A Beauty Scored by Bobby Charlton

Alas your humble drummer is, as predicted, _working_. This ghastly state of affairs, nearly as awful as sobriety, means that I am unable to post with the vigour and intelligence my readers have not come to expect.

So, today, given our nearness to the Munich disaster, and football's sudden discovery of history (a close companion to cricket fans), a quotation from the great man, courtesy of the Daily Getsworse:

Even now, 50 years later, it reaches down and touches me every day. Sometimes I feel it quite lightly, a mere brush stroke across an otherwise happy mood. Sometimes it engulfs me with terrible regret and sadness - and guilt that I walked away and achieved so much. Everything I have been able to achieve since that day has been accompanied by a simple question - why me?


We've heard, read, about this phenomenon, but to hear it from one of our footballing greats (our only surviving one, maybe?) is stalling and frightening. Like Harry Patch, 109, who lived for 80 years without talking about the Western Front (until his family were dying and there was no longer any reason to bury the memories),Sir Bobby has kept a lot of this to himself until very recently. Could it be - just possibly - that you _need_ to suppress, if not repress, awful memories in order to survive, because they will come and bite you on the arse anyway, so why would you want to give them free rein on your rotund and peachy buttocks?

Er..where was I...well, anyway, you get the point. As I've said before, and as Will Self wrote in _Grey Area_, the talking cure may well in fact be the talking curse.

And if you want TD to open up about his problems you can fuck right off.

Tsk. Typical of me to turn a post about Sir Bobby Charlton into a post about myself. I need to talk less and think more, since the two are mutually exclusive. My talk is a series of lies, designed for an audience, a script and a load of bullshit.

And as for my blogging....

Sir Bobby, we have no idea how you feel, and to pretend otherwise is impertinent, arrogant and ghastly. Nonetheless. We are glad for your survival. More, probably, than you will ever know.