So Paddy Got Up - an Arsenal anthology (2 page)

‘Oh fuck’, he said.

‘Yeah.’

Quite how the situation was resolved, I don’t remember. I have vague recollections of standing around drinking things until someone found a late night hardware store – not easy to come by in 1997, let me tell you – or we cut the plugs off the CD decks and attached them to the record players. Anyway, despite the round-pinned plugs, the gig was fine. I don’t think anyone asked me why I was so milky for an Ibiza-based DJ as I stood there and played records until 2am or so. Not quite as seminal as Sasha at Renaissance or anything but generally fine and I pocketed a whopping £40 for my night’s work (hey, back then you could buy a nice suit, go on a foreign holiday and still have enough left over for a night at pictures with that kind of money).

The problems started on the way home. I was in the front seat as Daragh drove me back to my house on the South Circular Road. We came to a crossroads, complete with handy traffic lights so you knew it was your turn to go. Traffic was light, as you’d expect at that time of night. In fact, there were only two cars on the road – us and another man heading in the opposite direction. As we went through the lights, which were green, he decided this would be the perfect time to turn right. It wasn’t. The perfect time would have been when we weren’t halfway across the junction. The perfect time would have ensured that he didn’t crash right into us, exploding the airbag in Daragh’s face and leaving me completely unscathed apart from a hideously broken arm and most of the windshield in my forehead. I got out of the car imploring somebody to commit an act of unspeakable violence on the other man before I noticed my second elbow. It hurt. Anyway, the ambulance came and brought me to hospital, where they X-rayed me, picked as much of the glass out of my head as they could, and left me sitting on a trolley in a room off the emergency department. Surgery was to take place the next morning.

Mrs Blogs arrived at the hospital and I asked the nurse if it might be possible to have something for the pain.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘But you’ll have to stand up and undo your pants’.

I went to an all boys school run by priests so was immediately suspicious but figured I didn’t have much choice.

‘This,’ said the nurse, ‘is just the legal side of heroin.’ She then jabbed me in the arse with a giant needle. I know people tut-tut at drug addicts but at that precise moment my intense love of morphine was born. It’s almost worth really hurting yourself just so you can get some. Soon the pain was replaced by a warm glow, I recall telling Mrs Blogs about how the stupid nightclub only had round plugs.

‘Can you believe that? In this day and age, round plugs?’

‘I certainly found it hard to believe the first few times you told me,’ she said nicely. And from then it was a slow drift off into nothingness. I woke in the morning, on the trolley, pants still not done up properly, having slept for hours sitting up straight. God bless you sweet delicious morphine.

So, the accident changed your life so much you decided to write about Arsenal?

Hold your horses! There’s still a way to go yet. Suffice to say I didn’t take being badly injured well. Especially when after three months of weekly visits to the hospital, wearing a shoulder to wrist cast, a doctor calmly announced, ‘Your arm is still broken.’ This was no surprise to me as I’d been telling them this for weeks in my out-patient visits.

‘I think my arm is still broken,’ I would say.

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘No, really. When I lie in bed at night I can crunch the two broken bits of bone off each other.’

‘You are being silly,’ the doctor would reply.

‘Well, you’re the doctor, I suppose.’

Turns out he was a bit of a shit doctor and when a better doctor took a look at the X-rays he was happy to conclude that my arm was indeed still broken and required surgery. This was depressing news but there you go.  I went in for surgery, they sliced my arm open from shoulder to elbow, put in a metal plate, some screws, closed me up and gave me some more morphine for a few days. It was a during a blissed-out haze I watched us beat Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on the TV in the room they gave me (I think out of guilt at being so crap earlier). Stephen Hughes scored both goals that day. Anyway, my arm was sort of fixed. I had to get the stitches out, learn how to bend it again, and all that other awful physio stuff. Yet the worst was still to come. Broken bones, second elbows, busted heads, glassy bits finding their way to the surface of my skin months later, surgery, rehab and all that paled into insignificance when I hurtled through the windscreen of life into … middle management.

I had spent the previous years of my life working as a DJ, sound engineer and voice-over bloke, but after the accident and a grand total of nine months out of action I had to get a job. I lied my way into AOL as tech support agent. That was fun. The call-centre for the UK was based in Dublin.

‘Hello, I can’t sign up with this AOL software.’

[Insert 20 minutes of installing, reinstalling, removing and adding back the TCP/IP control panel, rebooting computers, modems, toasters, anything you can think of. Then brainwave!]

‘Excuse me, madam. Can you please tell me your address?’

‘It’s 52 Flotheringtominham Crescent, Scunthorpe, County –’

‘There’s your problem!’ I’d say.

‘What? My address?’

‘Yes, you see the AOL software has powerful anti-swearing software. It doesn’t like part of your address.’

‘Which part?’

‘Erm, the bit between the S and the H …’

‘You mean…? Oh! Eeek, Clive, you should hear what this awful Irishman almost made me say.’

And that was the highlight of a life in technical support. A move to Ireland’s national telecoms company and a job as a team leader/middle manager guy didn’t make things much better. On the one hand I rarely had to speak to anyone who had a tech support problem, on the other I only got to speak to really, really angry people. And then there were team meetings, team building, management meetings, stats, spreadsheets, and a seemingly never-ending procession of stupid things and stupid people who existed solely to make my life miserable. Anyway, it got to the point where I would come home from work, sit out the back garden having a smoke (not of morphine sadly), and gaze fondly at the sky at passing planes. In fact, I would spend a lot of time gazing fondly at planes, wanting to be on them. And I hate flying. That’s how bad it was.

Anyway, long story short, me and Mrs Blogs decided to move to Spain. We’d sell our house, pack our stuff, pets and Blogette up, and move to a medium-sized town just outside Barcelona. No, we did not speak any Spanish beyond ordering calamari and various cocktails, but that was of no great worry. We decided to do the sensible thing; we’d make it up as we went along.

Fast forward to Barcelona airport in August 2001. Mrs Blogs and I are standing at the luggage carousel awaiting our various baggage. People are shuffling around, doing that thing they do to get as close as they can to the plastic flaps which birth the bags into their new realm, and we’re standing waiting, for we know what is to come. The carousel starts up, suitcases of all kinds start to appear, people are clutching greedily at them as if everyone else on the flight is David Hillier. And shortly afterwards our stuff emerges. There’s a sequence. It goes: suitcase > small bag > suitcase > cat > suitcase > basset hound > suitcase > suitcase > cat > cat > suitcase … well, you can imagine.

The first thing Opus, the basset, did when he got outside the airport was stop and do an enormous poo on the zebra crossing outside the airport. An inauspicious start to life in Spain, but considering how the relationship between Arsenal and FC Barcelona was to develop down the years perhaps you might say it was prophetic.

Ok, so you got to Spain and you started an Arsenal blog? Please. I can’t take any more of this.

Yes. And no. Sorry. After all that time with spreadsheets (hold me) I decided it would be good to take some time off. So I did. We got there in August and Arseblog started in February. In that time I spent every day on the telephone to telecoms company, Terra, trying to have ADSL installed. I ordered it in August; it arrived some time in the new year. I can’t remember exactly when, all I know is that it was the longest, most frustrating time of my life. You know when you take a trip to the dentist and the time in the chair crawls? Well, this was a bazillion and fifty times worse. I spoke little or no Spanish, but they did have an English-speaking department. In retrospect I think ‘department’ might be pushing it. It consisted of one woman. She got to know me quite well.

‘Oh please,’ I’d say. ‘When are you going to install my Internet?’

‘Eet weel be berry, berry soon. I promise!’

2 months later

‘Oh please,’ I’d say. ‘When are you going to install my Internet?’

‘Eet weel be berry, berry soon. I promise!’

Eventually a man came, frowned at my Mac and spent two hours trying to get it online. Soon, however, I had the worldwide web at my fingertips. And at lightning speed too. 512kb! Blimey. It was the Ben Johnson of Internet when you’re used to dial-up. It changed my life, I’ll admit it. Well, it meant I could load web pages faster and at the end of the day, isn’t that all any of us want? It opened up a new world of websites and soon I chanced upon these odd things called ‘blogs’: personal websites, updated on a regular basis, which seemed to be about nothing in particular, and yet they were strangely compelling. Really, what did I care about a lady who kept bunny rabbits in Cambridge? Nothing. Except I found myself clicking back to her Blogspot site. Everywhere I looked, there were blogs.

At the time, I had a very small and rather shit hosting company. I basically re-sold web-space in packages to people and raked in amazing amounts of up to $5 a month from some customers. I decided that to further augment this income I should look into the design side of things. That’s where you could make the big money. And once you got the money, you got the power, and then the women. Except I only wanted the money…and maybe a bit of power. Anyway, the main problem was I wasn’t very good at it. Not bad either, but not great. I could cobble something together, but if you want artistic, fresh and funky, I’m not your guy. If I were an interior designer you’d get a lot of magnolia and a print on the wall of that guy sitting in front of the TV with the TV blowing his hair back. I tried though. To kick things off I thought I’d make a website which would be a bit funny. So was born ‘The Church of Bob’, an odd effort which revolved around the premise that Robert Pires was not only the messiah but an Internet evangelist who was trying to shill people via a donation scam. As you can imagine the appeal was somewhat limited.

I needed something else, something different; something that would last. It struck me that I needed a website I could continuously update, a blog! To do a blog continuously it had to be something that, a) I was interested in, and b) had plenty of material. I could think only of one thing but then I worried about what my family would say if they discovered my penchant for leprous, dwarf, panther porn. Then it struck me. Arsenal, a blog about Arsenal. And what else could you call a blog about Arsenal only … Arseblog.

Right, well thanks for that! It’s been a pleasure but must dash, I’ve got to see a man about a -

Wait right there. I’m not finished yet.

Awwww
.

So you see, without that car crash in 1997 there probably would be no Arseblog. I don’t know who that crap driver was, but you wouldn’t be reading this without him. Life can take you in strange directions.  I think Arseblog was the very first Arsenal blog. There were other Arsenal websites at the time, Rupert Ward’s, Arseweb, the granddaddy of them all and Chris Parry’s, Arsenal World. There was Boring Boring Arsenal, by the wonderfully named Richard Head. Our old friend at Arsenal News Review might claim to have invented blogging whilst smoking super-hemp in a teepee with The Moody Blues, but a blog needs interaction and comments to be worthy of the name. There was also this site called @FC, the Red Geezer, who wrote the most incredibly biting and funny match reports. It would be a lie to say his ability to look at Arsenal with passion and humour wasn’t an influence. Around the time I started Arseblog he stopped writing his site. Maybe I was in the right place at the right time to fill the gap he left behind. Whoever you are, Red Geezer, if I had a cap, my cap would be doffed to you. I have a nice hat though so I’ll doff that instead.

Some of those sites are still around and some have gone by the wayside, but many, many more have come along and I don’t think it’d be wrong of me to suggest there are more blogs about Arsenal than about any other Premier League team. In fact, I’d put a cheeky bet on there being more blogs about Arsenal than there are about any other subject in the world. Ever. Whatever your disposition, beliefs, loyalties, demands, predilections, nationality, locality or anything else you can think of, there’s something for everyone. We may not agree with some of them, or like some of them; but here’s the great thing about the Internet, nobody is forcing you to read something you don’t like. You don’t even need an off button; you just don’t go there in the first place.

Over the years, through the blog and the Arsecast, I’ve come to know many of these Arsenal bloggers. What is fantastic is the vast majority of them do what they do simply out of a love of Arsenal Football Club. For no reward, and on a daily basis they have provided wonderful, timeless, free content for other Arsenal fans to chew over. I don’t think people realise quite how much work that takes, especially when it’s done in spare time. Joining them in these pages are some writers of a more professional bent who will be well known to readers of Arseblog. Collectively, they have entertained me, moved me, informed me, made me laugh, made me feel sympathy, empathy, anger, guilt, passion, rage, delight and all the other emotions that we get from football itself. The following pages will, I hope, do the same to you, as this unique collection of writing about Arsenal Football Club looks at everything from the club’s humble origins to where it finds itself today, from great players to great managers, from tactics to fans to stadia to kits, amongst many other things. It is my absolute pleasure to present this book to you.