Other blog down

Don't know why, and my webmaster is on holiday, but Wherediditallgoright.com seems to have had a funny turn. I'll post the most recent entries up here (as I can still get under the bonnet, oddly). Just bear with me. It might just get up and walk again like a miracle at any moment. Worth bookmarking this one, though - it's there for the nasty things in life.

A word from our sponsors

The Collings & Herrin Podcast is herewith sponsored by the Rhythm Festival, which looks like a very nice, modest music festival suitable for families and held in a place near Bedford, August 21-23. We have done a deal with them, whereby we promote the festival and for every weekend ticket sold, they GIVE US MONEY. Well, they give money to our chosen charities, Scope and Thomas's Fund. So go and have a look at their website. This has to be one of the worst sponsorship deals in the history of capitalism: we do all the work, and only our charities profit. But that's the kind of guys we are. We will be rewarded at some other point. And the man running the festival seems very nice, and we trust him.



In our 67th podcast, sponsored by the Rhythm Festival, blah blah blah, we discuss the electoral victory of the BNP and whether it's OK to have a go at Nick Griffin because of his face, celebrate the showbiz camp of Colonel Gaddafi, ponder the advantages and disadvantages of the head massage, admire Caroline Flint's shoes, assert Duncan Norvelle's heterosexuality, debate the spyhole, and, in the newly-shorn Richard's case, aim for two new catchphrases, one of which really belongs to Arnold Schwarzenegger. (British Library pencil sharpener pictured.)

Old blog working again!

Sorry to muck everyone about (I feel like William Holden in The Towering Inferno when he's haplessly directing the assembled dignitaries who are going to die in a fire from the lifts to the fire escapes to the scenic lift - oh, that scenic lift was a bad idea). But the old blog has mysteriously started working again. I know this because "GET", the post about "Can I get?" which I posted here and has led to a long and fruitful discussion, automatically posted on the old blog! (I had posted it, but it got lost in the ether, which is how I knew the thing had packed up.) Anyway, it seems only right and proper that we all go back over to Never Knowingly Underwhelmed. But keep The Corner bookmarked. You never know when technology will attack again.

See you back there!

Win an iPod Nano!!!

Got your attention? Good. The Radio Times website is currently polling people about the Greatest British Film over seven categories, the results of which will tie in with a big feature in the magazine and a forthcoming "landmark BBC series" about the very subject called The Seven Ages Of British Cinema (I'm joking, it's not called that). Anyway, myself and the great Barry Norman were polled and our lists combined to form the shortlists and you can cast your vote now. You'll also be entered into a prize draw, hence the iPod Nano. However, in order to find this poll on the website you'd have to know where to look. I couldn't find it yesterday until it was pointed out to me, and I must admit, I am rather dismayed that it just appears under Competitions and is not presented as poll at all, unless you read the small print. I'm drumming up business. The more voters, the more representative the poll.

You might like to get involved. I'd like you to. If so, go here and save yourself the trouble of hacking through the online underbrush.

Word

The Word Podcast is a marvellous thing anyway. This week's happens to have me on it, shooting the breeze with David Hepworth and Mark Ellen, one of whom was wearing sandals. It was such a pleasure to go up to the office and do. And if you want to hear three elderly rock journalists (two slightly more elderly than the other one) talking over one another about the Concert For Diana, Win Butler, Iggy Pop, the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party and the opening of the Harrods Sale, either listen to it on the website, or subscribe for free on iTunes. I don't think I can say enough nice things about the way this magazine is run.

You can't get it in WHSmith at Waterloo Station, but . . .

. . . It's available in the People's Republic of China. Thanks to Dominic Harvey, firstly for buying That's Me In The Corner at all, and secondly for doing so in Hong Kong. It apparently took just two weeks to order in at a chain called Dymocks, probably the largest in Hong Kong. This branch is in IFC (International Finance Centre), where the book costs HK$187. The assistant didn't want to be in the photo, but it's still photographic proof that the book's out there. Just not round here.

Beautiful

Two great books about football
As regular readers will know, I don't follow football. I'm able to get quite worked in time for a World Cup or European Championship, but I don't have the space in my head for league football. I don't have a team, and nor do I pretend to know what I'm talking about, or join in football conversations to prove that I am heterosexual. When people talk enthusiastically about football, I keep my mouth shut, and I only doggedly "reviewed" last year's World Cup matches on this blog to see what it was like to write about football, enraging the odd hardcore fan, but largely my match reports were read in the spirit they were written in.

Anyway, the point is: I grew up with football. As a boy, I was a hardcore collector of football stickers - the Esso collection of club badges I remember with great affection (I think I still have it somewhere) - and I could name most of the players in most of the league clubs, and where they played, and draw their badge. Because I grew up in Northampton, and my dad had long since lapsed going to see the Cobblers on a regular basis, I was never taken to the County Ground for that formative meat-pie experience, the kind that weds young lads to matchgoing at an impressionable age. Thus, I grew up at a remove from dogged local team support. I wasn't interested in Northampton Town FC. I supported Liverpool. And then Leeds when I shamelessly switched allegiance in order to "get in" with the hard lads at my new upper school (as detailed in Chapter Nine of Where Did It All Go Right?, because you have to confess these things to achieve redemption). And when I say Liverpool were my favourite team, I really liked the classic Don Revie Leeds squad at the same time. It wasn't life or death for me - sorry, Mr Shankly - but I loved it anyway. (Dad took me to see England play a couple of times at Wembley in the late 70s and it blew my mind.) Once I'd discovered girls in a meaningful way, football fell by the wayside, and I never really picked it up again. Sean Hughes took me to see Crystal Palace play Stoke in about 1993, which was an experience, too. We went in the players' lounge afterwards. I couldn't believe how much everybody in the stands shouted "cunt" in front of small children. I'm pretty sure they hadn't shouted "cunt" so much when I saw England in the late 70s, but that may be a rose-tinted memory.

So, these two books. I won't lie, I bought Believe In The Sign because its author, Mark Hodkinson, sent me a proof copy - it being a 70s memoir, he thought I might like it - and I lost it when I moved into my new office. So I bought another copy out of writerly loyalty, and read it when Mark was asked to review That's Me In The Corner for the Times, which he did with great honesty and no sucking up. We've never met. I read his book on the Wedding Present years ago, and hadn't made the connection, but it is him. Believe In The Sign is published by, and available to buy from, Pomona, his own imprint. Such ventures should be supported. Because he reads a lot of books and manuscripts for Pomona, Mark told me he only gives any of them half an hour. But his book held me to the end. It's the tale of an ordinary kid in Rochdale, the author, doggedly supporting his local team ("one of the worst in the Football League") and eventually, through contributing to the Rochdale match programme, finding a career path in journalism. Full of poetic description ("the stands, huts, dugouts and out-houses were like broken teeth, barely upright and left to decay ... Damp had turned wood to the colour of cinder toffee"), it evocatively depicts the loyalty of a local fan. Even better, it's illlustrated, with naff 70s photos of star signings and new managers, family snaps and cuttings from local rags (a nice touch that a huge, corporate publisher would probably have vetoed on grounds of extra cost, but which a small publisher can absorb, if it wants to). Here's my favourite bit, and what I like is the directness of the prose:

Rochdale's away form was abysmal. In a run of eighty consecutive league games in the late 1970s we won on just five occasions away from home. Dad and me regularly saw Rochdale lose heavily: 5-0, 4-0, 5-1, 4-1. We'd be among a small group of visiting fans dotted around concrete-flagged terraces. We'd start by shouting encouragement when the players warmed up before the game.

"Come on, keep 'em out, lads."

They didn't keep them out. They let them in.


The Damned Utd doesn't really need any more praise, from me or anyone. David Peace is a much-fancied young novelist, and this is the novel that puts him on the map ("Probably the best novel ever written about sport," said the Times). I'll be honest - and this proves the point of such promotions - I bought it in a 3-for-2 offer in Borders in Kingston, having taken two books thus stickered to the counter without realising, and being sent back to the racks for a third. (As an author, I know the power of racking. If a book's at head height, which this was, you're more likely to pick it up during a browse. Also, the reviews! What reviews it'd had! I can only dream of such a reception!) Anyway, it didn't exactly go to the top of the pile, but I was leaving my office one day and wanted something for the journey, so I picked it up. It's mesmerising. If you don't know, it's incredibly specific and boldly based on fact: the 44 days Brian Clough spent as manager of Leeds United in 1974, when he was one of the most famous club managers in the country, impersonated by Mike Yarwood no less! Peace gets inside his brain, acknowledging the assistance of about 40 non-fiction books at the back, including Cloughie's two memoirs, and the result, hammered home through repetition, repetition, repetiton, is that of a man in almost constant turmoil, married to the game, losing his watch, drinking at all times, occasionally pulling the bedsheets over his head, always desperate to prove himself as good as Don Revie.

It's daft to say, as some have, that you don't need to be a football fan to enjoy it. You do. Because it's set at the highpoint of my youthful football fandom, I found it impossible to put down - every name of every player is evocative (Cherry! Hector! Gemmill! Reaney! Giles! McFarland! Hunter! Sprake!), and I was as interested in Derby County as I was in Liverpool and Leeds, being a pluralist lover of the leagues. The triumph though, is not in tickling the nostalgia glands of 70s football fans, it's in making fiction out of fact. The lines are so blurred, you read it as documentary truth, but so much is imagined by Peace, it's sort of mindblowing. Only Clough can know what he was thinking and when, every day, for 44 days. The supporting players - Peter Taylor, Billy Bremner, Sniffer Clarke - are equally real, but fleshed out in fewer keystrokes. What a writer he is. And to run two stories parallel - the doomed Leeds tenure and the rocky road at Derby, which of course ends precisely where the first story begins - is a key narrative decision. At first, it irks that you're chopping about from normal type (Elland Road) to italics (Baseball Ground), and the repetition seems arbitary, a way of filling up the page, but it's amazing how rapidly these quibbles fade and you're right there, down the corridor, round the corner, up the stairs, with a chair against the door in his office, having a snifter, making some calls to offer to buy star players from other clubs you can't afford, against the wishes of the board, but fuck the board.

Both books highly recommended, if you followed football in the 1970s, or if you follow it now.

And look what I've just found whilst failing to find the Esso Collection: a scrapbook from around 1973-74, when I was eight going on nine, whose pages are themed around telly, "soccer" (as I believe we were allowed to call it in 1973), animals, Disney, pop, comedy and army, and more soccer. Who's in here?