Columns

The Rough Guides to Clubbing were a monthly series taking a sideways glance at the depraved world of the nightclub, published in The North Guide. Time for Sport was a monthly column in the North East Times county magazine.

Rough Guide to Clubbing #01: Grabbing a Granny

WHAT?
Sadly, the world is filled with old people. No matter how often we hide their Werther’s Originals, set alight to their shawls and fiddle with their hearing aids, they just won’t go away.
And worse still, even the Peter Pan Mecca of clubland itself has fallen prey to this pestilence of pensioners – you can nary hang your cloak nowadays without being at the mercy of an ancient beast with six inch long claws and a nine inch thick fake tan, or a teddy boy reject with a gold money clip. We’ve tried poking fun at them, ignoring them and downright violence, but they still remain at large. Only one solution remains: seduce them.
Grabbing a granny, as the ancient (and unfortunately largely masculine) sport is called, is best played with a mob of lairy pals. Scoring is vital, and can be judged using a number of criteria: age; size of undergarments; or similarity to own mother/father. After the event, points should be added up and the winner should have his necessary resulting course of therapy paid for by the rest of the group.

WHERE?
Weddings, karaoke, bingo and any club that you have to have a ‘collar’ to enter a veritable granny-grabbing all-you-can-eat buffets, but provincial nightspots will do you just fine. For reasons of potential libel we can’t actually give you the full name of the granny-grabbing City of Gold but here’s a few sneaky clues: it’s in Tyneside, it’s not far from a certain monument, and it’s name might rhyme with Isaac Hayes.

WHO?
See them people smashing up phone boxes in the Bigg Market? One day, they will be old. And still drunk. And they will want to dance to Europe and DJ Jean with other old, drunk people in that remarkable ‘Shoes glued to floor. Must wiggle arms’ manner. In terms of garments, glow-in-the-dark suntans and sovereign rings are an absolute must, with leather elbow patches, pirate earrings and asexual crimped mullets also in the running.

ON THE TURNTABLES?
Expect to have your ears sodomised by a pick-&-mix of rubbish from the last six decades: bankers are Kylie’s Locomotion, Britney Spears’ Hit Me Baby One More Time (yes, my stomach leapt at the thought of that too), Kenny’s The Bump (actually, that was pretty good), Gerry & The Pacemakers’ You’ll Never Walk Alone’, and the midnight ‘erection selection’ – The ‘Snake, The Adams and De Burgh in excelcis.

IF GRABBING A GRANNY CLUBBING WAS A RECORD, IT WOULD BE:
Supergran by Billy Connolly or Ol Man’s River by Al Jolson.

(Published: The North Guide, November 2001)

Time For Sport

As the football season approaches, David John Watton gets all hot and bothered about a certain Russian billionaire…

“ALL YOU NEED is love.” So said John Lennon, broadcasting live to the world with a flower in his hair in 1967, exactly one month after Jock Stein’s Lisbon Lions had lifted the European Cup for Celtic.
When it comes to the beautiful game, however, all you really need is hate. Hate is as intrinsic a part of football as pie, mud and continental wingers who cry when they get their hairbands dirty. Much as one suspects that Darren Anderton is very kind to small animals and Tore Andre Flo has a keen appreciation of landscape gardening, it is the players whose internal rage dwarfs even the most furious Greek gods that make football the lyrical wedding of grace and violence that, at best, it is.
Roy Keane contains within him more bile than the entire gastro-enterology ward at the RVI: he’s been the best player in the Premiership for the last five years.
Indeed, you could argue that the life of a football fan is just hours, days, even years of hatred, fear, paranoia and loathing, tempered by the odd pocket of joy. You hate your own players for not being able to kick a ball straight. You hate the other players for scoring all those goals when your players were pre-occupied trying to kick a ball straight. You hate your manager for persisting with that fat fool up front. You hate your chair man for not buying that fat fool when he was at least a fat fool who scored the odd goal two years ago.
You hate the Mags/Mackems/Smoggies (delete as appropriate). You hate your ground for being too quiet. You hate the guy sitting next to you for being too loud. You hate yourself for putting yourself through this pointless, hideously expensive turmoil every week when you could be doing something infinitely more pleasurable like sticking pins in your eyes. And you really hate what happens when that half-time burger finally reaches the digestive stage at 9.30pm every Saturday night.

THE BEST, AND most creative kind of hate, though, is reserved for hating other clubs. Manchester United? Too successful. Aston Villa? Too unsuccessful. Glasgow Rangers? Too Tory. Ipswich? Too damn nice.
Think of the team you hate the most. Reasons will no doubt range from 17th century Dutch history (our ‘friends’ north of the border) to their nickname (‘The Toffees’??), all the way to some obnoxious work colleague you had years ago whose name you’ve long forgotten but whose life-long devotion to Sheffield Wednesday means you want to punish him and them for time immemorial.
Which brings us to the point of this tirade: for all my football supporting life, I have hated Chelsea FC. My passion runs deep and sincere, and my reasons for these myopic murderous desires are long, plentiful and have been carefully honed over the last decade-and-a-half.
A Match of the Day-style hate highlights package would include the words Chelsea Village; David Mellor; fans waving £20 notes at northern away games; Dennis Wise; Frank Lampard Jnr; “A continental club playing in England”; the Headhunters hooligan firm; £50 a ticket for away seats; playing in blue; Bosnich and Bogarde on £40,000 a week in the reserves; and the cup finals. Losing 2-0. Three times. To cockneys.

SO IMAGINE MY delight when the richest man in Russia (£3.65 billion, and counting) turned on Sky Sports News, decided that he liked the look of the Premiership, promptly bought Chelsea, and cleared their £100m debts with one swipe of his platinum Amex card while bankrolling a spending spree which could be unparalleled in footballing history with another.
As the rest of the world’s chairmen scrabble round the back of the sofa for some loose change to ease their creaking wage bills – the legacy of the previous four years of Chelski-style economics – Roman Abramovich simply draws up a list of the world’s best players and buys them. The Zen simplicity of unimaginable wealth.
So what will the repercussions of this extraordinary deal be? The Abramovich saga will no doubt change the face of football, but how? And will Chelsea ever achieve their ambition of becoming the Real Madrid of England?
Well, the fact – and I admit this is my heart ruling slightly over my head here – is that football is not as simple as that. Even the miracle of Madrid – who, Vieira and Vieri aside, now boast the world’s five best players in their first team – hasn’t guaranteed them unmitigated success. They were pushed all the way in La Liga by modest Real Sociedad, and were out-thought and out-fought in the Champion’s League semi-final by Juventus.
In football, success cannot be bought. Inter Milan spent more than £300m in the 1990s, winning nothing of note. Newcastle United, Chelsea and Leeds are probably the three worst recent examples in the Premiership of thinking that a blank chequebook can equate directly to triumph.
The perils of foreign ownership are another story in themselves: remember that Wimbledon were one of the earliest Premiership clubs to succumb to controlling interests outside of this country, in the form of a Norwegian consortium.
And just look at the current situation at Fulham, owned by Mohammed al-Fayed, who assumed he could bankroll the club into the world’s elite. They’re now homeless, with an unproved 33 year-old manager and have just spent a season flirting dangerously with relegation.

APART FROM THE very elite few (which is a lot more elite than the casual observer would think), football clubs do not make money. Therefore, the wealthy benefactors who stay with football are exclusively those with a genuine love for their team: Jack Walker at Blackburn, Steve Gibson at Middlesbrough, Jack Hayward at Wolves and Elton John at Watford have all enjoyed a relative amount of success for their investment, and must clearly love their hobby.
The al-Fayeds, Uri Gellers and – I predict – the Abramoviches, as they realise football is not the golden goose that the glamorous TV highlights and acres of press coverage promise, will soon move on to more profitable pastures. Leaving the game to the die-hards in the boardrooms and the stands for whom football is not a brief infatuation, but a love affair for life.

(Published: The North East Times, August 2003)

Rough Guide to Clubbing #04: Clubbing on a Weeknight

WHAT?
-beep. beep. Beep-Beep. Beep-biddly-Beep. BEEP-biddly-BIDDLY-BEEP. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP [bang]. [pause.] Ooo-whooo-oooo-whoooo-ooo… The evil sunlight. The confusion. The inability to understand the sounds and numbers on the clock, or why you’ve chosen to sleep wearing your loafers with an open, yet full can of Heineken in your hand. The sudden, dull thud right between the eyes which strikes at the exact same moment as you try and prise what was your tongue from your lips, resulting in elastoplast-removal levels of pain. And the worst sensation of all: Sara bloody Cox’s foghorn serenade, combined with the messy realisation that ten minutes ago you were late for work, and you are still at least eight rungs over the drink-drive limit. Clubbing on a weeknight: bad. Is that going to stop us? No.

WHERE?
Every doomed expedition of this ilk will begin in the pub nearest work, where you’ll retire at 5.25pm to wind down from the day’s labour with a cheeky one. You will initially be in the company of a few trusted companions from work, and most like as not encumbered with numerous bags of food shopping and extremely valuable electrical goods, for most piteous is the man who tries to put his newly-repaired DVD player and value bucket of houmous on the same peg in the Legends cloakroom. For now though, a pint or two with friends and some scurrilous office gossip is your only goal.
Four hours later, and you are in an Italian restaurant with your rapidly-defrosting luggage, your office pals, their pals, some of your office pals’ pals and some other totally random people who may or may not be yours or their pals. Everything is strange; and stuck as you are between post-work wind-down, evening meal sophistication and bona-fide boozing spree, you are drinking a pint of beer, a glass of wine, and double tequilas with every round. You can forsee naught but doom.
Another four hours later, and you are dancing to Kylie, surrounded by rugby players and student nurses. You’ve withdrawn £30 three times from various cash machines and borrowed £30 off someone you will never see again. Your houmous is posing a viable health risk to the poor girl in the cloakroom, and your newly-repaired DVD player is halfway to Cash Converters via Dodgy Trev the head bouncer.
Another four hours later still, and you’ve lost 3x£30 in the local Grosvenor and are chain-smoking B&H and nibbling on decaying houmous in your bedroom with The Pogues playing at an incorrect volume, and either some unfortunate fellow late-night drinker or one of your friend’s girlfriends slowly passing out on your floor. You are a long, long way from answering your extension.
Four hours after that, you awake. The world is ending. And the houmous is repeating something rotten.

WHO?
No-one is unsusceptible to this hellish scenario, although teachers, doctors, journalists, footballers, journalists, politicians, receptionists and journalists are the social groups most likely at risk. Students are paid by the government to practice this kind of behaviour, and at least one man (the estimable Soho barfly and sometime journalist – quelle surprise – Jeffrey Bernard) has made money out of this dreadful situation. For the rest of us though, it’s just another brick in the P45 wall. We don’t need no education…

IF CLUBBING ON A WEEKNIGHT WAS A RECORD, IT WOULD BE:
No question: Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now by The Smiths. “I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour”? Anthemic.

(Published: The North Guide, February 2002)