Feeling we had got off to a convincing start, I put the thing on Facebook. First up was Simon Chadwick with Chris Waddle. I liked the rapidity of response. When people think of haircuts and football, deep down, they have one in their heart. And for many that person is Chris Waddle, and his mullet. Waddle retained the mullet for a full decade, keeping it well into the ‘90s, long after such things were fashionable. In a strong mullet-field (Hendrie, Lawrenson, a young Gordon Strachan) Waddle was in.
Then John Armstrong raised Jason Lee. For John, the matter of football haircuts starts and finishes with Lee. There are few footballers who can claim to have invented a hairstyle. And Jason Lee, while a half-decent footballer, will primarily be remembered for his contribution to the world of hair: the pineapple.
Jason Lee – pineapple. End of.
I work with a few scientists and that breed are known for their precision. So it was no surprise that Julia Wilson came up not only with a name, but also a year. She backed Graeme Souness, in his 1979 vintage. This was when his combination of moustache and volume was at its peak. The Scottish psycho look, if you like, or what is now formally known as the Begbie.
The midfield was then completed by Rob Hustwayte, with the suggestion of Attilio Lombardo. For being bald. The anti-hair. No Graham Gooch-style replacements for him. No argument, Lombardo deserves his place.
At this point, I started to become concerned about the backline. James Watson, among several, modestly put Abel Xavier‘s dyed blonde hair and beard into the ring. The wolf look. The sort of hair which wouldn’t look out of place in the Thriller video. Yes.
I was delighted to find that Harjit had gone out into the field with this matter. And she returned, merrily, with Taribo West. I have long admired West for his willingness to experiment. His hair quite possibly peaked in his Inter Milan days with a cut I have called ‘show pony with devil’.
The backline (we have an attacking 3-4-3 formation) is completed by one of my own. My Essex kin, John Terry. The England captain might not be everyone’s choice but I like the fact that, despited being on £150,000 a week, he still goes to the barber and asks for ‘spikes with No.1 shave on back and sides.’ Just like we did back in school.
The goalkeeper’s position was the most hotly contested. Neville Southall was suggested for his ‘do nothing’ approach. Some wanted Dave Beasant (curly with blonde moustache). Several wanted Rene Higuita. Many more were banging the drum for David James. Despite James’s long and distinguished record – the braid, the cornrow, the afro – I wasn’t convinced. That was until Matthew Jupe mentioned that James had once strode out onto the field of play sporting a side parting. I liked it. A classic 1950s look. Which, for a black man, I imagine takes a lot of relaxer. So, for his nod to tradition, and his lifetime achievement in hair, David James is in net.
I had two striker places to fill. Could it be the Baggio rat’s tail? The Nuno Gomes grease? Cisse?
No, what we need was the dreadlocks, with moustache. Yes, Ruud Gullit in his 1988 vintage made an unarguable case for inclusion.
Finally, I was left pondering whether Keegan, who for many had the definitive perm, should be in. But then, at the eleventh hour, Rob Ball, brought Walter Casagrande into the frame. I am ashamed to say, I hadn’t even heard of this prince among men. Apparently he was up front for Brazil in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. Moreover, the man had a very fine perm, in the Rick James mode. While we all have a lot of time for Keegan’s perm, I felt Casagrande, in the end, had the better hair.
And that is what it has to come down to. Casagrande completes the line-up.
The Latin Rick James – Casagrande
Thanks to all who contributed. Here is the line-up. Haircut XI
Goal
David James (Matt Jupe et al) – corn row, braid, afro, side parting
Defence
Taribo West (Harjit’s brother) – show pony with devil
Abel Xavier (James Watson) – dyed blonde beard
John Terry (Richard Purnell) – spiked with No 1 shave back and sides
Midfield
Chris Waddle (Simon Chadwick and many others) – mullet
Jason Lee (John Armstrong) – pineapple
Attilio Lombardo (Rob Hustwayte) – bald
Graeme Souness 1979 (Julia Wilson) – perm and moustache
Attack
Karel Poborsky (Harjit Kaur) – flowing locks with product
Ruud Gullit (Steve Bocock) – dreads with moustache
Walter Casagrande (Rob Ball) – The Latin perm
Don’t agree with the line-up? Let me know who would be in your Fantasy Haircut XI. Remember, it’s the hair ability, not football ability, which counts.
So, I died on stage tonight. That was to be expected, considering I was reading poetry in the public bar of a Brixton pub.
People were coming in. Saying hello to friends. Ordering drinks. Going for a piss. Whatever.
What they were not doing was listening to my tender words. It’s hard to keep going when only the promoter of the night, the estimable Dennis Just Dennis, is watching you. No one else, not even your mates, could give a shit.
Up there on stage, without some sort of human response, you have that feeling perhaps akin to being in purgatory. Someone is going to send you to hell in a minute, but not before they smoke a rollie out back in the beer garden.
It was a truly horrible experience. It wasn’t Dennis’s fault. He usually has the room upstairs, where people are up there if they want to be there. But tonight, there was some sort of party and we got moved to the public bar.
Dennis put a positive spin on it. ‘It’s a chance to get people from off the street, win over the crowd down here.’ He and I knew that was small talk. It was going to be a hard night.
After I’d done my slot, I fucked off to the back of the bar and drank Guinness for a bit.
But then Paul Birtill was on. He is one of my favourite poets. A scouser living down south. Bone dry wit. Micro-poems. The kind of poetry I’d never produce but love to hear.
I encourage my mates to come up the front and listen to the man. He reeled off his set, battling against the woman with the machine gun laugh at the back of the bar.
He got some laughs. Less than usual, but still, he’s a pro. He did well. Much better than me.
Then it was time for a break and after that was Grassy Noel and his band, Ape. Grassy had witnessed proceedings, sipping orange juice in the wings (he’s teetotal).
His band I had seen at Kid, I wrote back. They were absolutely incredible, and went down a storm.
This time, Grassy, in trademark black trilby and black jacket, was in full attack mode. I liked to think that he’d seen the way his fellow poets had suffered up on stage, and with his band behind him, was meting out some justice.
He started off not using words. Just noises, bellowed into the mike. It wasn’t pretty, but it was pretty effective. Quite a few people left the bar.
The band started firing up, the stand-up double-bass with bulldog clip on the strings, the better for producing harsh clipped basslines. One of his colleagues was playing the vuvuzela, the instrument of choice at the last World Cup in South Africa. The other fellow was producing strange sounds from a lap top.
And then Grassy started naming wartorn countries. Libya…Afghanistan…Pakistan. For ages, not looking at the crowd, down in the microphone, juddering, shuddering.
Then he got onto Humpty Dumpty, in his preacher-like Irish tones, got down, deep down into the nursery rhyme, which, by christ, has never sounded more sinister.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall…Humpty Dumpty had a great fall…
One of the band started clanging two ancient fire extinguishers together.
More people left. Beer garden, out front, whatever. Just out. Fucking brilliant.
His band got the horns out, the cornet and the alto sax. This is where they sound all Radiohead, in the Amnesiac era. Freaky as fuck. Really really good.
Now Grassy’s going on about the Seventh Seal. Who know what he’s talking about, but it’s dark. Dark and incomprehensible. But I understand. This is punk. This is brutal attack music and poetry. This is living without compromise. This is G-Force poetry. If My Bloody Valentine did poetry, it would sound like this.
By the end of the set, it was just me, my two friends, Dennis, a few more freaks, and the band. Everyone had wisely got the fuck out.
People have the right to enjoy a drink without being assaulted by poetry. And poets have the right to bring their words into pubs and carry out assaults. Everyone is right. And not everyone can be happy all the time.
I died on stage tonight. And tonight Grassy Noel saved my life.
In this video, I make an impassioned defence of the human rights of Chelsea and England footballer, Ashley Cole. My speech, while being rather rambling, covers off most of the salient criticisms made of this most misunderstood of Premier League stars – the move from Arsenal to Chelsea, the lovemaking, the gun incident.
Please do watch and let me know what you think. I want to hear all sides of this most pertinent debate. However, ultimately, what I am looking for is greater tolerance and understanding of our well-paid footballers, particularly Ashley.
There were, however, some remarkably arguments in opposition to Ashley. This video below shows how it is only through going out into the community and talking to people face to face that you really get to understand where some of this dislike stems from
With the passing of Nate Dogg, the g-funk era has well and truly ended. It is time to remember the remarkable, revolutionary impact of Nate Dogg, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and indeed the whole of Tha Dogg Pound, on popular culture.
Let us cast our minds back to the early 1990s. Pop music was very different from what it is today. Phil Collins and Bryan Adams bestrode the charts like ageing warriors of middle-of-the-road rock. Kylie Minogue was a fixture in the UK top 10. Mariah Carey was just beginning her trilling rise to pop notoriety.
One of the greats - Nate Dogg
The rap music scene was burgeoning, but some of the artists held views which we can now see were wildly off-kilter. Some rap groups used the art form to promote radical political views, feminism even (Public Enemy); others, even more troublingly, sought to advance the cause of peace (De La Soul). It is shocking to us in the 21st Century, but these groups rarely, if ever, described women as bitches, or black men as n*ggaz.
With these groups dominating hip-hop, it was clearly the time for an alternative. Yes, there were tireless, hardworking folk such as Ice-T and Ice Cube advocating traditional American values of misogyny, homophobia, gun-love and laissez-faire capitalism. But these rappers, while essentially having the right approach, were too rough-edged for the mainstream.
If rap was to take over, something had to change. A new approach was needed. It was time for g-funk. Enter Tha Dogg Pound.
To all but the most underground fan, the key moment was the release of Dr Dre’s Chronic album in 1992. This album effectively ushered in g-funk, which used George Clinton and other classic funk samples with Dre’s beats, while giving the young Nate Dogg and Snoop Doggy Dogg room to express the full range of their talents.
A good example was Deeez Nuuuts, which featured, Snoop, Nate, Warren G and Daz (it has never been confirmed whether Daz was named after the washing powder – however I use the product to put a g-funk spin on my household chores).
While the rest of the chaps were spitting truth from the booth, the crucial role Nate Dogg played was delivering the gangsta lyrics in the innocent, honeyed tones of a classic soul singer.
So when Nate came with the inimitable line:
I can’t be faded, I’m a n*gga from the mothafucking streets
It made the heart soar, and nourished the soul. It was Nate who converted gangsta rap from being for hardcore fans only, to something your grandmother would dance to at a wedding reception.
Like many great artists who have died, the media has boiled his long and distinguished career down to just one moment: his work on the Warren G megahit, Regulate. There’s no doubt this is one of the greatest songs of all time, but Nate Dogg’s career went far beyond that.
I am fond of his contribution on Bitch Please, but particularly the follow-up, Bitch Please II, on Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP.
Nate’s chorus went like this:
You don’t really wanna fuck wit me Only n*gga that I trust is me Fuck around and make me bust, this heat
With Snoop’s rejoinder:
That’s, the devil, they always wanna dance
I can also strongly recommend his work with Knoc-turn’al on Str8 West Coast, Ludacris (Area Codes) and of course Just Doggin’ with Tha Dogg Pound, from a packed discography.
So what was Nate Dogg’s impact? While he was often the sideman, it was Nate’s voice which meant that a generation of young gentlemen could listen to rap music which their girlfriends could find acceptable. The girl could convince herself that Snoop didn’t say what she thought he said, while the chap would be perfectly sure what was being said, roll a blunt and act upon it.
For me, Nate Dogg is a modern version of the old blues shouter, Jimmy Rushing, whose theme tune, Jimmy’s Blues, could be seen as the ancient template for Nate’s style.
When the dust has settled on his untimely death, we will remember a man who helped bring misogyny and gun-love back into fashion again with his once-in-a-generation voice.
Now I know there are a lot of people out there who favour ‘conscious’ hiphop over gangsta. Conscious is basically an umbrella term which covers ‘intellectual’ through to ‘preachy polysyllabic bollocks’. The essential difference is that it is substance over style, whereas g-funk was the other way around.
While I don’t mind a message in the music I listen to, when you live in suburban London and work in an office you want to listen to something with a bit of swagger to get you motivated to stare at Outlook for another eight hours. It acts as a thrilling counterpoint to my fairly tepid existence. I do like Saul Williams and Mos Def, but I prefer the gangsta shit.
Nate Dogg went for the gusto, the style, and he’s one of the big reasons rap is the dominant force in music it is today.
Massive love to Nate Dogg. All those up in the heavens: you really do not want to fuck with him.
There have been so many malicious words written about you in the media that it is time to set the record straight. There are a lot of sad people who take pleasure in other people’s troubles. They have a name. They are called haters and this letter is my chance to help fight these evil folk who try to destroy your good reputation. While I have only seen you on telly, I believe I know the real Ashley Cole. I can see beyond the lurid headlines to the good person you really are.
Ashley Cole – misunderstood
Of course, you have had your problems in life, just like all of us have.
Yes, you had to walk out on Arsenal when they only offered you £56,000 a week to play football for them.
Yes, you fell in love with and married a foul-mouthed Geordie woman notorious for beating a cleaner in a nightclub.
Yes, you cheated on that same wife with several women.
Yes, when you had sex with one of those women you had to stop having sex to vomit on her cream rug, before finishing having sex with her.
Yes, you texted other women pictures of your erect penis as a way to seduce them.
And yes, you shot a work experience boy at Chelsea’s training ground at point blank range with an air rifle.
What infuriates me is how people are so quick to judge you on the basis of these incidents. Who stops to ask what Ashley Cole’s side of the story is?
So you left Arsenal for Chelsea because they weren’t prepared to give you enough money. This is a simple wage dispute, like any other. People, hurtfully, called you Cashley.
HARDWORKING
They ignore how hard you work. You train for two hours every day, and play in matches once or even twice a week. In those matches you run up and down the left flank, making tackles as well as finding time to swear at referees. This is not easy. Not easy at all. Those sanctimonious, Guardian-reading nurses and teachers should try it some time. Then they will realise you are well-paid but not unfairly so.
So you married Geordie lass Cheryl Cole, a woman primarily known for lip-synching on telly and getting slutty tattoos more often than she eats. Well, the path of love is not something we can predict or do anything about. Yes, I would have preferred it if you had met someone more appropriate to your intellect. Kerry Katona, perhaps. But no man can criticise another’s love matches. You loved her, she loved you and you sealed your love in a well-publicised photo shoot for OK! magazine. Those pictures, in front of the white Bentley, truly showed that love is blind.
A lot of love to give – Ashley Cole
After time, you ‘cheated’ on her. Well, I say this. You, Ashley Cole, are a young man with a lot of love to give. I don’t think you should be criticised for spreading that love around. Christians spread the word of the Lord. You spread your semen. There’s surely not much difference. It’s all love and if the haters can’t understand that, that’s their problem, not yours.
You texted pictures of your penis to women. The old-fashioned romantic in me does wonder whether dinner and a movie is not a more appropriate seduction method. There again, I am not as busy as you are. We live in a digital age and in 50 years’ time, people might look back on your texting your erect knob to a bird with a message saying ‘want some?’as the height of chivalry. We should leave that for history to judge.
Most recently, there has been this gun incident. Yes, you shot a student. He was hurt. However, you explained you were only ‘larking about’ and apologised afterwards. You made a mistake but got the matter sorted. I hope the police desist from their unseemly investigation of this perfectly explicable event.
A GREAT MAN
In conclusion, Ashley, I would say this. You are a man. A great man. And like all great men, you rightly refuse to kowtow to society’s expectations. Other Premier League footballers would have sought gagging orders to stem the flow of kiss’n’tell stories, or embarked on a PR campaign to show the public a more sympathetic side to their character, perhaps building schools in Africa or something. You could have stayed faithful to your trophy wife, or at least not cheated on her in a manner that necessitated the co-operation and silence of several poorly-paid underlings. But you don’t because you know this:
You, Ashley, are really good at football, which means you have an absolute right to do whatever you please.
When people discover that I am a vegetarian, they are often surprised. They look at me and find none of the deathly pallor commonly associated with the veggie.
When conversing with carnivores, I concede that I haven’t been one of ‘them’ for that long, only about three years.
Put at ease, they become fascinated by me as a specimen. Their scientific and sociological impulses are aroused. How can I, all healthy looking and energetic, be a veggie? They want to know how it started. The story goes like this.
For shame, I became fascinated by vegetables, and uninterested in meat
Back in 2007, I was living in Brixton with my friend Dan. He is from Wigan, the pie-eating capital of the UK, and probably the world. He’d been brought up to regard vegetarianism as something weird that southerners get up to, like dogging. It was beyond his comprehension.
In our happy Rushcroft Road flat, Dan and I would cook for each other (sweet, isn’t it?). He would roll in from work and pop some chops under the grill, or I’d roast some chicken breasts. He was quite advanced as Wiganers go, and only ate pies or sausages three or four times a week. We occasionally grilled salmon, as a nod towards cholesterol levels and a healthy lifestyle.
Things were going fine. The household was steady. But for whatever reason, I became unnaturally attracted by vegetables, to the point that I saw them not as a side dish, but the main part of a meal. I started making pasta with vegetables for dinner, or perhaps a tomato risotto. Dan was a tolerant fellow and put up with it.
One day, however, he came home and excitedly showed me some sausages he’d picked up from Moen’s, the posh butcher’s in Clapham. I said that I didn’t fancy them, at which point his equanimity broke.
‘ARE YOU A VEGETARIAN?’ he said, using the v-word as a pejorative.
‘I think I might be,’ I said quietly, eyes downcast.
‘Oh,’ he said. Neither of us expected that.
‘Does this include fish?’ he said hopefully.
‘I don’t know.’ It was all so new.
‘So you don’t want these sausages, then?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, what are you going to eat?’
‘Some vegetables, I suppose.’
Then, like all big news, it became a matter of telling people. I told my mother, who told my father. She took it in her stride. I’d dabbled in environmentalism, which she knew can lead to vegetarianism. She saw it as an opportunity to cook different meals, expand her repertoire.
My father, however, is northern, from Leeds, and wasn’t prepared at all. He was as unsettled as Dan by this turn of events. I imagined him sitting at home, casting his mind back across the rearing process and wondering where he had gone wrong. Had he shown rather too much interest in some sprouts in the early years? Not finished a second portion of roast beef? He would have concluded that his carnivorous credentials were impeccable, and blamed my mother for being ‘soft on the boy’.
My first Christmas as a vegetarian was a fraught affair. Blood relations kept asking me ‘what are you going to eat?’ in worried tones. They believed my vegetarianism to be a sign of a deeper malaise, a mental unravelling of some sort.
I assured them in a ‘there’s-nothing-to-look-at-here’ way, that it was all right. I’d just have the vegetables, thanks. My mother heaped roast potatoes, parsnips, sprouts, red cabbage and carrots on my plate and wondered whether I had enough, eyeing me nervously throughout the meal.
With time, my nearest and dearest realised the new me was very much like the old. I was still the same greedy bastard they’d known before. I still ate as much as I possibly could on any given occasion. Apart from the meat.
Dan and I went our separate ways a few months later. I can’t say the vegetarianism didn’t play a part. However, and this shows the live and let live attitude of the man, we remain friends, despite my unorthodox lifestyle.
What probably saved the friendship between me and this connoisseur was that even if I am unduly fascinated by the aubergine, I still like to tuck into the cheese and wine. And, as I like to say, without the meat, you have far more room for a good bit of Stilton.
A lovely head and shoulders shot of a Stilton. So good, some French don't sneer at it. Occasionally.
‘We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall, keeping us tied and true’
Joni Mitchell, My Old Man, 1971
I think we can say conclusively that Joni Mitchell, when she wrote the above song at the back-end of the hippy era, had not been to the National Wedding Show. Because if she had done, her lyric, if accurately rendered, would read something more like:
We need a piece of paper from the city hall, keeping us tied and true, and we also need a fantastically expensive wedding, reception and honeymoon which will cost a small fortune, to show that we love each other.
Yes, I took a trip to the National Wedding Show at Olympia at the weekend. This is the place where that proposal, that down on one knee burbling of, ‘will you, my dear?’ turns into reality. The place where romance morphs into budgets and colour schemes and timelines. Where men realise what they have let themselves in for, and the women say, ‘don’t worry, just organise the music at the reception, and leave the rest to me.’
I wasn’t there because of any upcoming nuptials on my part. I was volunteering for Breakthrough Breast Cancer, for whom I also work. The people who organise the thing had generously given the charity a stand to promote our good cause. We spent our time chatting to the people about the various pins we had on offer which could be alternative wedding favours.
To give you some understanding of my level of innocence before attending on Sunday, I didn’t even know what a wedding favour was. For the unenlightened, they are the sugared almonds, or similar, that you get on the table when you sit down to a meal at a wedding. In the weddings I have attended, I have clearly scoffed the little blighters long before ascertaining that they are a traditional gesture of friendship from the happy couple.
The Wedding Fair was a bustling place, mostly with business-like mothers dragging their daughter and groom-to-be around, looking at dresses, places to get married, places to have receptions, caterers, the lot. It’s a place to gather ideas and start to scope out what’s out there.
Some were floating around the place, excited by the possibilities of it all. Others were utterly bewildered, finding out that, yes, even trifling things like confetti and cup cakes have got to be bought. And if you think you might struggle into the wedding dress of your dreams, there was even a Boot Camp to get you into shape.
There was some wonderfully novel sights to be seen down at the show. Opposite us was a heavy-set fellow from Scunthorpe who had a stand called Amazing Smile. This was offering a kind UV light treatment to the teeth, to whiten them, with prices starting at £89.99. I never knew such a product existed, and thought it preposterously expensive. But apparently this was very cheap and prices are usually in the hundreds of pounds. He did a roaring trade.
The Amazing Smile stand drew some interesting characters to it. Some of the ladies getting their gnashers done were in what you might call the Silvio Berlusconi class. But the biggest (in every way) customers were the Dream Boys. These are hen party specialists, appearing at various locations across the UK to do their show. Needless to say, they were all getting their teeth done, some quite possibly twice. It appears that the dream these boys were peddling was that of a group of men, quite possibly from Essex, with gym-built physiques and unnaturally whitened teeth, stripping down to the posing pouch. The show has been running for years, so it clearly works.
One of the blokes told us they support a different cancer charity each year, and have given tens of thousands to charity, including Breakthrough. So it appears that everyone is a winner.
By the end of Sunday, it had been a hard few days for many of the people working there. I saw models who had been doing the catwalk show hobbling about. Some of the stallholders were on autopilot – dreaming of being at home with their feet up.
When we tottered out of there, I wondered whether this modern obsession with highly elaborate, highly expensive weddings kills romance stone dead. I needed some sort of affirmation that people who get married aren’t just burdened by societal pressure and financial strain. On the cab back to the office, I prattled to the driver about the wedding show. He told me that it was the day of his ninth wedding anniversary, and he was out working.
Economics conquering love? Not a bit of it. He was taking his wife out for a meal the following day, he told me with a smile. A heartwarming tale to end a good, but rather unromantic day.
Last night’s display by Gennaro Gattuso was possibly the best example of a short man going on the rampage since Joe Pesci went at that poor unfortunate with the telephone in Goodfellas.
Infuriated by the beanpole striker, short man Gattuso goes after Crouch
Not only did he hand out this finger-wagging attack on Peter Crouch, probably just on account of Crouch’s preposterous size, but he sought out Joe Jordan, a jock known as hard even amongst his own rugged people, and dealt him a headbutt.
(A note on this headutt: while I fully admire the handing out of a headbutt by Gattuso on Joe Jordan, I cannot admire the execution. It was one of those half-hearted push-headed efforts which suggests that even this volcanic footballer was holding himself in somewhat. It reminds me of Zidane in the World Cup Final. I still can’t understand why he didn’t deal him the blow to the bridge of the nose rather than the breast bone. My philosophy – you should never waste a good headbutt.)
This takes me back to my own football-playing heyday when my pragmatic manager sent me out, week after week, to man-mark the tallest player on the field. There I would be, all furious because of the brevity of my physique, and take great pride in pulling this week’s giant to the ground with a succession of, shall we say, ‘committed’ challenges.
Occasionally, when it looked my nascent short man syndrome was not quite to the fore, he would suggest amiably that ‘the bigger they are the harder they fall’. That, it’s safe to say, was all that was needed to fire up the old Napoleon Complex and leave some poor gentle giant wondering why short men had such aggressive streaks.
Well, as Gattuso or Pesci would testify, there really is no explaining it. There is no saying why when I see a tall man I boil up in some sort of apoplectic rage. Is it genetic? Is it environment? Is it a complex mix of both? Hard to tell. It’s just the way it is.
And football is all the better for it. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Xavi suggested that Barcelona’s style of play was the most beautiful and, almost, that the result was secondary. Well, after we had watched the tedium of Spain’s succession of 1-0s winning the World Cup, I think the football fraternity is ready for a taste of an older style, that style of football where no one can be quite sure they are going to leave the field of play with all four limbs still attached.
Because, on the night that Arsenal play Barcelona, in what the aesthetes are calling a meeting of philosophers and artists, we should remember this: football began as a game being played with a pig’s bladder between working men who wanted to thrash a ball about and hurt each other after a hard day working in the fields. In an age when the two-footed, studs-up challege is anathema to many, we should rejoice in the behaviour of players such as Gattuso who are in it for the physical battle and as a legal way to unleash their psychotic tendencies.
From one short man to another: Gattuso, I salute you.
Notes: Gattuso is about 5ft 9ins. This is not short when it comes to the general population but in the world of sport people who are usually six feet or above, he certainly is. And what I always say when people are unsure if a man is truly short or not – you will be able to tell. With Gattuso, I think we can rest assured, in his heart of hearts, he is a short man and proud.
Joe Pesci keeping his short man syndrome nicely under control
President Mubarak has gone, despite the very generous $1.5 billion each year he received from the US to keep his people in the state to which they had become accustomed. Throughout the 18 days of protests the west remained unwilling to speak out too strongly against their friend and ally. Like Pinochet, he was a man with whom the west could conduct business.
So here is a poem in honour of
A good despot
People called him a dictator, a tyrant, a despot
I say: that is not the man I know
I know a man of learning, culture, principles
And say this world must have gone mad when
A man, a military man, can give 60 years
Of unswerving service to his nation
And be treated like a common or garden criminal
It was laughable to me, seeing those unwashed beasts
filling the streets with their tatty flags and odours –
Couldn’t you almost smell them through the flat screen tv? –
Bearing their rotting cavitied teeth,
and demanding, what? Some kind of idiot justice
and an end to the rule of a man, a friend to the west
A man who had done his duty and his exceptional best
They said he had feathered his nest a little bit
Well, did he not deserve that for playing such a
calm, considered role in the realm of geopolitics?
We are not talking about anything insidious,
We are talking about a man who
was steadfast in doing the right thing,
A man whose farthest thought was abandoning ship
He has gone now, sating the shameful need of
A nation’s children to be rid of their grandfather.
The next days will be hard, yet I feel sure
he will be wise enough to reflect that
He is merely the latest in a line of great leaders
who leave power quietly admired by the many
while loudly decried by the hotheaded few
Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, was in converation at a free LSE lecture tonight. He confirmed that the book, about the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market, and subsequent spectacular fallout, had been bought by Brad Pitt and Paramount Pictures.
He also said that Brad Pitt would star in the film as Steve Eisman, a hedge fund manager who made millions by betting against the subprime market.
Lewis, in his usual irreverent style, described Eisman as a guy who ‘gets pleasure out of saying things that are true and offensive, like a really bright four-year-old on steroids.’
Eisman’s wife says of him in the book, ‘Even on Wall Street people think he is rude and obnoxious and offensive.’
So it looks Pitt should have a lot of fun playing this character, and we should have a lot of fun watching him when the film comes out.
Lewis had a host of great throwaway quotes at LSE:
“People have unreliable memories, especially about their own financial decisions.”
He pointed out the most of the characters in the book are reprehensible in many respects. About Greg Lippmann, who had shorted the market at Deutsche Bank: “Even when he is saying a profound truth he can seem like he is lying.”
About the bond traders: “None of them thought they had made bad decisions. They thought they were victims of a natural disaster…they were not good witnesses. They hadn’t understood what was happening to them when it was happening to them.”
He also told a terrific story about his own LSE days when the students used the sport budget to buy a racehorse. Upshot was the racehorse wasn’t very good and some people weren’t happy so the sport budget was instead spent on sending folk like Lewis around Europe to play basketball.
Lewis described LSE students in the early 1980s as ‘the most irresponsible people I’ve met, including sub-prime mortgage traders.’
He also showed himself to be a master of the Q&A, using all of the questions as an opportunity to pull out more from his seemingly endless supply of stories.
And finally he gave this wonderful insight into his writing style and indeed good writing generally: “The trick is to leave a hole in the story to allow the reader in and let them exercise judgement.”
By the factory wall 