Most of us have checked out our “googlegangers” - the hybried term (part Google, part doppelganger) coined for typing your own name into the world’s biggest search engine to see what it throws up.
I’m sure I recall doing this a few year ago and coming across a children’s entertainer/magician and a cabaret singer. However, it’s all about search engine optimisation these days and they must have slipped down the rankings.
Googling yourself is a bit of harmless fun and a shortlived, vicarious peek into the lives, interests and thoughts of people (usually north American) who share your name.
However, it pales when compared to the shock of unexpectedly stumbling upon a photograph of someone who looks so like you that your nearest and dearest find it difficult to work out if it is you or not.
Especially when that person is not on the other side of the world - but a mere 50 miles up the road.
So, thanks to Brian Lewis at Deadline Press & Picture Agency (and soon to be at the Scottish Sun) for bringing me no end of ribbing by finding this picture which accompanied a recent press release from RAF Leuchars.
Firstly, let me congratulate the RAF Leuchars team on raising £2000 for local charity, Enable, which helps people with disabilities. And for the recent prodigious output from their media office, who have been extremely busy - and I hope - garnering many column inches of positive coverage.
For those who don’t automatically see the likeness, let me say that not only was I taken aback by this image, so were my missus and my mother. It doesn’t really get any more inarguable (damning?) than that. And just to mop up any lingering doubts, I’ve even looked out this image of yours truly for comparison:
The first thing that strikes me is that it has to be a stroke of bad luck that my lookalike wears a hat straight out of Thunderbirds, along with a comedy RAF outfit complete with lapels that look as though they would probably help the wearer to take off.
Apart from that, I suppose I should be grateful that Squadron Leader Rob de Boyes is such a handsome swine. Oh - and give thanks to anybody who’ll listen that he’s not actually called Roger de Boyes.
Never one to miss milking an opportunity to the max, I’m going to take this chance to coax a few more hits out of my old pal, Phani Tikkala.
For me, at least, his name has become synonomous with near superhero-like feats of stamina (and thousands of blog hits).
So much so that my chum Mhairi Munro thougth of me when she managed to escape the demands of baby Andrew for a few precious moments to read her email - and found this pearl in her inbox:
For those who haven’t yet received it, the email comes along with it’s own wee narrative about the Marvel-ously named (actually, for accuracy I should stress that both Superman and Batman were out of the DC Comics stable) fella from Singapore and his unfortunate brush with airport security officials:
Airport Security, Customs Official: May I know your name?
Customer: Batman.
CO: May I know your name?
Cust: My name is Bat-man.
CO: Trying to be funny?! What is your surname?
Cust: Supar-man.
CO arrests the guy.
Stupid guy. Should have told them his name was soemthing believable, like Hulk Wolverine.
When I was 19 one of my best pals was a pretty serious amateur boxer. He ate carefully, trained with a discipline that involved a level of self-sacrifice none of our peers would have entertained and was in near perfect physical conditon. His fitness was awesome. All of this I could see with my own eyes on a daily basis.
What took a bit more understanding was the amount of sheer craft involved in mastering the noble art.
My friend was a thinker and we watched endless videos of the fighters he admired, for their speed, skill and tactics - most notably Sugar Ray Leonard. So I knew that while it ultimately came down to who could bludgeon whom most effectively over 12 rounds, the sport in its purest form involved guile, finesse, speed of thought and a a real degree of artistry.
This was brought home to me one afternoon in my friend’s back garden when he invited myself and another pal to spend as long as we could pummelling him. Two on one and he promised he wouldn’t throw a punch in return. While we wore bag gloves (not much in the way of padding), he would wear sparring gloves (which were the most padded gloves it was possible to get). In other words, even if he forgot himself for a second threw a punch at one of us, it would be as painless as possible, while any punches we landed would be felt acutely.
The aim of this exercise, as we soon found out, was to demonstrate to us two non-boxers, just how much skill was involved. In the few frenzied minutes we threw everything we had at him neither of us managed to connect with a meaningful punch. Those which actually landed (and I was utterly amazed by the number which he successfully slipped) were caught harmlessly on gloves or elbows.
It’s safe to say I was dumbfounded. In a few minutes a sport I already respected attained an entirely new status. The casual ease with which he avoided, or parried blows from two of us was like a scene from the Matrix. We must have seemed like we were moving in slow motion to his fine-tuned boxer’s brain. Bear in mind that while my boxer pal was a big talent in the local amateur scene, the gulf between him and the top class professionals was akin to the gap between the footballers at Linlithgow Rose and those in a World Cup winning team.
Needless to say, I’ve never look at any boxing match the same way since. I always try to see beyond two blokes thumping each other to see the dedication, discipline, conditioning and undeniable level of skill involved.
Imagine learning all those skills for boxing and it’s easy to see why it requires endless hours of training, repeated day-after-day and year-after-year. Then imagine also having to learn all the equivalent skills in wrestling (the olympic version, not the theatrical joke that is WWF). And judo or ju-jitsu. And maybe a spot of Thai kick boxing as well.
Consider the combined training regime for all of those combat sports - and the feat of memory and the dedication required to master each highly-technical move, throw, grip , slip or avoidance technique. Wonder at how difficult it would be to learn how to read opponents across all those separate disciplines. Finally picture the culmination of that process - and stepping into an arena to face an opponent every bit as highly trained, motivated and hungry.
Welcome to the world of Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). Step into the controversial subject that is cage fighting - and to a fiercely contested debate on whether this is a genuine sport, or a form of bloodlust and barbarism with no place in a decent civilisation.
When Holyrood Partnership agreed to provide media support to Cage War Productions for its Max Xtreme Fighting event at Braehead Arena, it was with a degree of trepidation. I expected us to be firefighting constanlty while knee-jerk reactionaries would all too easily command the moral high ground. Previous experience told me reasoned argument in favour of cage fighting would be virtually ignored - steamrollered by a heady mixture of righteous indignation and misplaces anti-violence sentiments.
However, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Firstly the coverage by STV (which has been slightly amended in the YouTube video a the top of this post) is pretty well balanced. Even more impressive is this article (click here) by Alasdair Reid in the latest Sunday Herald magazine. Inscisive, insightful and effortlessly written it is also gives a genuinely thoughtful - and thought provoking - view of the world of cage fighting for Britain’s aspiring competitors.
Each piece of coverage introduces a separate MMA fighter - and both are eloquent and persuasive advocates for their sport. At best MMA is misunderstood. At worst it is reviled. Add to that its status as little more than underground and minority sport in the UK, factor in the dedication and training required and the lack of financial rewards. All of these factors make it quite remarkable that Glasgow should boast two such impressive spokesmen as Anthony Thompson (the philosophy student featured in the video)and Paul McVeigh, who is quoted in the Sunday Herald article.
Pick of the quotes for me is Mcveigh’s snortingly comical dismissal of the local politician, who branded cage fighting a danger because of the strobe lighting and loud music. His riposte was this classic put down:
“Disney On Ice has strobe lighting, music and fighting and nobody talks about banning that.”
Now that is a quite brilliant piece of fighting talk.
What is the official term, I wonder, for the pressure that builds up just behind the eyes when you have loads of subjects you want to blog about - but no time to get them typed out?
Blogjam? Bloggage? Backblog?
Whatever it’s called, I’ve got it bad. I’ve had one of those busy periods of such intensity there’ve been times when I wondered if the old ticker will see me through to my 40th later this year. And the casualites (along with family, social life and regular sleep patterns) have included any faint hopes of regular blog updates.
So I’ve got plenty to catch up on. Earlier this week one of those busy days was spent driving to Liverpool to meet with a potential new PR client. It was my first ever trip to that fine city and I hope to hear soon if we’ve been successful with our pitch.
While I was drawn there by work, the venue was next door to historic Aintree Racecourse, better known to millions of previous visitors as the home of the Grand National. However, gambling is not one of my many vices, so I don’t profess to know much about the nags.
What I DO know about is breakfast. Anyone who’s worked with me knows my epic, albeit unorthodox appetites - especially in the morning. For instance, here is a recent missive from Danny Groom, the man who now runs the dailymail.co.uk website and whom I caught up with recently for the first time in years:
Spookily, I was telling one of my colleagues the other day about the famous Douglas breakfast of a baked bean toastie, jam on toast and a banana - all served by a drug-fuelled lunatic with dirty fingernails.
Danny, who has worked on the newsdesks of PA, The Observer and the Daily Mail, was referring to our time together on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. There was no canteen in the building so we used to send out for breakfast to the local sarnie/snack shop - which had dodgy hygiene standards but would deliver to our desks.
Anyway, I digress, purely to explain why the horseracing Mecca of Aintree held little interest for me, particularly when my belly started rumbling after a four hour drive down the M6 (including a rather scary white out experience on the Biggar Road).
Within minutes of arriving I’d found my way to a greasy spoon cafe (bypassing the fish and chip shop which was, bafflingly, open for business at 11.30am) dragging a reluctant Raymond with me. I knew exactly what I wanted: a cup of tea and a roll with sausage and brown suace.
This proved frustratingly difficult to get hold of. The Scouse woman behind the counter made extremely hard work of my accent - and after several minutes of negotiating, still seemed not to understand the concept of a roll with sausage.
At one point she tried to serve me a baguette. The fact this run down caff even had fresh baguettes was a minor miracle - but didn’t divert me from my hunger for a simple breakfast roll. Finally the woman grasped that all I wanted was a round roll - “Ahhhh - a barncake!” she exclaimed.
Shortly my cuppa arrived - along with the most ginormous roll I’ve ever been served. This thing was like a gargantuan, floury, freak-of-nature big brother of the roll I’d been expecting. And I swear, there must have been six or seven separate sausages on it.
Raymond’s eyse widened in awe. Mine simply widened in anticipation.
True to form, I polished it off in short order and have to offer my hearty congratulations to the makers of Liverpool Barn Cakes, which seem to be a regional variation of the Stotty Cake I’d previously encountered in Newcastle.
An hour or so later it was lunchtime, and our hosts laid on a fine spread of fruit and sandwiches. I felt obliged to tuck in again.
Apart from having a reputation as being grey, humourless men with bad breath and worse suits (unjustified, I’m sure - some of them are women), they also suffer because just about every unpopular decision in business is taken by the “bean counters“.
Oh aye. We’ve all sat in the office cursing the folly of the top floor accountants and their cost saving decisions, usually made with a complete detachment from reality and common sense and no understanding of the practical demands of business.
Certainly, during my time in newspapers there was a sense of deepening despair that, after decades of being run by journalists, newspapers had fallen into the hands of the dreaded number crunchers and things would never be the same again.
In fairness I suspect that’s less to do with the direct influence of the accountants and more to do with the fact that papers were dragged kicking and screaming out of an age of gentlemanly excess - and into the cut-throat, free-market Thatcherite 80s. Fom that point the rise of satellite and digital TV, improvements in radio and the arrival of the monster that is the internet have all further conspired to change the media for ever in a relatively short period.
But as often as not it’s the hapless, socially inept and dandruff-bespeckled accountants who get the blame. So it is surprising (refreshing even) to hear that nobody is immune from the cuts, the financial trimming and the efficiencies.
Cue a call this week to Deadline Press and Picture Agency from the editorial staff at the rather splendid website, Director of Finance Online. It does exactly what it says on the tin - providing online reports on a wide range of subjects of interest to the head honchos of the accountancy world - Directors of Finance.
As you’d expect of a site catering for the movers and shakers of the money counting scene, the site is extremely slick, well put together and atractively presented. So Deadline was flattered when a request came for an article by court reporting staff about crooked HM Revenue and Customs worker, Craig Gordon (pictured).
With only the minimum of negotiation, the website agreed to pay a modest fee for the story. Kerching! A pleasure doing business with people who know the value of everything.
Except, not 20 minutes later this rather contrite email dropped from the editor:
I’m sorry but our finance department has amazingly turned down our request to pay for the article. Stupid but it’s the end of the finance year etc. Our apologies for wasting your time.
Which just goes to show that nobody is immune from the scourge of the bean counters (though in fairness, you’d have thought if anyone was going to be painfully aware of the financial year end, it would be the staff on Director of Finance Online!)
No, this isn’t a prop from some camp version of telly sci-fi hit, Dr Who.
Even with Russell T Davies (the innovative writer who penned brilliant and groundbreaking gay drama, Queer as Folk) reviving the popularity of the timelord, I don’t think David Tennent will be stepping out across the space-time continuum any time soon in a lavendar Tardis.
In actual fact this fuchsia police box isn’t a prop of any sort. It is a very real, very bright, warning sign. A 10ft pink testament to the folly which has gripped the senior management of Lothian and Borders Police.
It is, if you will, an outrageous neon proclamation that says: We’ve lost credibility among our own officers. We’ve lost the support of the media. We’re fast losing the confidence of the public. And now we’re a laughing stock among every flavour of ned, Niddron and ne-er do well.
I’ve watched with disbelief the goings-on at Fettes police HQ for the past 18 months. First a press office which enjoyed the best media relations in Scotland was methodically dismantled for no good reason and the force began, quite deliberately, to alienate the media.
That kind of actions is never a good sign, as it invariably and inevitably precedes the slow creep of control freakery, politically correct paranoia and an insidious, “We know best. All the time. Every time” philosophy.
In short, it smacks of the Thought Police. Of an organisation so convinced of its own worth and rightness that, even when it is hopelessly out of touch and sync with everything and everyone else, it believes the tide of naysayers, critics and objectors can be reduced, rebuffed or re-educated.
And so it has proved at L&B. Blunder after misjudgement after folly after cringemaking faux pas has followed. From senior officers appearing very publicly in gay pin-up competions, through flying rainbow coloured flags to this week’s expensive corporate “rebrand” which met near universal derision.
There isn’t a journalist (even though he’s a PR man these days) in Scotland with better contacts inside Lothian and Borders than Stephen Rafferty - and his blog has been merciless in exposing these follies today and in previous posts (click here and also here).
Meanwhile in an article in the Daily Express , Scottish Politicial Editor Kerry Gill pointed out:
In the case of Lothian and Borders, people might be forgiven for thinking that a police force that needs to be better recognised must be doing a remarkably bad job … Unfortunately when a venerable organisation such as a police force attempts to improve its market place image, not only is the motivation wrong - they are not in a marketplace in the first place - we naturally suspect what is behind the change … Their attempts to convey an image become a cover, we suspect, for failing to successfully uphold the law.
No doubt the police will be writing off recent criticism as the huffy stropping of a jilted media. But how do they write off the fetching paint job given by some particularly bold vandals to this police box at The Wisp - just a short distance from the Niddrie and Craigmillar housing schemes?
They can’t. Because the truth is the force is now a laughing stock - and even the Neds are letting them know it. L&B were caught out when a branding expert said their new logo “wasn’t very arresting”. The lack of ”arrest factor” probably won’t stop there - and I’ll bet nobody is brought to book for this cheeky piece of vandalism.
Collars are what count when it comes to juding our cops. Not how easy it is to recognise their logo; how gay or other minority friendly they are or even how efficiently they run their media relations office. Right now, the only collars needing felt are those of Chief Constable David Strang and his Deputy, Tom Halpin.
They must be wishing for a time machine of their own. Even if it was just to revisit happier days when the store of media goodwill built up over many years might just have helped them through their current image crisis.
Among my main memories of growing up in Wester Hailes in the 1980s is the amount of sport the kids used to play.
It was the height of Thatcherism and the greed is good culture, but there wasn’t much in the way of conspicuous wealth in the Hailes. Indeed, at the time the sprawling estate was renowned as the most troubled in Edinburgh and more closely associated with the city’s AIDS and heroin problems.
What I remember is the sheer size of the place - with the high rise buildings punctuated by street-after-street of low rise blocks. That was a lot of houses which meant there were around 17,000 people in Wester Hailes at the time.
The planning gurus who’d created the scheme had envisaged it as a kind of genteel commuter suburb for a generation who’d all have cars and use them to travel to and from work, before returning to relax in front of the TV with their families (there wasn’t anything else for recreation: despite have a population equivalent to that of Musselburgh, Wester Hailes had just one pub - and that was a no-go zone).
Bizarrely this meant the entire scheme was designed without pavements along any of its main roads (who was going to walk in the car-led utopia the social planners had dreamt up?), while every single flat was provided with at least one car parking space.
The reality was that hardly anybody actually owned a car, so the sizable parking areas were empty and virtually traffic free. In other words, ideal spaces were kids could play everything from tennis and rounders to football, skateboarding and the odd game of British Bulldog. Or anything else the pre-video game generation could dream up to fill their days and nights.
One of the neighbourhood kids who stuck most firmly in my memory was a skinny boy with a shock of jet black hair and huge, solemn dark eyes who moved into the scheme after a stint living abroad in Abu Dhabi. As if that didn’t make him memorable enough he also revelled in the inexplicable nickname of Basher.
No-one knew why. The kid wasn’t a fighter or troublemaker in any way, shape or form. He wasn’t a bully or threatening in presence or manner. And he didn’t bear a resemblance to any of the characters from the Bash Street Kids. Looking back now I can only guess that maybe it was a bastardisation of arabic name, Bashir, which maybe came back with him from the Middle East.
Whatever. The point about Basher was that he was a skinny wee skelf of a kid - but he was football daft and despite being slight was good enough to be one of the early picks when teams were being assembled. Even on the occasions when he was playing in welly boots aginst kids in trainers.
At some point in the mid 80s Basher and his family moved away from their flat in the stair next to mine and I have not a clue what became of them. I grew up and moved on myself and over the intervening years Wester Hailes has been transformed beyond recognition. The high rises and the huge empty car parks are gone, replaced with more desirable and socially acceptable housing. And a canal.
But a couple of years ago my sister asked me if I ever listened to the Real Radio football phone in - with Alan Rough and Ewen Cameron. The reason? It turns out that Ewen Cameron is none other than the big-eyed, football-daft Basher, now all grown up.
I don’t know much about how Basher - or Ewen as I should now refer to him - carved himself a media career, but he is doing well and he and Roughie are a popular sporting fixture. I’m not surprised he’s enjoying success because he always had quiet grit.
This week that 25 year old connection came full circle. My sister’s middle kid, Harris Dracup, is pushing seven and football daft. As a treat, a family friend arranged to take him along with his own son to visit the Real Radio studios to see the phone-in programme in full flow actually being made.
Highpoint for Harris during the visit on Tuesday night was when Ewan introduced him live on air - and asked if there was anything he wanted to say.
Refusing to be phased by his moment in the spotlight young Harris dug deep and came up with a tuneful wee radio-friendly snippet and burst into song … unfortunately with with the catchy jingle for BBC Radio Two!
Apparently this impromptu ad for the opposotion went down a storm with Roughie and Ewan, who were in stitches and more than saw the funny side.
As well as making me laugh out loud, this video got me thinking:
In late 2002, a few weeks after the birth of my daughter, I was knocked down while on a busy pedestrian crossing at the West End of Princes Street. I was crossing on the green man and a BMW driver jumped the red light and sent me spinning into the air. This happened shortly after midnight.
The culprit, Anthony Tester, was traced because a passer-by got a partial number plate. Although cops found his car parked outside his house they couldn’t get any response to the repeated bangs on his door in the small hours of the morning. Strange that a man should sleep so soundly, considering the trauma (having just run me over on a pedestrian crossing, he later told police he only fled the scene because “my friends” were moving threateningly towards his car. I was alone. Those “friends” were actually passers-by who couldn’t believe what they’d just witnessed) he’d endured.
Regardless of that, Tony Tester seemed to be enjoying the deep, peaceful sleep of the righteous. Either that, or he was hiding under his bed, desperetaly trying to avoid the inevitable breath test. In the circumstances, the police could do nothing. When they were able to breath test him the next day - a good 12 hours later - unsurprisingly he was not over the limit.
Eventually he was fined £500 and given some penalty points for failing to stop at the scene of an accident. I wasn’t in court because I wasn’t told. So I didn’t get to say my piece to the Edinburgh Sheriff, which would have been: “Your Honour, it’s my belief that Tony Tester is a drink-driving scumbag who only by luck avoided robbing my baby daughter of her father. I hope you ban him from the roads for a long time.”
Still, the point of this wasn’t to let out Tester’s nasty little secret all these years later (and if word reaches his friends, family and colleagues that would be a real shame). In fact the point of the little aside is this:
The day after the accident, with my entire body black and blue and aching, I got up and went to work. I was just as happy to be suffering the discomfort in the office as I was to be stuck at home watching crap daytime TV. And if I’d been afllicted with the so-called “man cold” or even more dreaded “man flu” then I would also still have turned up for work.
Just for the record, most of the blokes I’ve ever worked with were/are exactly the same. They pretty much turn up for work uncomplaining and without too much fuss with deep tissue injuries, fractures, infections or even still-healing vasectomies. So, where exactly does this man cold/man fly myth come from? A job for the urban myth-busting site, www.snopes.com (click here) perchance?
More to the point, perhaps we should actually be asking who might actually benefit from such a long enduring myth (”womankind” anyone?).
Your answers - written neatly on the back of a Lemsip wrapper or rolled up safely in an emtpy Night Nurse bottle - should be sent to this address.
Gawd bless that Phani Tikkalah. Ever since Gordon Tait at the Scottish Sun forwarded me the picture of the unfortunately named Asian chap, this blog’s enjoyed something of a boost in figures. If you haven’t seen the Phani post yet, you can catch it by clicking here - worth it for the comments if nothing else.
In that post I also had a juvenile guffaw at the expense of Gail Stepo from Fife Council Press Office. I don’t know Gail, so was mightily relieved when she turned out to be a top sport and entered into the spirit of things. During a subsequent email exchange she even sent me this message:
Being the gstepo is far better than being Phanni Tikhala and also much better than a name my mate Matthew Fitt came up with . He once met a lady down in England called Fanny Wyper. Give me the jackboots any day.
I was intrigued - nay horrified - to think that there could be a Fanny Wyper trudging through life miserably blighted by a moniker of such ill-conceived intent, whether marital or parental.
So, it was over to those intrepid newshounds on Deadline Press & Picture Agency to ask if they could track down Ms Wyper. Those of you who know Deadline news editor Brian Lewis will be totally unsurprised to learn that he couldn’t find Fanny for love nor money. However, he did suggest that we should try to find out if Fanny was a derivative of some other name.
A quick Google check and we hit paydirt. While Fanny was once a popular name in its own right, it is also an abbreviated version of both Frances and Stephanie. Cooking by gas, it was back to the search tools and this time we struck the mother lode. Not in England - but in the heart of Glasgow.
At last we found our Fanny (actually Stephanie) Wyper - but she shares here home with the equally unfortunately named Willie Wyper.
So there you have it, in the heart of upmarket Bearsden , I give you the most carelessly named twosome in Scotland - Fanny and Willie Wyper.
News reached me this week that a couple of my old college classmates are gamely trying to arrange a get together to mark the 20th anniversary of our graduation in Journalism Studies.
Hard to believe - for me anyway - that it’s 20 years since we finished up at Napier College of Commerce and Technology (aye, we were there before it was even a polytechnic, never mind a full-blown university!) and headed out into the big bad world to fend for ourselves.
I’d love to see the reunion come off - as personally it would have a special kind of symmetry in the year when I’ll also turn 40.
In the meantime, the man behind the whole thing -Dutch media guru Rupert Parker Brady (yesh, I know it doesn’t shound Dutch. But he mosht defintely ish) - forwarded me a bunch of pics to whet my appetite. They included a couple taken in 1986, not long after we started at college and had a “getting to know you” football match against the second year students at the Craiglockhart campus (not the spaceage dome it is now!).
I’ve loosely kept tabs on the progress of many of my classmates over the years. But seeing the pics from back in the day took me slightly unawares. I laughed to be reminded just how young we actually were. Then I slipped into a bit of a blue funk over just how fast those intervening years have disappeared. I picked up again to see just how well everybody has done.
But most of all, I had to admit that as a class, we had pretty crap legs (the ladies excepted, of course).
Ladies and gentlemen I give you:
BACK ROW (L-R): Some guy called Dave (whose surname escapes me cos he left after three weeks); David Dinsmore (Slaphead Scottish Sun editor); Steve Walker (I’ve seen him naked, so can only guess he was keeping his “spare” pair of socks warm in this photo); Rupert Parker Brady (beanpole dyke plugger); Alex Barr (BIG Parntership and Bothwell’s richest man - probably); Steve Smith (heid like a quite extraordinarily bouffant burst sofa - now a lawyer); Craig Wilson (Falkirk’s finest who went on to be a bigwig at Grampian TV).
FRONT ROW (L-R): Anna Steven, (baby of the course but now a mum herself and part of the BT Scotland press office); Patricia Kane, (Writer in residence at the Scottish Mail on Sunday); Yours Truly (aye - I know I’ve changed. And not for the better. So no need to rub it in); Raymond Hainey (Globetrotting journalistic itinerant); Chris (extremely quiet but likeable lad who surname - and career details - escape me).
I have nothing to say in our defence. Yes, we were badly dressed. Yes we had woeful barnets. Yes we were crap at football and got humped of the park.
But apart from that, we done good. Roll on September and the chance to catch up with them all again.
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