Basket Cases

The five stages of grief, as proposed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, sometimes known by the acronym DABDA. Originally used to identify the series of emotions experienced by terminally ill patients, these have been extended to cover bereavement, divorce (particularly as experienced by the children of a marriage), the loss of a relationship and substance abuse. It might seem fatuous to suggest that a similar range of emotions can be experienced by sports fans, but I think it is a theory that holds water. Viewed from afar, the range of emotions experienced by fans of Leicester City certainly could fit the Kübler-Ross model.

Leicester City celebrate their shock Premier League title last season.

The East Midlands club stunned the football world by winning the Premier League title last term but have been in free-fall this season, sitting just one place above the relegation zone and having won just one and lost eight of their last ten league games. While last season their fans will have been experiencing pleasurable disbelief at their team's success, this season they will undoubtedly have run through the gamut of emotions from D to D, even if they may not all have reached A.

The league table does not lie. This is where Leicester now find themselves.

For many fans of teams who look like they are relegation candidates, their journey starts with Denial, as in "We're too good to go down." It  is a phrase heard commonly in football, and having won the Premier League in 2016, Leicester fans could have been forgiven for thinking that at the start of this season. But as any football fan will tell you, the history of the game is littered with clubs who everyone thought were either too big or too good to get relegated, but when the final table is totted up, it is only points, not reputations nor the quality of the football you've played that determine whether or not you stay up.

Then comes Anger - Having seen their side slip to defeats to the likes of Hull City and Sunderland, there will be some supporters who are angry. Angry that the club allowed a player like N'Golo Kanté to move to Chelsea; angry that the players that swept Leicester to the title last season have under-performed so abysmally this campaign; angry that the club have not signed players to address the slide and angry that their team finds themselves where they are in the table.

Next is Bargaining - Leicester remain in the Champions League for now and there are probably desperate supporters offering trade-offs - "I'd happily see us out of Europe if it meant staying in the Premier League," that sort of thing. This stage is also marked by feverish calculations of what will happen if other clubs around them in the table win or draw and exactly how many wins are needed for survival. It's the sort of desperate straw clutching experience that deludes fans into thinking that despite having won only five out of the first thirty games, the team can win five of the last eight.

Then Depression sets in - There will be those who can see no possibility of staying up, so they give up hope: they may still go to the games or watch them on TV, but do so with a sense of futility - "I don't know why I bother, I know they are going to lose."

Finally, Acceptance - There will come a stage when relegation is unavoidable, or while mathematically still possible is so unlikely that it might as well be. Perversely, this is when - with the pressure off - teams suddenly start performing well and win a game or two. The fans, meanwhile have accepted their fate and started planning their trip to Cardiff instead of Manchester next season.

But as miserably as Leicester fans might view their future - and for supporters of the clubs below them it looks more miserable still - they can at least console themselves that the only real difference next season will probably be the division they find themselves playing in, and that they have the very real prospect of bouncing straight back up into the top flight. For some of English football's basket case clubs, both the present and the immediate future look bleak: for one in particular, relegation may be the least of their worries.

Coventry City fans protest about Sisu, the club's owners. Photo: Coventry Telegraph

Coventry City fans may have a trip to Wembley in the much maligned and much boycotted Checkatrade Trophy to look forward to, but relegation from League One seems to be a racing certainty as they sit nine points from safety. Fans have frequently protested against owners Sisu, whose stewardship has seen the club endure rows over unpaid rent (which resulted in a temporary move to Northampton), frozen bank accounts and transfer embargos. Next season Coventry will likely be playing league games in the same division as Morecambe, who were bought - somewhat improbably - by 35-year old Brazilian businessman Diego Lemos last September. Lemos has been seen rarely and as is fairly common in these sorts of cases, there are tales of unpaid wages, unpaid bills and the spectre of closure.

Photo: The Insider

But if you really want to see a club that are a basket case, just look to East London and Leyton Orient. In the 2013–14 season, Orient lost the League One Play-Off final at Wembley to Rotherham United on penalties.  Owner Barry Hearn sold the club to Italian businessman Francesco Becchetti, the club were relegated to League Two and now look likely to drop out of the league completely as they sit second from bottom having won just once in their last ten games. Becchetti's tenure has seen the appointment of eleven managers including four alone this season, which is one manager more than there have been home wins. The term 'Manager of The Month' has a totally different meaning at The Matchroom Stadium. Tales of Becchetti's interference in team matters and the alienation of long-time club employees abound and from the outside it is difficult to decide whether this stems from incompetence or deliberate and wilful actions aimed at taking the club out of existence; whichever is the case, the future of the club is clearly in jeopardy.

This season has seen four managers but only three wins in East London for Leyton Orient. Photo: Evening Standard.

It gives me no pleasure to see the miserable decline of Leyton Orient - after all I was a season ticket holder for over ten years, saw them first in the old Second Division, fall to the Fourth and win promotion, so I have a great deal of affection for them - but on the other hand, I do not I feel that I'm being unfair in describing them as a basket case. It comes to something when, by comparison, I feel blessed with the club I support now (if you want to know how and why I now support them, see http://rulesfoolsandwisemen.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/romford-1-manchester-united-0.html), even though Romford do not own their own ground, nor play in the town that they are named for, do not have a playing budget and consider themselves fortunate to attract a crowd of more than 150.

The Leyton Orient faithful have almost certainly gone through all of Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief this season - many simultaneously -with anger and depression particularly prominent.  So concerned are the Leyton Orient Fans Trust (LOFT) that they have even acknowledged the possibility of setting up a phoenix club a la AFC Wimbledon[1]. Leicester City fans dismayed at the prospect of relegation to the Championship might like to remember - scant consolation though it might be - that there's always someone worse off than yourself.

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[1] See http://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/francesco-becchetti-unwilling-to-sell-leyton-orient-for-less-than-4m-as-owner-looks-to-get-his-money-a3466456.html

Without Let Or Hindrance

On the inside cover of my passport, it says "Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary." This evokes images of the British Empire, of moustachioed gentlemen, immaculately dressed in three-piece suits - and behatted of course -trailed by porters wheeling their steamer trunks down a gangplank as they disembark at some sun beaten foreign port in the vein of Phileas Fogg in Round The World In Eighty Days.  Waved through passport control and customs by admiring locals, they proceed imperiously on some diplomatic mission or to run the family's tea plantation. In reality its presence is more ornamental than of any practical use; I imagine that one would get fairly short shrift if you cited it to speed your journey through immigration at some foreign airport - or British airport come to that - as any traveller will be familiar with the queues that snake around arrivals halls at most airports, which can only be dealt with by allowing them to take their own sweet time to clear.

David Niven (left) as Phileas Fogg, the quintessential Englishman abroad.

The longest delay I can recall encountering was at Cancun airport a good number of years ago - if the pictures I have seen online are anything to go by, they seem to have tarted the place up a bit from how I recall it- where immigration took a couple of hours, time that was spent queuing in what can best be described as a superannuated shed. Of course even returning to the UK and landing at Stansted or Gatwick is not much better as you join what seems to be an endless line of travellers that ends at the automatic passport gate, where instead of some bored UK Border Agency official giving your document a cursory glance, you have to wait patiently, shuffling and turning your head at random angles to try to get the ePassport gate to recognise your photograph.

The reason for my mentioning all of this is because I recently renewed my passport, and the experience was very much different from either my previous renewal, and more especially, from the very first application I made for a passport back in the 1980's. Prior to then I had used a British Visitors Passport  for my occasional forays overseas (usually just day trips to France or Belgium).  The British Visitors Passport, which could be obtained from the Post Office, was valid for a year and was only accepted in Western Europe. It consisted of a single piece of cardboard, folded in three. It was dropped in 1995 as it did not meet security standards.

The British Visitors Passport

This time round, my application was processed completely online. The Passport Office kept me up to date by email and text, telling me that my old passport had been received by them, that my application was being processed, and that my new passport had been despatched. The first time I applied for a full passport, in 1987, staff at the Passport Office went on strike literally the day after I had posted off my application. My passport arrived in May, just weeks before I was due to go on holiday, but in the interim I had had no idea if I was going to get it in time to go on holiday. In 2007 we booked a holiday to Tobago and I suddenly realised that my passport needed renewing before we went. That time I went for the Premium service - you get your passport in one day, but have to go in person to a passport office and it is eye-wateringly expensive - which involved going to Victoria, having my application processed and then kicking my heels for a few hours while they produced the document.

First step in renewing my passport last week was obviously to get a new picture taken and it was probably naive of me to expect this to be trouble free. When Val renewed her passport a couple of years ago, her photo - which was a physical copy sent off with a paper application - was rejected by the Passport Office (they said she was smiling and smiling is not allowed as it makes it particularly difficult for ePassport gates to recognise you apparently) so despite the claims of stores like Timpsons or Snappy Snaps that they are experts at taking passport photos that comply with all the rules, I guess I should not have been so cavalier as to expect my photograph to be accepted without any problem. 

Sadly, Snappy Snaps' claims on their website proved over-ambitious.

The first attempt was, I admit, a bloody awful picture, but then again most passport photos are pretty terrible. Yes, I did look like an serial killer, but it was me, and it was taken professionally, so what could go wrong? I uploaded it - and it was rejected. "There's not enough space round your head," said the error message, before going on to say, "We can't find the outline of your head." Back I went to Snappy Snaps, but this time - in case the hooded sweatshirt top I had been wearing was partly responsible for the rejection - I wore something different. They took a new picture - which looked marginally less like a man bent on disembowelling someone with a rusty breadknife, but not much. I uploaded it - and it was rejected.  Apparently this time the software could find the outline of my head, but there was still insufficient space around it. As you can imagine, I was not a happy bunny, being forced to return to Snappy Snaps again. This time they manipulated the second photo and checked it online with the Passport Office to make sure it was compliant - why they didn't do that in the first place (and I didn't know they could) is beyond me. Naturally, this time when I uploaded my photo, it was accepted.

For the sake of your sensibilities, I have excised the offending picture from this screenshot of the website that rejected it. 

Even though the Passport Office website says that it will take three weeks to renew a passport, my application only took seven days, I did it all online and it was entirely hassle free, which is more than can be said for getting the new photograph that I needed for it in the first place. Because renewal applications can be done entirely online, there is no need to have a photograph printed, and if my experience is anything to go by, I would recommend that when you next need your passport renewed you get a friend or relative with a smartphone or digital camera to take your picture rather than get it taken professionally. Since the Passport Office website checks whether the photo complies with the rules,  you can keep taking photos and uploading them till you get one that is accepted. Or you can make multiple trips to Snappy Snaps, like I did. Given the choice, I would go for the first option.

Gadgets and Gimmicks

Once one hits a certain age, it is inevitable that you will be asked some lifestyle questions by your doctor: Do you smoke? Do you drink (alcohol) and if so, how much? The patient who says they smoke the occasional cigarette and drinks a couple of pints a couple of times a week will probably have his doctor reckoning that they are a twenty-a-day man who has at least four pints every day, the conventional wisdom being that we all underestimate - or, to put more bluntly - lie about such things.

William Hague claimed he used to drink 14 pints a day...no one believed him.

Equally, how accurate is the answer you give to the question about how much exercise you take? If you play sport, go to the gym or take exercise classes, the question should be fairly easy to answer, but if - like me - you do none of these things, how do you answer? There's a good chance you will wildly over - or under - estimate. These days the major form of exercise I take is walking, and when I decide that I'm going to take a walk of a decent length I will use the Map My Walk app on my phone, so I know how long were the walks I did from Herne Bay to Margate (12 miles) and Romford to Tilbury (16 miles - see my blog The Long Walk To Tilbury). But on days when I just walk to the shops or into town I have only a rough idea of how far I have walked, which is why I decided to buy a Fitbit activity tracker. I did consider buying one a while ago, but reckoned it was a bit of a gimmick for someone like me who does not exercise seriously, but having taken the plunge, I am impressed. In the eight days that I've had it, I've clocked up over 41 miles; but a lot of it is just pootling round the house or the supermarket, you might say, except that those walks include 341 'very active' minutes and 143 flights of stairs climbed, and include one day where I walked ten miles and two where I did seven. And now that I have an idea of how far I walk on a normal day, I can make sure I keep up the regime.

A word of caution however: research by the National University of Ireland in Galway suggests that these activity trackers can register false positives, and it is true that some mornings I wake to find that my Fitbit has registered more steps than can be accounted for by a nocturnal trip to the bathroom, but as the makers of the Fitbit say, their trackers ‘are not intended to be scientific or medical devices,' rather they monitor ‘overall health and fitness trends.’ On the whole, my Fitbit is giving me a pretty good indication of how much exercise I'm getting and is a darn sight more accurate than any estimates I might otherwise have been able to make. So despite any misgiving I might initially have had, at the moment I'll rate the Fitbit as a useful gadget rather than a gimmick.

What is the point of an internet enabled fridge?

I'll just leave this here, you can make up your own jokes.

There are, however plenty of gimmicky devices available, particularly among the Internet of Things. I cannot ever see the day dawning when I decide I need an internet enabled fridge - I'll rely on my own five senses to decide whether I need to buy more orange juice or if that bacon is past its best, thank you. And when I read stories like the one that appeared on the BBC website in 2014 - 'Fridge sends spam emails as attack hits smart gadgets'[1] - it makes me want one even less.  I'm sure there's a joke there about spam, but I can't be bothered to think one up. But if an internet enabled fridge might conceivably have its uses, I truly cannot think of any reason why anyone would want a wi-fi kettle. Last year The Guardian reported that ' Data specialist Mark Rittman spent an entire day attempting to set up his new appliance so that it would boil on command.' Frankly, if you want a gadget to avoid having to go switch the kettle on and wait for it to boil, get a Quooker: they may be expensive, but I guarantee they are a lot less frustrating.

Quooker's mean instant boiling water, so where's the need for a Wi-fi kettle?

Some gadgets come and go, often replaced by superior alternatives. The video recorder and the fax machine have been supplanted by hard disk drive recorders and -largely -by email respectively, but both had reasonably long and useful periods of use. Not so the 3D television, the first of which was produced in 1935, although it wasn't until 2010 that they became popular - albeit not that popular. When we bought our last TV in 2012, 3D capability was a major selling point as far as the retailers were concerned, although personally I felt that rather than making the viewing experience more life-like, it was rather unnatural, and it seems I was not alone as Sky TV dropped their 3D output and manufacturers like Sony, LG and Samsung have now largely stopped making sets with this functionality. History will record the 3D television as a gimmick.

Putting a digital watch in every conceivable device was popular during the 1980's

Years ago the Innovations catalogue was a treasure trove of gadgets - most were useless and many combined two gadgets in one: adding a watch to items like pens and far more unlikely devices was a staple of it. Pocket handwarmers, revolving wine racks and storage units for shoes and CD's (sometimes combined), and caddies for your remote controls were among the hundreds of essential items the magazine advertised, the majority of which turned out to be a waste of space and money - somehow they seemed much more useful when seen on the pages of the catalogue than they turned out to be in reality.

The kitchen is where you will find the sharpest contrast between the useful and the useless - or, if not useless, annoying. We have a Vitamix blender (see The Scariest Domestic Appliance In The World) which I thought might turn out to be a gimmick, but which we have used virtually every day since we bought it, but we also used to have a worktop grill like the ones that go under the George Foreman brand (I can't remember now what make ours was). It was such a faff to use and to clean that we binned it, although given the popularity of the Foreman ones, I imagine a lot of people would swear by them.

Ultimately, what to one man is a gimmicky disappointment is to another an indispensible gadget, and at the moment my Fitbit falls in that second category. Time will tell how long that lasts.

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[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25780908

The World of Ragle Gumm

Last week I went to see a recording of BBC Radio's satirical sketch show, Newsjack. Inevitably, two subjects dominated the skits and jokes: Brexit and Donald Trump. In many ways, it is a difficult time for writers of satirical sketches as reality is often weirder and more absurd than anything a script writer could devise, but on the other hand, there is material in bucket loads. Meanwhile, one of the twentieth century's greatest pieces of fiction - George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984 -has apparently seen an upsurge in sales, prompting many people to wheel out that old saying, "1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual."

  

It is true that certain aspects of politics seem to have taken an Orwellian turn in recent months, with both Brexit and Trump. The Orwellian sounding term 'Post truth' is not new (it was first coined as far back as 1992), but the EU referendum campaign - in particular the oft repeated and much debunked claim that EU membership cost the UK £350million per week - brought the expression into common usage. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Michael Deacon said that in the culture of post truth, "Facts are negative. Facts are pessimistic. Facts are unpatriotic." Facts which do not fit with the preconceptions of a particular group or individual are, therefore deemed unreliable: somewhere there are better facts, facts that more readily support that group or person's position. It also strikes me that proponents of certain post-truth ideas are like many conspiracy theorists; the more vociferously their theories are denied and debunked, the more they believe them to be validated. Denial equals proof.

No matter how often the message on the bus was debunked, and even after Nigel Farage admitted it was a "mistake," this post-truth 'fact' was still oft quoted.

The media has often been accused of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story, but what exactly are facts? Years ago I worked for a manager who would refer to "true facts," which I always thought (but never said), was tautological: by definition, a fact must be true. A fact is a thing that is known, or proved, to be true, so what type of fact could there be, apart from a true one? Today that definition of a fact is under attack: opinions and downright falsehoods are being dressed up in fancy clothes and sent out into the world to masquerade as facts, and as Lenin said, "A lie told often enough becomes the truth." With the amount of news that we can access today - through television, radio, newspapers and the internet - a statement, regardless of its provenance, regardless of its accuracy, becomes a fact through repetition and through it being published through a multiplicity of sources. Fact checking using just the internet is unreliable: a wildly implausible statement cannot be treated as verified simply because two or three different outlets report it, but with our voracious appetite for 'news' and with the media's equally insatiable desire to be the first with a story, our critical faculties need to be heightened. Under the constant bombardment of post-truth stories, alternative facts and fake news, sifting the wheat from the chaff is more difficult than at any time in history. Simply put, we need to be less credulous and more sceptical.

If Orwell were writing 1984 today, he would probably quietly tear up his manuscript and never think of it again. He would undoubtedly concede that no work of fiction could compete with the absurdity, the contradictions and the downright cruelty of the world we now live in. Equally, he would be horrified that the ideas that he set out in his work have been treated less as warnings and more as guidelines. We now live in a world where, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, doublethink, hate crime, and doublespeak - to name but three of the concepts from 1984 - have become part of our normal life. The last of these is particularly prevalent  (just think of downsizing when used as a euphemism for redundancy) while doublethink is so ingrained in politicians and many of their supporters that most will not even recognise that they are guilty of it.

The twin concepts of post-truth and alternative facts have led us into a world where the President of the United States of America squabbles with an actress over social media because she had the temerity to criticise him in a speech at an award ceremony, and berates the press for publishing what he calls fake news simply because their reportage is uncomplimentary, while blithely making unverifiable statements about voter fraud and the size of his inauguration crowd.  If The Donald is that thin skinned, it bodes ill for the day he is attacked by a political heavyweight, or the day when one of his controversial policies fails. If it were not so serious it would be funny.

It remains to be seen whether a wall is ever built along the border with Mexico - and Trump does seem to have diluted his guarantee that Mexico would pay for such a wall to a suggestion that he will claw the money back somehow once it is built - and equally his executive order that halted the entire US refugee programme, indefinitely banned Syrian refugees, and suspended all nationals from seven countries may turn out to be short lived in light of legal opposition following a case filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). But if we criticise Trump for his actions, we must at least concede that unlike many politicians, he is already making good on many of his campaign promises - no matter how objectionable many people think they are.

Just as Orwell's seminal work becomes more prophetic with each passing day, I cannot help but feel that we may be in a world that bears more than a passing resemblance to the sort of alternative realities that Philip K Dick created. Worlds like the one inhabited by Ragle Gumm in Time Out Of Joint, where the reality Gumm believes he exists in begins slowly to unravel and expose the real world outside. One can almost believe that one day soon we will pick up a discarded newspaper that was not supposed to be found, and find an obituary of John F Kennedy, who we will discover was not assassinated in 1963, but lived to be one-hundred years of age and died peacefully in a Florida nursing home. And from that discovery, our world will suddenly start to morph into one in which Donald Trump is a professional golfer with no political ambitions, the European Union never came into being and Nigel Farage is still trading commodities on the London Metal Exchange.

Philip K Dick

The late US senator Daniel Moynihan said - presciently, in 1994 - "Everyone is entitled to his opinion, but not his own facts," and a great deal of what are being presented as facts on all sides (where they are not downright falsehoods) are largely just opinion and speculation. Despite the opprobrium in which Trump is held and the intense opposition there has been to Brexit, time will judge Trump's Presidency and Britain's exit from the EU and may even do so more swiftly than any of us expect. Maybe, in years to come we will look back at Brexit and the election of Donald Trump more positively than we can currently imagine - personally I doubt it, but I could be wrong - but whatever history makes of this period, the time is ripe for 'true facts' to make a comeback.