Wednesday 9 July 2014

BROTHERS IN ARMS.

There were some friends here, a little while ago and a text message came from Birmingham, favourite son was unexpectedly flying out to the already kicked-off THIEFA World Cup.

He's one of those forty-year old Mummy-dependents, on his second failing marriage, trapped in an immaturity undisguised by his beery blokeishness, his bloated, red-faced excess.

We were talking, here,  the other night,  about what we now call consumer choices - how you spend your money - and there has never been a time when I could afford to fly-out to Brazil, didn't matter how much money I had, I could never afford to do that.  This guy also, with his mates,  regularly flies to European capitals in order, bless,  to get pissed and obnoxious. I blame the football, it is the bloke's equivalent of Because I'm worth it.  Somehow, thousands and thousands of pounds are diverted from family budgets into the pockets of spivs, gang-rapists and a United Nations of foreign gangsters.

Today, two young British Muslims face lengthy sentences for having flown abroad, not to engage in the mass hysteria of footy, not to get pissed-up and shame their country but to risk their limbs and lives fighting an enemy which the British government was desperate, a short time ago, to annihilate.

By today's yardstick any Briton who  fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War would be deemed terrorist and face durance vile upon their return.  And let us not even consider the bizarrely  incongruous judicial example  of Old Queen Brenda having a knees-up with Marty Kneecaps, or the fact that no British or any other kind of  Muslim has come anywhere near Marty's record of killing British citizens, men, women and children.

One would hope that, come sentencing time, Mr Justice Slag will say, Listen lads, fair play to you for wanting to have a go at Bashir Assad but, you know, you can't go taking the law into your own hands, you're not Tony Blair or anything.  I'm gonna give you a suspended sentence, just as long as you swear to me, before Allah, peace and whatnot be upon his wotsaname.... that you'll step back from this Jihad stuff.  Now off you go and stop worrying your parents and everybody.

But these young men are black-ish and they didn't go to Eton or Repton,  they were never in the Bullingdon Crime Gang  and they must, therefore,  be punished for their youthful high spirits  and idealism.

I am related neither to the lachrymose, neglectful,  spoiled, ageing footybrat nor to the young Brummie Jihadists but  think if I was looking, from among them,  for brothers in arms, I'd have to think long and hard.

14 comments:

call me ishmael said...

Sorry, mr yardarm, I tried to delete your duplicated comment and somehow deleted both of them.

I think we might all be working for MI5 and just don't know about it.

Alphons said...

In the Great Briton of fiscal success and social equality every one has the right to fly out to Brazil or China or Honalulu or whatever.

Dick the Prick said...

I like cricket quite a bit, the tactics, the pace or lack of it, the battle and psychology but it's got to the point now that i'll only go if it's gonna be quiet because the crowds are just total cunts.

I also like booze and find booze and sport to be an ideal combination - don't really need to think, serves as an entertaining distraction which everyone can enjoy. However, i've never felt the need to shout 'who are ya?' at the top of my lungs or 'get yer tits out' at any girl which wanders past.

Perhaps the ideal solution would be to swap plane tickets so every twat goes to Damascus and every jihadist gets thrown in the footy fest. If the government are so arse over tit then maybe it's time for the airlines too.

callmeishmael said...

Isn't it just a demonstration, modern sport, of the willingness of people to be corporatised? And isn't all so refined as to be bland and banal? Alex Higgins or Stephen Hendry; George Best or, well, any of them; Rod Laver or Roger Federer, I know that fitness and performance are much higher but it all seems so charmless and sponsored and shit; Rolex v Tag, Nike v Adidas, all of them v us.

Dick the Prick said...

We've all gone Tour de France crazy round here - seriously, the amount of effort that was put into the ancillary events was amazing and because of the weather people came out of the woodwork. I've genuinely never seen anything like it and there was a kind of nostalgia almost - for 1 weekend in, yer know, ever, the entire county stopped.

Sure, cycling's as dirty as most sports if not significantly more so but when the bid was chucked in (brown envelope for £70 million s'il vous plait) I thought it was bollox and yet I couldn't have been wrongerer. I guess it's the nature of the sport that it moves and visits places yet in comparison to this world cup thing strewn with violence, crime, extortionate ticket prices and God alone knows what other shit - well, it's just ridiculous why anyone would even bother. For the price of a beery trip to Brazil the lad could have hired a camper van and fucked off to France with the family for a fortnight and seen some of the best territory in the world (Aquitaine - best part of England) and the most trouble they'd have had would be avoiding the tossers in the mankinis.

Football just seems to be an idiot tax where everyone gets fleeced as much as profoundly possible. It's like you said - i'm doing alright now and am a single bloke but i'll never have enough money to fuck off to Brazil to watch the football because for the minimum £5k for a week maybe, there's so much better shit available.

I used to play loads of golf as a kid and me and my chum used to purposefully chat to older blokes, usually fat and pompous, who couldn't play for fuck yet had £2k clubs wondering 'have you always been a knob?' to which, looking back, the answer was invariably yes but it ain't right, it just ain't right.

I dunno - something about a fool and his money maybe but I see people my own age driving Porsches, Astons etc and before I used to think that they're probably minted but I bet the truth is, yeah, they're on a good whack but they're financed to the fucking hilt living on interest only mortgages and in debt to their eyeballs just to try and impress people or fit in with something that they think they belong to. It's just a bit vulgar I guess.

Anyway, the cycling man, a total festival over 200 miles - they built a farm in our local town square for no apparent reason and just shut the place down for 4 days. Sport can be good but, yeah, there should be a rule of thumb that the more corporatised it is, the shitter time the punter will inevitably have. I got an advert last week offering me Wimbledon qtr final tickets for £500 - yeah, yup, ok - fuck off, cheeky cunts.

callmeishmael said...

Thanks, mr dtp, for that. I have been bewildered by the amount of MediaMiles which can be wrung from the headline, Man Falls Off Bike.

Yes, Aquitane, after Scotland, the best part of England. We should re-take it

Doug Shoulders said...

The Brazilians built a new stadium in that city that they built earlier in the middle of the jungle…Manaus. Billions it cost ficking billions..and that’s a lot of money. Then they built the leccy supply so it wouldn’t go dark during the game. More billions.
Watching the documentary on I’m thinking…who is paying for all this magnifico feat of engineering blah blah blah?
Well, that would me the Brazilian people for generations to come. Wonga loans from globabanks. Expect the Brazil membership of BRICS to be on indefinite hold.
Poor folks from the slums of Brazil Argentina etc are taught that football is a way out of it. And if you don’t make it you can live through those that do make it and become idolised.
To a lesser extent in this country the same thing applies. No mention of how much and from whom was the money borrowed for the London Olympics. Ditto the commonwealth games. Perhaps Scotland could put on a budget show and save a few quid.

mongoose said...

Footie? Don't me laugh. Shearer was widely ridiculed a few days back for suggesting that the reason England were sent packing so early was because they didn't cheat as well as the others - sorry, correction" "were too honest". The even more ridiculous truth is that there was a smidgeon of justification in what he was saying. And that tells you all you need to know about football. It is a tax on the daft.

Doug Shoulders said...


I wouldn’t have thought Shearer would have been ridiculed for that… cheeky chappie that he is.…or anything. Thing about celebs…they can do no wrong.
Lance Armstrong was a sportsman who won stuff by doing stuff that wasn’t allowed, he got caught and wrote a book about how to become adored through doin’ drugs.
He’s more feted now than he ever was.
The footie divers are the same. Cheating plain and simple.
If the system had bigger balls that shit would be stamped out.

callmeishmael said...

The reason Shearer gets singled-out, here, from an army of mediocrity is that I heard him, when he was playing, describe his own cheating as Doin' somefin fer me country, but it didn't come off; now his country is paying him PBC shedloads of moneynfor talking out of his scabby arse, when all that needs to be said is said, in a few words, by you, mr mongoose, by mr shoulders, mr the prick and all who here congregate.

I could always talk to my late friend about football, it's easy enough, twenty-two blokes kicking a ball around and either they score or they don't score; he could never talk to me about Hamlet, though; I could always talk to him about Bruce Springsteen, although we could never discuss Beethoven, and on and on and on, but wherever we were in the world, come Saturday afternoon, all were hushed to attentive silence, ears pinned sagely to the football results; as the years pass, I see this as what it was, fucking tyranny.

Makes the relentless, fuckwit blokey bullying of Jerry Clarkson and his bumboys look positively benign, dies footie.

Anonymous said...

I can't see how anyone who leaves the UK to fight abroad is committing an offence as long as they don't breach the peace whilst they're here. Didn't there used to be a thing called "jursisdiction?"
-richard

call me ishmael said...

It is an overreach of the criminal law, mr richard, one of many, as we see this morning.

I don't presently, but if I did decide to medicate myself with cannabis it would be a crime, as though the government owns my very pain.

Anonymous said...

Anybody notice the crowd shots at Brazil's games? Not a black face to be seen, light-skinned Iberians all. According to wiki the population % is roughly half white, half mixed-race/black (and fuck-all percent "Amerindian", much like Agentina/Paraguay etc, because they killed them all off one way or another). This was not a percentile visible amongst those Brazilians with tickets for the games. Wallet apartheid, much? Ghastly shower, fuck them and their smug exuberance. Nicely done, the Fritzes.

verge//

call me ishmael said...

I had noticed it, mr verge, but not noticed that I'd noticed it until you mentioned it, mr verge.

And I wondered, too, if there was news apartheid at work, seems that all those pesky protesters just disappeared at the very first kick-off, so's not to trouble Al and Gaz and Adrian with things like politics, which have no place in showbusiness, I mean sport.