Down Days

These are the down days, the days between games when players train and pundits wander the streets, bother the homeless, pester the vagrant, and look for something to do.

They kicked me out of the library this morning when I got into an argument about video technology with a bundle of rags that smelled vaguely of marker pens. Inside them was wrapped a drunken swine who wouldn’t accept that it would break up the flow of the game. I had to teach him a lesson or two with a hardback edition of the Rules of Association Football and that's when they decided to invite me to leave the library.

Drink, occasional violence, and disorderly conduct are getting old. I’ve considered taking up some more vices but vice seems to be on the way out among those in the know. Abstinence is the new drug. I’m thinking of taking it up in a serious way. I want to get seriously abstinent, despairingly sober, and decadently clean. The only way to go in the current climate is to be depraved in your abstinence. Those who want to give up the most excessive lifestyles do so excessively. Britney Spears has demanded the whole wing of her rehab clinic, which is undoubtedly the kind of behaviour that got her in there in the first place. Heather Mills McCartney is also giving up disability, or that’s according to some disabled-rights campaigners here in the UK. Because she’s stomping around the dance floor for some American TV show they argue that she must be able bodied. Well I can’t dance, does this make me disabled? If it does, I should look to give it up immediately by learning to dance.

Which has nothing to do with football and even less to do with politics.

But these are the down days and I’m going to see if I can sneak back into the library this afternoon.