Author: 6000

Decade

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It’s been 10 years since Sheffield United’s last league game against Arsenal. Sure, there have been a couple of minor cup games since then, but it’s exactly 10 years since this game at Beautiful Downtown Bramall Lane:

Look at that result! And look at the strength of the opposition! Van Persie, Cesc Fibreglass, Rosicky, Toure, Clichy, Gilbeagle Silva.

And then the fact that we played the last half hour with no goalkeeper. Golly.

It’s that “small team” spirit that frustrates Sky Sports commentators, “big club” managers, and ably demonstrates the reason that Pep Guardiola isn’t going to have things his own way in the most competitive league in the world.

Things are (finally) looking up this season, which means that we may only be 18 months or so from the next Blades v Arsenal game at The Lane*.

* Terms and conditions apply.

Rolling Stone

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Lying in the cool of the cottage, the sun beating down outside, the turquoise blue of the ocean out of the window, and this playing on my 1995 JVC hi-fi:

The perfect soundtrack. This morning’s spring tide gave us some remarkable rockpooling opportunities, but with a few days more here before we can back to the hullabaloo of city life, there’s no reason to rush to get anything much done. And so, the lazing and the music continue.

Diet

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I, like so many others in Cape Town, seem to have chosen to try the gastroenteritis diet after Xmas this year. The local Black Market in Loperamide is off the scale right now.

It’s going well: I’m losing about a kilo a day and therefore, by (late) March, I should cease to exist. Do the maths. I don’t care. Given the way I’m currently feeling, (late) March can’t come soon enough.

Most irritating of all is the fact that the family has had to delay our trip back down to Agulhas: that particular ‘happy place’ having temporarily been replaced by ‘anywhere near adequate ablution facilities’.

The recovery is very much on, though, and I’m hopeful that we can make that move tomorrow.

It’s not going to stop

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I hate to be the one to say it, but it’s really not.

2016 – “the year that killed so many celebrities” is going to stop. I think we can all be assured of that.
But the whole celebrity death thing? No. Of course not. It’s not like the Grim Reaper takes any note of the arbitrarily imposed boundaries that some of us humans use to measure and delineate time.

It’s been a bad year for celebrity death (or, I guess, a very good one, depending on your frame of reference) for two reasons. The first was explained in April. Namely, that as the notion of “celebrity” became popular, so more people became “celebrities” and there became a larger, now increasingly-aging pool to be knocked off by the bloke with the scythe. The second is down to our good old (but still very much alive) friend, Confirmation Bias:

the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories

That is, that once someone remarked on the extraordinarily high number of celebrities joining the choir invisible in 2016, suddenly every clog popping incident – even that of a pseudocelebrity – seemed to be added to the ever-growing list of high profile coffin inhabitors.

And the first celeb death in 2017, be it at 12:01 on New Years Day or (if we’re super lucky and get through to) quarter past three in the afternoon on the 6th or something is going to ignite the social media grief athletes once again and the process will half-continue, half-begin again.

“I thought we were past this. I thought we’d left it behind!” they will wail.
“OMG! It looks like 2017 is going to be just like another 2016” will be proclaimed.

And the Proclaimers (soon!) will be right, for exactly those reasons I gave above. And then there will be more of this sort of thing.

Death doesn’t care about the tickover from 2016 to 2017, even of the passage of one month to the next. Our pathetically needy society means that we have ever more celebrities, ever older celebrities, and – come 2017 – we’ll have ever more dead celebrities too.

I’m sorry that I had to be the one to break it to you.