive government since Maggie comes into power and I leave school just as my football team crashes to new lows. As I sit writing this, on a week’s work experience with the Grimsby Telegraph, I see the optimism plastered over the sports pages for the first full season back for manager Russell Slade. The man who nearly took Town into League One back in 2006. Slade allegedly left us in the lurch when he quit. Granted he isn’t as hated as Mike Newell or as frustrating as Paul Hurst but he isn’t exactly pally with a lot of the Mariners faithful. Promotion will get rid of most of the ill-feeling (it worked for Hursty last year, sort of) but some fans are just never happy. While we’re on the subject of fans, you get all the Twitter pundits sticking their oar in, unwanted, criticising everyone for everything. Wake up. This isn’t Discoveries vs Birds Eye in the Sunday League district football league. This is professional football, okay? It doesn’t always work how you think it should and a lot of your opinions are misguided, misjudged and, in some cases, mystifying. For example, we can win a match comfortably, we’re talking a 3-0/4-0 win. Some wannabe Alan Hansen will troll on social media about ‘we should be destroying teams more’. I’m happy with a scrappy one-niller if I’m brutally honest. As long as we win, the performance is not necessarily important- unless it’s a big match or a derby and then you need the players putting in performances. Anyway, we’re back in the league. It comes as some sort of comfort to me that my formative years as a Mariner was when we defied the bookies to avoid relegation every year between 1999 and 2002. Okay, so the days of us stunning Manchester City or Fulham with a blood and thunder defensive shutout are over but the football club itself remains what it always has been. The black and white beacon of working-class solidarity, of fishing communities going the match together, the old and the new generations welding together the steel beams of the Findus Stand (or Stones/John Smiths/Barratts/Youngs Stand for the various generations of Mariners). That may all sound a little bit contrived and over-exaggerated but unless you’re a football fan yourself, you can’t really understand the array of emotions you can go through. The play-off final, 2016. At half-time, we were 2-0 up and cruising back to the FL after Omar Bogle (my latest Town hero before he left) had boggled and bullied two goals to put us in the driving seat against Vegan Chompers FC (sorry, Forest Green Rovers). I felt elated. I was that ecstatic that I did a full run up and hugged a random, overweight man that I had never met before or since. Then the other team scored. With pandemonium amongst their five fans, their team had the momentum. I felt scared. Like actual fear. The kind of fear I only ever get when I see one of them hairy-legged house spiders cavorting about my house like it owns the place. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a lump in my throat or cartwheels in my stomach for as long as I did that afternoon. Then Nathan Arnold scored to make it 3-1 and send us up. That was a feeling I can never truly describe to anyone who wasn’t there. Why do you support Grimsby when they always lose? I regularly hear. Well, because when they win it’s a sensation that no mortal possesses the descriptive powers to explain. The celebrations outweigh the debilitating lows every single time. I’m trying to think of anything else (except maybe love) that makes you feel such crushing blows and mesmerising highs at the same rate as football can. Maybe I’m just talking balls, who knows? One thing is for certain- a person never gives up on their football team even though it appears their team has given up on them. It’s like an abusive relationship, I guess. You stay even though you probably shouldn’t sometimes. My dad regularly ponders on why Grimsby Town FC are such a massive part of my life, how eleven players chasing a laminated football around for seemingly no real purpose can have such an effect on my mood. Well, I don’t know. It just is. That sense of identity and belonging that you have, along with the camaraderie and downright antics that are seen (especially on an away day) are the drug you keep on taking. I like to think that even when I’m old, rich and famous, I’m still gonna be standing on the Pontoon in my Fred Perry and my Samba trainers waiting for Lincoln or Scunny fans to call us scumbags and get the collective shout of ‘we piss on your fish’ hurled right back at them. No matter where you are in the country, if you meet another Mariner then you’re instantly accepted. It’s that kind of family feeling that entices you to the match in the first place. I mean, seriously, in the days after Alan Buckley and his famously lovely football vacated Blundell Park, nobody came to see the turgid style of play, did they? Be honest with yourselves. But by that point you’re already hooked on a feeling. You feel like a fish in the North Sea, snared by the barbed fingers of a football crowd, wriggling into place before flopping down into the safe haven of a fired-up mob. I love that. You can be the most shy and reserved person in the world until you’re in the middle of a like-minded sea of souls all looking for that same thing as you- someone to share the good, the bad and the brilliantly ugly with. A part of the crowd. A member of the pack. Maybe this is why football hooliganism was such a big thing. That sense of protecting your own and shielding the younger members of your pride from the big guns and bovver boots of the bullet-headed bully boys. I’ve seen it myself, first-hand. Big lads are always straight to the front in any small-scale confrontation with opposition fans. The women and children are hurried away to safety as the army of lads join forces to (usually only shouting and swearing takes place and no actual violence) win the day. In answer to my original question: why do we love it so much? Well, I’m no professor of football psychology but my personal experience must count for some sort of answer. I believe that we, as football fans, have a duty to protect our working-class roots, our local identity and our animalistic survival instincts. Grimsby Town is for Grimsby people. Simple as that. Oh, and Cleethorpes but let’s not split hairs. So, I’m a Mariner. Get used to it. It’s a part of my life that will never disappear and I’m proud of that fact that, for all my various slurs and barbs towards my hometown, it’s what makes me…well, me. I’m full of righteous anger. My country has become a by-word for social division. Capitalism is a machine of evil corporations, heartless management and mendacious profit addicts. It sucks at the blood of the honest, it absorbs the tears of the hard-working, it eats up the sorrow of the less fortunate. I did not vote for this country to be flexing its capitalist agenda, throwing families out onto the street and slowly strangling the NHS to death.
It seems absurd to think that Richard Branson, a Tory party supporter and donation-friend, is alleged to be suing the National Health over private health care contracts. Fuck you, Dick. It is the right of everybody in Britain to have access to free healthcare via the payment of National Insurance by the working people. For that smug, smirking prick to be stroking his beard and getting indignant about not securing another few million quid by living like a parasite on the backs of sick people really makes me angry. The country has voted THREE TIMES for the Tory party’s austerity in just seven years. It seems that we love being downtrodden, we appear to get some sort of sado-masochistic kick out of being fucked over by conglomerates and companies. Tory Britain can be summed up with a simple phrase- YOU v THEM. The haves and the have nots. Unfortunately, in these times of Brexit and financial deficits, it is the working-class man and woman in the most socially and economically-deprived areas that have to suffer for the prospects of the Capitalist wheel. Go out and see it for yourself if you don’t believe me. As Theresa May and her ‘yes men’ cronies cavort all over Europe telling the French and the Germans what’s best for Britain, their own constituents are literally starving. Food banks are going through a renaissance. There just aren’t enough volunteers, schemes, community centres or spare tins of soup around to help people out. Why? Well, the blue bloods that vote Tory decided that it doesn’t affect them. They’re okay with their mushroom soup heated on the Aga while looking out at their manicured lawns and admiring the parking of their brand-new seven-seater. If you’ve worked hard in life to get these things, then great, I can’t begrudge anyone that. It’s the people living in places such as the East Marsh in Grimsby or Hackney in London that go and put a tick in the blue box that upsets me. They’re condemning their friends, their families, their neighbours to a life hovering dangerously over (or even below) the ever-changing poverty line. The mind boggles when working-class people from economically-ravaged places such as Sheffield or Manchester vote Conservative. It is because of their ultra-violent approach to divisive politics that there is no steel, there are no factories and the manufacturing industry that this country built itself up from was destroyed in favour of imports and the Common Market. Why pay your own people to make cars when you can buy them from Japan cheaper? Oh yeah, and some of us have the nerve to want to work for the minimum wage! Sorry, and all that. Pardon me for wanting to be able to live independently without fear of eviction, debt or homelessness. I get it that some people are just not affected and a lot of others simply don’t care. Some of us just have that fire burning inside to make a difference or- and this is the key- want to raise awareness of such issues. Capitalism is the devil. Many years ago it was seen as satanic and wrong to worship anything other than the Protestant or Catholic deity. The fat cat business types worship that flimsy piece of pulp paper in their Paco Rabanne wallets. Nothing else matters to them except for how many digits they have in their bank. They are the malevolent mask of materialistic Britain. The slits where their eyes should be can be filled like a piggy bank, put a ten pence piece in their hand and they’ll spin like a carousel. Give a vagrant 50p and you’ll make their day. It really is as different as that. (I should probably add that what the vagrant decides to spend the said 50p on is his business, and his business alone. The difference being that the Capitalist cockmuncher will immediately invest it into another ‘venture’ and spew yet more toxic corporate capital into the atmosphere.) I guess Capitalism is a religion. Its theological analysis can be summed up by a picture of a pound sign next to a single mother crying that she’s had to go without a hot meal all day to feed their children. The capitalist callously laughs in a very villainous way, head rolled back with teeth baring, laughing heartily at another’s misfortune. Richard Branson is laughing his horrible little head off at the thought of millions of us struggling to pay for medical care, due to his favourite gang of Conservatives murdering the NHS and thus making it inevitable that private healthcare is the only way. He is in his luxurious mansion, lighting cigars with tenners and drinking human blood, waiting for his next million to bleep its way through on his diamond-encrusted phone (I wonder if he’s on Virgin mobile?). Do yourselves a favour, Britain, and wake the fuck up. They’re all in bed together. Branson, May, Boris, Osborne, Cameron, Amazon, Microsoft, McDonalds…the big companies that are exempt from paying taxes somehow while people like your mum and dad worry themselves white-haired paying bills for them. They’re all having a big, endless orgy of financial power and Capitalist shagging. I’m sure to some people, the thought of being fucked every night sounds extremely sexy. Think of being shafted by the most expensive prostitute you can imagine, paying them, then paying them again, then receiving a bill saying you owe them money and then, finally, being taken to court by Can’t Pay, We’ll Take It Away bailiffs because you decided you wanted to have fun. You can’t have fun in Britain without filling the pockets of a member of the Bankers Brigade. I’m sure someone will argue here that I’m urging everyone to vote Labour, or embrace socialism. I’m not. All I’m doing is raising the issue that while we are being dictated to as Tory Britain, we will never have our freedom. It’s like the Orwellian Big Brother idea from 1984, slavery is freedom. I’d rather be a free man in my grave, than live as a puppet or a slave. Britain is an ugly place. A country that brought civilisation to the world, a country boasting great literature, cinema, art and history has sold the soul of its people over to finance fanatics like Branson et al. Where will it end? My country is still looked at by other nations as the immaculate face of civilised society. A country of tea, digestive biscuits, The Beatles and crumpets. Until certain aspects are fixed or until people wake up and smell the shite that they’re forced to chow down for breakfast before breaking their back all day for minimum wage, then things can never get better. Sod the Tories. And if any of them consider suing me for libel then it proves my point that chasing the pound coins is far more important to them than the people they claim they know what’s best for! Make a stand. Thanks for listening. Agree or disagree, we’re all entitled to our opinions. I welcome the debate. Bring it on, Britain. The summer is basically over. What’s new with you lot? The good thing about right now is that Yours Truly has secured himself a job as a barman at a pub in Grimsby. The new football season is a few days away and I’m as close to owning my own vehicle as I ever have been. So, good news all-round.
In contrast to this terrible year so far. 2017 has been flexing its malevolent muscle. Terrorist bombs in Manchester, tower blocks catching fire, President Trump, riots in Venezuela and Harry Styles debut album have all blasted their way through to the summer months. Like last year when all them celebrities died, it has been a year drenched in tragedy. There is NEVER an excuse to blow up kids watching a concert. There is NEVER an excuse to discriminate due to religion, race, sexual orientation or social background. Theresa May has had a nightmare, hasn’t she? Good. The blue blood that runs ice-cold through her Tory veins has been tainted further by losing a big majority and several embarrassing U-turns over Brexit (or ‘Breggsit’ as people on the BBC insist on calling it) and her general frumpy features. It’s always a good thing to see the Cuntservative party flailing and floundering under the pressure of a greed-filled society they made themselves. Ahh, karma. I know I haven’t posted for a while but this year has been a very, very busy one. I graduated last week, you know. Oh yes, your favourite irregular, irreverent blogsmith has a degree in Creative Writing. I know it’s something to be extremely proud of but it always closes the curtain on one hell of an era. Three years of sessions, confessions and impressions have finished and the world goes back to normality. To witness just how far I have come since being an unemployed, angry young wastrel of the dole queue to the employable, degree’d up doyen of writing that I am now is insane. The website will be updated with match reports as my first-ever Grimsby Town season ticket enables me to dish the dirt of what goes on in the Pontoon Stand. As I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know, I have far less time on my hands than when I first planted the seeds of Blog Roll into the information superhighway back in mid-2015. Of course, this latest post is just an overview of things to come and things that have been. I don’t wanna dwell on the shocking and senseless extremism that has saturated the media in 2017. Just know that an eye for an eye makes the world go blind, but it certainly makes you feel better to poke someone else in the eye. Things to look forward to: Theresa May getting her P45 from the members of her own party; Jezza sworn in as PM; Trump being impeached for crimes against both toupees and fake tan; The latest series of Game of Thrones and, who could forget, my unnecessary ramblings on politics, football, music and the life of a Masters Student. Have it. Zante was two years ago, mate, madness. Time flies when you’re getting high. Let’s hope the weather improves. Now then, now then. Roll up for another cavalcade of contemptuous claptrap from your resident Grumpy Adolescent Man. The new season is a month away and Grimsby Town have stunned the world by announcing that nobody in particular has joined the club. No disrespect to the four new summer signings (Mitch “Brother of Danny” Rose, Siriki “Brother of that Celtic Striker” Dembele, Sam “Tonight Matthew” Kelly and Nathan “No Nickname” Clarke) but we’ve hardly done any business in the transfer market with the money John Fenty said we’d accrued from selling Omar Bogle in January.
That cash was supposed to entice former goal machine and injury table regular Nicky Maynard to BP and for other veteran Sladist players to join Russell’s Revolution. In the end its been all quiet on the Eastern coast. I guess it might be a case of Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me before we can Cum On And Feel The Noise of Slade’s plans. The squad in place is one that can definitely compete and we have a manager who has seen it all before. The lovely flowing football Town played in the 2005/06 season under Sort It Slade had Mariners foaming at the mouth, dripping fish and chip drool over the hills and far away in deepest Wales, before Cheltenham shanked in a flukey finish and our promotion tilt bit the dust on that day in Cardiff. Anyway, round two might just be better for Slade, a very amiable and jovial character who keeps up his Jolly Johnny persona towards the fans while seething and scathing his players when they perform badly (remember the rant against Thomas Pinault in his first spell when he refused to call him anything other than ‘The Frenchman’). After the emotional cyclone of the non-league years with play-off heartache and triumph, goals galore and humbling defeats to the likes of Hayes and Chasetown, we should be thankful that we don’t have to dig out the SatNav for a trip to Bognor Regis or Buxton. Last season was a disappointment wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a quiet satisfaction that we kept our heads well above the water. It could have been much choppier and the Grimsby trawler could’ve caught its own net on the bottom of the league and been forced back down into the drudgery of the Vanarama National. But, we didn’t. Hursty had us in a decent position before he swanned off to Shropshire, days after he and his assistant Chris Doig said there’d been no contact. Marcus Bignot came in with a wide smile, a seemingly blank cheque and a reputation as a Fine Young Thing. In the end, rather than a BigYES he was more of a BigNOT to fans and board alike and was pushed away from the club after some dire results against the likes of Crewe, Donny and Exeter who all conquered Marcus’ confusing game plan. So, we turned, once more, to Uncle Russ. The man who most resembles a mint imperial gets his feet under the Blundell Park table. He has taken a scientific look at the training methods and put the players through their pre-season paces. I am a fan of his. He took the club to within a whisker of League One at a time when the financial future of the club was uncertain, its foundations were unstable and its fans well and truly fed up with turgid football and a huge turnover of mercenary football journeymen looking for a paycheck. Let’s hope he can inject some passion and fight into a group of players that lacked consistency last season. League Two is very competitive, as always. Mansfield and Luton are blowing teams away with some very impressive transfer dealings while, whisper it quietly, our Impish neighbours from over yonder are assembling a decent squad that could see them repeat last year’s promotion heroics. We’ll take six points off them still, naturally. No matter what, though, the Pontoon stand will be packed and punchy and performing all its perfectly choreographed pirouettes as we see Jones dash beyond defences and the rime of the Ancient Mariner as Danny C gives opposition strikers an F. One thing that needs to be different from last year is coming out from the dressing room fully alert. Get the lads their Ready Brek, Russ, and send them out with an orange glow around their black and white shirts. Too many times last season did we pay for a sluggish start. I guess that’s actually giving slugs a discredit. Grimsby Town were, at times last campaign, still snoozing come three o’clock and only woke up once Jimmy Mac had picked the ball out of his net four times (think Portsmouth and Crewe away). With most of the promotion-winning side of 2016 now gone, the club has taken a new direction. Shaun Pearson, Craig Disley, Omar Bogle and Paul Hurst all departed for pastures new and, erm, Wrexham, over the last six or seven months and it’s almost as if the gorgeous day in that London never happened. To listen to some of the wannabe Alan Hansens on Twitter last season was infuriating. Hurst was a bottler. Bignot was clueless. Slade looks like Uncle Fester. Bogle was a traitor. Arnold switched humbug colours for candy canes and Fenty pocketed the Wigan transfer money to feed his addiction to bullshit. Apparently. Some town fans are the most negative people on the planet. None of last season is relevant right now. All we need to do is regroup, get the fans behind the team and cheer on Russ, Wilkie and Dave Moore to bring back some much-needed strategy and stability. It’s all we can ask. After letting two lynchpins go (Pearson, Disley) in a Dizzapointing lack of loyalty, the club needs to find a new captain, leader and all-round top lad to match the heroics of the Ginger Pirlo and the Poundland John Stones. I’d best make my predictions then, hadn’t I? I nearly always get these wrong but if Town do better than I imagine then I’m hardly gonna complain. I’d stick a fiver on the Dalai Lama, if I was a Tibetan man. With strong competition from Mansfield, Luton, Exeter and the relegated League One clubs alongside a resurgent Lincoln, a never-say-die Accrington team and the perennial bookie-bashing Wycombe- it’s not gonna be a dull moment. Grimsby’s chances rely on the team gelling together like silicon mastic on a new window frame. We have an undoubted star in the veteran Danny Collins, he martials a defence that also has Nathan Clarke in it. Two proven winners with real clout who’ll give you a clout an’all. Collins played for Wales you know. With Ozzie, Jones and the talented Bolarinwa in midfield, the club has quality in the middle and, with the likes of Mr Grimsby (Harry Clifton) and Clemmo, Macca and Rosie to add, everyone has a nickname in Grimmo, it’s a good group. At the time of writing, striking options and a back-up goalkeeper are the major sticking points. Also, after Danny Andrew capped a glorious debut season by winning all the awards at the end of season bash and subsequently ducking and diving to Donny, we have no real left-back; rumours are rife that a long-haired left-back from Liverpool is on his way on loan. I’m gonna stick my neck out and say we’ll challenge for the top seven. Head says 6th; heart says champions. Enjoy the season and I’ll see you at Coventry (H) on the 12th of August. For the first time in ages, here’s a blog roll special.
There is a new deal being hammered out by the boring and two-faced politicians in Westminster which might actually just help my dear old hometown. Context time- The Grimsby of the first half of the twentieth century was one of jobs, prosperity an fish…lots and lots of fish. Now, its well-known that I’m not the biggest fan of my birthplace but with the UK ending an international fishing agreement, that could mean that we can control where we fish in our waters again. Just like our grandfathers did in the booming post-war years. In 1950, Grimsby was the busiest and most bustling fishing port in the world. Yeah, the world. Not just in England. With the collapse of industry in general during the sixties and seventies, high levels of inflation, the common market and mass unemployment ravaged the town’s maritime success. A so-called Cod War with the Icelandic fishing fleets further damaged the industry and sent the biggest trawler fleet to the bottom of the North Sea, literally swimming with the fishes. The years have gone by and not been kind. Frozen food production is one of the few things that are done on the docks these days. Long gone are the days of several generations of the same family going out to sea on a Friday and coming back a three-day millionaire (as the local legend has it). There are still many superstitions that arise from my fishing heritage. Green is bad luck at sea, apparently. The old wives’ tale of not doing the washing on a Friday is something that a fair amount of people still considers. The idea being that the waves would wash away the trawlermen as the water enveloped the dirty laundry. Spooky. Anyway, what I’m getting at is the former glories. For too long, the UK has been aloof and forgotten about its heritage, its industry and its historical past-times. With a Tory fucking government in charge, that won’t change much but if we can control our own waters again then maybe we can add a trawler or two to the now non-existent fleet. Whenever I see the grainy images of sailors in caps, tattooed and pissed as they celebrate a successful seaman mission in the pubs on Freeman Street, I think that how all that has changed in half a decade and that it will probably never be again. The town was built around the fishing community and once that goes, it becomes an inevitability that drugs, apathy, despair, unemployment and spiralling rates of crimes and dereliction fill the void. But with all these other countries now not allowed to fish so close to our shores, it could set off a revolution in the maritime industry. But it probably won’t. I hate to be the negative Norris but it’s unlikely. Grimsby is my hometown, my birthplace and there is literally haddock in my veins as my great-grandfather was a merchant fisherman in the war. I do hope, sincerely, believe it or not, that the town can return to it’s peak years as a thriving capital of fish fingers, cod markets and pontoons bursting with the latest catch. Also, there’s a JustGiving page been set up to help save the Ross Tiger, the last remaining of the aforementioned trawler fleet. Yours truly has pledged a bob or two from his ever-dwindling funds towards the eventual target. Oh yeah and I see that them scumbags over the bridge (Hull) have been given more money to protect their fishing industry. Cheers, yeah. Let the fucking Yorkies safeguard their past, present and future while 'little old Grimsby' on the other side of the Humber is left to fend for themselves. Well fuck you Hull. We look after ourselves. Enjoy your 'breadcakes' and your, probably, incestuous relationships. A serious blog post. Who knew I was capable of that? |