Derren Brown is Infamous

in·fa·mous  [adjective]

Notorious, disreputable, ill-famed, of ill repute, legendary, fabled.

In his new stage show, Infamous, Derren Brown claims that he wishes to be exactly that, infamous. Not one assumes as disreputable or of ill repute, but certainly legendary or fabled, although if he were to put his talents to nefarious use I'm sure he could do so quite easily! I was fortunate enough to see the show recently and although this is a review of sorts, I won’t be going into detail on what the show comprises as the audience were especially asked not to do so and I’m sure that if any of you intend seeing the show, you wouldn’t want me to.

What I can tell you is that even having seen Derren on television, both some of his recorded stage shows and experiments, I was unprepared for how good this show would be. As you are probably familiar with his work I won’t try and describe it, though he says himself that his act combines "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship,” which sums it up nicely. His shows frequently see him reveal information about members of his audience which make him appear to be psychic, although however he does it he is not a psychic; in fact he is possibly an anti-psychic, claiming no such powers and he is in fact a frequent debunker of those who claim such talents.

A common theme that runs though all of Derren Brown’s work is the power of the mind. On stage that is his mind, controlling and misdirecting to achieve his illusions but it is also the power of the minds of his subjects in which he is interested. He is clear that he does not wish to manipulate people's real-life decisions or belief systems; rather how can they alter the way their minds work to achieve more positive outcomes.

Although I've not included specific references to the content of Infamous, in the following paragraphs these is some detail of some of Brown's previous works by way of examples, which I don't believe should spoil these shows for anyone as they've been on TV and on DVD for some time, although if you've not seen The Assassin or Fear and Faith, and want to keep them as a surprise, you might want to skip to the penultimate paragraph, but please come back and read the rest once you've watched the shows!

Of all of Derren’s  TV “experiments” quite my favourite is The Assassin in which an unsuspecting member of the public “assassinates” Stephen Fry but is completely unaware that he has done so. To describe the technique which is used to achieve this as hypnosis does not do it justice, this is programming a human being. The show tests the conspiracy theory that Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy under hypnosis on orders from the CIA or similar agency and was further programmed to have no recollection of the events. It appears to be compelling in proving that this is possible, although it is in no way proof that Sirhan Sirhan was hypnotised. Like all good conspiracy theories, any denial of the fact that Robert Kennedy was assassinated as a result of CIA activity will be assumed by the supporters of the theory as evidence that their ideas are correct.

In Fear and Faith, Brown takes a group of people with various fears and phobias and tells them that a new wonder drug will conquer these fears and phobias. The drug, Rumyodin (Your Mind) is a placebo; the participants overcome their fears and phobias, such as fear of confrontation or phobia of heights, through the power of their own minds. It is powerful stuff and there is no doubt that Derren Brown’s techniques worked, although some of it left me uneasy. The participant who had crippling social anxiety and a fear of conflict and confrontation was placed in a variety of situations in which such confrontations occurred. The other participants in these situations were actors; obviously their reactions were predetermined by Derren Brown himself whereas in real-life situations the actions of others would be unpredictable and potentially violent. My fear was that the young man who was participating in this part of the show could have become involved in some dangerous positions in real life where no actors were involved. There being no evidence that this did happen, I hope that my fears are ill founded.

Our minds are like muscles; they need to be exercised but the ways in which we tend to exercise them are predictable; our minds like to find patterns in randomness. In Fear and Faith a young woman is told she has been selected to take part in a TV show, Intervention and that actors will interact with her. She keeps a video diary and describes these interventions, but as you probably guessed, there is no show, and there are no actors. The woman ascribes the random events that occur as part of her normal life to her interactions with these fictitious actors. Her mind has found patterns where none exist; the mere suggestion that these would occur caused her to look for things that simply were not there. The challenge here is to dispute the evidence of our own minds and to look beyond the obvious.

And that, challenging the evidence of our own eyes, is how to approach Infamous. Much of what Derren Brown does on stage is explicable; in fact much of it he explains for us. The rest however much it must have an explanation, is unfathomable (well it was to me at least), but what is required is a dose of realism as Brown himself says, “I happily admit cheating, as it's all part of the game. I hope some of the fun for the viewer comes from not knowing what's real and what isn't.”

Ultimately Infamous is entertainment, and excellent entertainment at that. The show is currently touring and comes to London in June, running till the end of August. If you have got tickets I am sure you will enjoy it and be entertained, mystified and awe struck by turns; if you haven’t got tickets I seriously recommend that you try and get some!

Virgin on the Ridiculous - Part Two

Regular readers, and it's gratifying to note that I have some, will recall the trials and tribulations that I had last year when I foolishly (as it turned out) signed up for Virgin Media. To recap, after a number of visits from various engineers, it was concluded that my address wasn't serviceable because there was no cable actually running into my property. To install the cabling the engineers would require access to my neighbour's garden and he expected to be paid £1,000 to give permission for that. As neither I nor Virgin were prepared to pay, that appeared to be the end of the matter. Having abandoned the idea of Virgin, I explored the idea of BT's fibre optic product Infinity, but it wasn't yet available in my area, so we struggled on with our existing broadband and its snail paced speeds of less than 2Mbps.

Then in March at the Ideal Home Show, my wife and I visited the Virgin Media stand, more out of devilment than anything else really. We gave them a cut down version of our experiences to date, but they were quite insistent that there would be no problem in our having Virgin Media installed. One of the ironies was that like us, one of the chaps working the stand told us that he regularly received mail from Virgin urging him to sign up, but he couldn't because his street had no cable at all. Anyway, we signed up and were given an installation date of 13th April. The absence of any cable running into our property was dismissed as a mere bagatelle; engineers would call on the preceding day to make good that omission (allegedly).

I have to say that I wasn't entirely filled with confidence, but hey ho, what was the worst that could happen?

A few days later, with immaculately poor timing, I received an email from my existing ISP (Plusnet) offering fibre optic broadband, which had just become available in my area. This created a dilemma; cancelling Virgin would cost me £25 but if I did nothing then either I would get Virgin, whose advertised speeds in my area weren't quite as good as Plusnet or more likely I would get my £25 back when Virgin admitted defeat. In the end I decided to let Virgin come and see what happened.

Events then took a different turn when we came back from a few days in Spain to find that our broadband had given up the ghost. I tried the usual remedial technique, i.e. turn the router off and on again, but with no joy. I phoned  Plusnet who went away and did some checks. The next day our broadband connection was spontaneously restored, although it crept along at speeds reminiscent of dial-up. To cut a long story short, it then gave up on us again and an engineer called, identified a problem on the line, which he fixed and we were up and running again, albeit still pretty slowly.

Virgin Media were still due to call just three days hence, but after some discussion we decided to cancel them and opt for Plusnet’s fibre optic broadband. When we phoned up to place the order we were offered their phone package too, and with that and the broadband together, it works out cheaper than our existing broadband and line rental with BT. And here's the thing with BT; I pay an extortionate amount each month to them so I phoned them recently querying this and having checked my bill later, find that I am over £100 in credit. This is one of those drawbacks of paying your bills by monthly Direct Debit; budgeting is easier but you often end up with large credit balances which is good for the company, but not so good for the payer!

I have to say that despite cancelling the appointments with Virgin, I had a sneaking feeling that they would still turn up and sure enough they arrived on Friday at half past five in the afternoon to install the cabling. Well that was their plan although quite how they intended to do this wasn't something they were very clear on. I was only slightly surprised that they didn't return the next day to actually try and install the TiVo box and broadband hub.

Having burned our bridges with Virgin, I had a horrible feeling that the engineer would arrive to install our fibre optic broadband, only to find some insuperable problem that would leave us stuck with the existing connection. As you can tell, I am not the most optimistic of people!

Fortunately the installation went ahead and I ran a speed test for the hell of it. Monday, pre fibre optic, download 1.6Mbps, upload 0.4Mbps; Tuesday, post fibre optic, 65Mbps and 15 Mbps respectively, somewhat surpassing the speeds offered by Virgin in my area. (See footnote). If my fascination with, and the pleasure I take in the speeds I am now getting seems a little immature, then I can only say that this is because I have been struggling these last few months with broadband speeds that have been positively antediluvian.

Of course it's early days and could yet go horribly wrong (I told you I wasn't an optimist) but I've been a Plusnet customer since dial up days back in the 1990’s and they've always been pretty good. This year they picked up the “Best Customer Rated Broadband” award from uSwitch, but if you search for reviews of their services on the Internet you will find lots of customers and ex customers complaining about them. Mind you, if you look for reviews of most service providers, be they energy companies, banks or media companies including ISP’s you will find plenty of negative comments. And there is the rub, because apparently when people receive poor service they tell, on average 19 people but tell on average fewer than three people when they receive good service. 

Human nature being what it is we relish the opportunity for a good old moan; when things go well we keep quiet for fear of jinxing it and inevitably expect this not to last so that soon we will have something to jolly well moan about!

Reviews and other people's experiences are valuable to a point, but ultimately the moral of the story with most things you have to trust your own judgement and experience; if it works for you, stick with it. If it doesn't, then give it the old heave ho.

And now I'm off to watch BBC iPlayer on the television, sans buffering, simply because now, I can!

Postscript: I originally intended publishing this piece a week ago, but held it back for two reasons. Firstly, the Luis Suarez incident suggested itself for a more topical blog, but secondly after my initial euphoria at the download speeds I was getting, they dropped to under 2Mbps. My pessimism appeared well founded. The cause was apparently a stuck speed profile which has been fixed, although at any sign of pages being slow to load, I am running a speed test!

Footnote: These speeds were gathered from uswitch.com, who apparently are a tad unreliable in this field. My ISP told me (when I was experiencing some difficulties), that the best broadband speed test is to be found here at BT Wholesale which showed me my speeds were 40Mbps download and 10Mbps upload; still not too shabby.

“Some fava beans and a nice chianti for Mr. Suarez”

I could not quite believe what I was seeing when I watched Match of the Day last weekend and saw Luis Suarez take a bite out of Branislav Ivanovic; no doubt I wasn’t the only one who watched it in total amazement. It appeared to me that Suarez was trying to provoke his opponent into a foul that would earn Liverpool a penalty; they were 2-1 down at the time. As it happens, Ivanovic wrestled Suarez to the ground, which was a pretty mild reaction all things considered, but the referee awarded Liverpool only a corner. Obviously he knew something had gone on, but equally obviously had missed the Hannibal Lecter impression.

Luis Suarez

Hannibal Lecter

So Suarez stayed on the pitch and went on to score Liverpool’s equalizer, leaving Chelsea somewhat peeved at the injustice of it all. Suarez has form in the arm biting stakes, having also done so while playing in Holland. Put this together with his deliberate handball when playing for Uruguay that denied Ghana a certain goal in the 2010 World Cup plus his reputation for simulation and it’s easy to see why he will never win any popularity contests.

It has been suggested that Suarez has anger management issues. In the case of his bite on Ivanovic I wouldn’t say that it was done out of anger; anger usually spurs an uncontrolled reaction, the retaliatory kick or punch. Suarez’s bite looked to me to be the pre-meditated action of a man whose team were losing and who was trying, as I said, to win a penalty.

There is an argument that what Suarez did was not as bad as the knee high or over the top tackle that can potentially end an opponent’s career. Perhaps so, but these types of tackles are less likely to be premeditated, rather they may result from miscalculation or bad timing (not all of them, granted but many). The player who deliberately, maliciously goes over the top deserves as much opprobrium as does Suarez for his bite, but the slightly warped British sense of values and fair play sometimes overlooks these types of incidents as part and parcel of the game. I suppose that the reason for this is that as a nation we have an ethos of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Tackling is a legitimate part of football and the tackle that ends up as a leg breaker is often excused as a genuine but over enthusiastic attempt to get the ball, but biting can’t be seen in any way as being accidental or a miscalculation.

Again, the British culture of fair play is able to accept (up to a point) what we may call honest fouls, for example the rugby style tackle on the forward who is clean through and the retaliatory punch thrown (usually off target) by the forward. Whilst nowadays both of these offences would result in dismissal, back when I started watching football they would have resulted in no more than a stern lecture from the referee; times change! What the British sports fan finds less acceptable is the sly or underhand antics that Suarez’s bite typified.

This was the case even back in the 1960’s and 1970’s when the English game was somewhat more robust than it is now. Players like Norman Hunter and Ron Harris, with their respective sobriquets of “Bites yer legs” (not literally) and Chopper were examples of forceful defenders who thought nothing of giving opposing forwards a kick now and again, these were the days of course before the tackle from behind was outlawed. Forwards like Denis Law and Francis Lee were no shrinking violets either and were quite capable of giving as good as they got. But for all that Hunter and Harris were considered hard men, the antics of other players, and I’m particularly thinking of the 1970’s Leeds United team here, were not accepted by fans due to their being perceived as sly and devious.

Quite rightly the tackle from behind is now a forgotten part of the game but sadly the genuine art of tackling seems to have disappeared too. The block tackle and the sliding tackle, skills (yes, skills) that were a fundamental part of the full back’s armoury have now almost vanished. In part this is due to a lack of tolerance on the part of referees, but it is also due in some measure to the fact that there seem now to be so few players who can execute these tackles properly. Of course it doesn’t help that many forwards hit the deck squealing and screaming as though they had been stabbed rather than on the receiving end of a hard but vigorous challenge.

Annoyingly, the foul that appears to have become endemic in the game at its highest levels occurs at corners, where players hold, wrestle and generally manhandle each other. It really is tiresome and in my view needs addressing by the game’s law makers. Perhaps if a referee awarded a penalty each time it happened, rather than taking the safe option and letting it go, or worse penalising the victim, it might get stamped out. It might result in half a dozen penalties in a game, but it might also dissuade some of the more frequent practitioners from continuing with these antics.

To return to Suarez, Liverpool have fined him and the Football Association have banned him for ten games. When Suarez, then playing for Ajax, bit PSV Eindhoven player Otman Bakkal he was hit with a seven game ban so the length of the FA's ban does not appear disproportionate. 

On this occasion he should be grateful he bit the apparently mild mannered Ivanovic rather than someone like Ron Harris because rather than contemplating the length of his ban, he would in all probability be wondering when he would be released from hospital.

Shirking from Home

Working at home is a skivers charter, isn’t it? Well, no not really, it depends on both the organisations that allow it and the attitude of those who work from home. There is a prevalent state of mind among those who don’t work from home that those who do are not putting in a full shift, but in my experience that is not the case. For  instance my wife works from home regularly and I know from observing her that not only does she use the time she would otherwise be commuting to work, she regularly  puts in a ten hour stint in front of the PC when working at home.

Working from home has become more prevalent in recent years, and the concept tends to polarise opinions. Naturally there are some jobs that do not lend themselves to home working, so when we talk of people working from home we are normally talking of those who would otherwise be working in offices, and among office workers there are some divisions about the effectiveness of home working.

Some people are opposed to home working on principle and in my experience these people’s prejudices are based on their conception of how effective other people are when they work at home, so the merits of home working have a certain dependency on who is doing the talking, the home worker or the worker who remains tied to the office. For those who work at home and do so enthusiastically, the benefits include the lack of commute, the freedom from interruptions and the ability to concentrate solely on the task at hand; the flexibility to start work early, finish late and adapt work around their domestic commitments. To those who remain chained to their office desk, these virtues may be seen as opportunities for the home worker to be less productive, less proactive and more reactive, doing only the bare minimum of what is required of them.

There is no black or white answer; sometimes home working is at least as effective as working in the office; sometimes even more so but on other occasions there is no substitute for being in the office. Having worked from home on occasions, I know that how effective I was really depended on what tasks I had to perform on a given day. Some days I could be really effective working at home, for instance if it was appraisal time and I had to write reviews of my directs, or if I had to produce some sort of document then it really didn’t matter whether I was in the office or at home. On days when there was less structure, I might become purely reactive, just responding to emails and therefore somewhat less productive. In the job I did, one particular piece of software was not available to me at home as I didn’t have a laptop supplied by my employers and instead relied on connecting through Citrix [1]on my home PC. The software in question was a thick client and not having the software installed on my home computer I was unable to use the GUI[2] and instead had to connect via CICS[3], or the “green screens” as many of you will know them. This had the effect of making life slightly more difficult in working at home than in the office.

Being in the office facilitates collaboration; face to face meetings can be more effective than conference calls and informal chats at the coffee machine have a habit of throwing up solutions to problems but are not possible if workers are not co-located. On that subject, virtual teams, whereby members of the same team may be located in different offices or different countries and time zones are another matter and one which I cannot honestly say that I favour, but that subject I may well return to at a later date.

Whatever work you do at home, there are a few key imperatives to ensure that the home worker is as effective as it can be.

Firstly, environment. Sitting in the lounge, on the sofa, with a laptop balanced on your knees is not ideal in any way, well not for working. A laptop on the kitchen or dining room table is a step up, but ideally home workers ought to strive for an area of their home that is as business like as possible. I’m in the fortunate position of having a small study with a phone, PC, printer and an office chair and this always made me feel more businesslike and focussed when I worked at home.

Secondly, family. Because you are at home, there can be a tendency for family members to forget that your primary purpose is to work for your employer, not for them! The home worker needs to be able to refuse requests to run errands for their family to the detriment of their paid employment.

Thirdly, distractions. I have to admit that when I worked at home my major distraction was tea, and I would drink cup after cup to the point where I was spending almost as much time in the kitchen making tea as anywhere else. In my defence, I would say that I usually worked longer hours and took a shorter lunch break when I worked at home than I did in the office, so I don’t think that the time I spent with the kettle rather and the PC was that detrimental. The home worker needs to guard against the five minutes spent browsing non-work websites or reading a book, that turns into an hour (or two).

From the organisation’s point of view, having their staff work at home saves on various overheads, allows “hot-desking” and enables their personnel to work flexibly. On the face of it, it is a win-win situation for the organisation and their staff, but as with all things, trends and fashions change and the tide may even now being changing to an anti-home working point of view. In February 2013, Yahoo! announced that it was banning staff from remote working, giving as reasons such things as improved communication from working side by side, that speed and quality are often sacrificed with home working and that some interactions and experiences are only possible in the office. Far from a voice in the wilderness, their fellow search engine giants, Google, when asked how many of their people work from home, replied “as few as possible.”

With so many organisations now setting themselves up to encourage home working by reducing office floor space, introducing hot desking and positively encouraging their people to work from home, are Yahoo! and Google out of step or, having pioneered home working, have they been the first to discover that it is not the panacea that many thought? Probably they have found that with many things, home working should not be seen as a mutually exclusive option to regular office work, but complements it when required. Certainly organisations need contingency, for example if bad weather makes commuting difficult then the ability of staff to work from home provides a perfect alternative but as a rule, home working may not after all be the magic potion that it might have thought to have been originally.

Mind you, with many organisations changing course with all the speed of a fully laden oil tanker, it may be many years before some reverse the trend. So if you are reading this while working from home, why not check out my previous blogs while you have the chance; before too long you may be back in the office!

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[1] Citrix is an American multinational software company founded in 1989 that provides server and desktop virtualization, networking, software-as-a-service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologies.

[2] Graphical User Interface.

[3] Customer Information Control System – IBM transaction processing software.

Cheap Flights! Cheap Flights!

Budget airlines, particularly Ryanair, come in for some significant flak from the media, the public and the like, largely on the grounds that their so called “cheap” flights can turn out to be anything but cheap once the extras are added on. Other criticisms that are laid at these airline’s doors are that their customer service can be less than helpful; that they are not customer friendly and that can appear to be running their business purely for their own benefit and not for that of their passengers. That last criticism I find somewhat specious; they aren’t running their business exclusively for the benefit of their customers, their principle concern is turning a profit for their shareholders. It amazes me that some people seem to believe that budget airlines should be philanthropic organisations, at the beck and call of their customers and treating them in the way that the transatlantic carriers do.

Budget airlines are like train companies and ferry companies. You get on in one city and off in another; if you want anything en route you pay for it, if you don’t like the way they do things then you should seek an alternative means of transport. It almost seems as there is some perverse law of customer satisfaction where budget airlines are concerned, whereby contentment is in inverse proportion to price, regardless of quality.

Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s chief executive is no shrinking violet and has been quoted as saying some things that have ruffled plenty of feathers among the media and his client base. He has been scathing of his customers who have had to pay additional sums of money having infringed one of Ryanair’s many rules. Failing to print boarding cards at home or having oversized or overweight hand luggage are popular failings among Ryanair’s client base.

Ryanair are very easy to knock, but personally I don’t have a problem with them. I can’t speak for other budget airlines as apart from Go (who merged with EasyJet in 2003) I haven’t flown with any of them. Ryanair are very much “what you see is what you get” but, in order not to be struck by swingeing extra costs, consumers really need to open their eyes.

The major criticism levelled at budget airlines is that the eventual cost of the flight can be significantly greater than the advertised price. The adverts that read “London to Barcelona, from £1!” may sound good but they are in fact too good to be true because there was only every a very limited number of seats on one flight available at that price and they have already been sold. But seriously people, that is what advertising is for; it lures you in with undreamt of riches or bargains, then makes you pay more than you intended because the idea has taken such a grip on you that you want the product regardless of price. It isn’t just the airlines that do this, everyone who advertises does.

The complaints that are made about being charged because you didn’t print your own boarding card or you luggage was too large or too heavy are in some ways laughable. Did you not read the terms and conditions? If you didn’t, haven’t you heard on TV, or read in the papers about these sorts of things? Really, too many people are too careless of their responsibilities and complain that it isn’t fair when they get charged, when they have only themselves to blame. If you don’t like it, travel with another carrier.

There have also been grumbles from passengers who have been landed at an airport thirty, forty or fifty miles from their expected destination. Again, these people have only themselves to blame. Having booked a flight and having seen the name of the airport at the other end, the first thing most sensible people do is plan their journey to their ultimate destination. Instead the people who grumble about Ryanair complain that they have been “stranded” miles from their hotel. On that basis, shouldn’t these same people complain that Ryanair use airports too far from their own home and that when they arrive back in the UK, they are stranded miles from where they live?

In flight catering exercises a lot of people too. Ryanair charge for everything, tea, coffee, water, and snacks; if it can be consumed they charge for it. Everyone knows this, so why do people still complain? I’ve never heard of anyone on a train journey from Manchester to London complain that they had to pay for a cup of tea and a sandwich, so why should a flight be any different, especially when the flight is a two hour hop from London to Palma for instance?

Additional costs to use the toilets and the steps to board and disembark the plane are as yet works of fiction. Should they ever be introduced I’m sure the airline will advertise them, so passengers should not be taken by surprise; they will however complain about them.

British Caledonian Airways had a slogan, “We never forget you have a choice” and customers of today’s budget airlines would do well to remember this. You have a choice; if you don’t like the product that the airline is offering, use one of their competitors.

Having flown Ryanair recently, from Stansted to Murcia I have to say that the majority of passengers on these two flights were pretty much accepting of the way the airline works as most were getting a flight at a bargain price. I did hear a few grumbles as we boarded the flight out of Stansted about the boarding process itself and I have to say that if you haven’t paid the premium for priority boarding and therefore reserved your seats, the boarding process is a bit of a bun fight, but that is a minor cross to bear. It may be a shock the first time, but thereafter you just have to sharpen your elbows and get to the head of the line.

The budget airlines have shrunk Europe and we should be grateful to them for that. A long weekend in Spain, or Portugal, Poland or the Czech Republic is now as easy to arrange and probably cheaper than a similar weekend away to another city in the UK. With booking hotel rooms on the internet easy too, there is no obstacle to getting home from work on a Friday, booking a trip to the continent and flying out the next morning. That is something that you couldn’t have done twenty years ago.

By the by, I’ve had some internet problems in the last week; if I’d had those problems the week before and not been able to print my own boarding cards, the tone of this piece may have been slightly different! It would not, however have been the airline’s problem and if I had any complaint, it would not have been with them.

And finally, a song from the brilliant Fascinating Aida; you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. I reckon that it would even raise a smile from Michael O’Leary!

If you are unable to view the video, please click here or use this URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HPyl2tOaKxM

Romford 1 Manchester United 0

On supporting Romford FC.

If you gather a group of men[1] together their conversation will at some point usually turn to sport in general and football in particular. At this juncture it is quite likely that the question of which teams everyone supports comes up, whereupon all the usual suspects are trotted out; Manchester United, Chelsea, West Ham, Arsenal and the like with the occasional Leeds, Crystal Palace or Leyton Orient thrown in. Everyone understands these teams and why people support them, even if they may patronise the Orient supporter a bit, but when I mention who I support the reactions can be varied, because I support Romford FC.

When I explain that Romford ply their trade in the Ryman League Division One North, which is a Step Four league within the non-League pyramid, or more simply, seven promotions away from the Premier League, this often prompts a question along the lines of “No, which proper team do you support?” It is inconceivable to some that anyone should support a team outside the Premier League, although it is gratifying that on some occasions there will be a flicker of recognition among those more knowledgeable of the non-League game.

So why do I support Romford? Well, back in the late sixties, when I first became interested in football I toyed with the idea of following Manchester United, for no other reason than that they were top of the First Division but even at that tender age I wanted to support a team I could go and watch and as Manchester was over two hundred miles from my home I recognised that my chances of seeing them play were limited. So in February 1968 I went to watch The Boro (as Romford are known) for the first time. 

The programme cover for the first Romford match I attended. The artist's impression of the ground in the picture is fairly accurate, if a little idealised.

In 1968 Romford were reigning champions of the Southern League, which was then the competition immediately below the Football League. Sadly there was then no automatic promotion, which instead could only be achieved by being elected by the existing member clubs. Boro regularly attracted crowds of two or three thousand to their ground at Brooklands, a magnificent stadium with a 20,000 capacity, a 2,000 seat main stand, huge banked terracing and imposing floodlight pylons. After my first visit I was hooked.  It wasn’t a conscious decision, in these matters it is like falling in love; your heart rules your head.

Romford FC - Southern League Champions 1966-67

If choosing the team you support is like falling in love then actually supporting them is like a marriage; “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part,” well it certainly has been like that supporting Romford. The investment the club had made in the ground and the players in their attempts to gain Football League status had left them with huge debts and by 1978 the club had disbanded.

If supporting a football club is like a marriage, then this one had run its course.

Fourteen years elapsed, years in which having initially flitted from match to match without any emotional attachment I eventually took to supporting Leyton Orient, before news reached me in the summer of 1992 that plans were afoot to reform Romford FC.

The new club were accepted as members of the Essex Senior League and on 22^nd August 1992 played their first competitive match against East Ham United. It was strange watching the new club for the first time, seeing faces I’d not seen for fourteen years, seeing a team in the famous Gold and Blue again, but just like in 1978 the club had no ground to call their own. An initial groundshare with Hornchurch has been followed over the next twenty years with any number of formal and ad hoc groundshare arrangements. When Romford reformed I still considered myself an Orient supporter as I’d been a season ticket holder for twelve years, but I watched the Boro when I could until eventually the old ties and bonds drew me back into being a full time Romford fan.

There have been ups and downs aplenty in Romford’s history, many more in the last twenty years than can be included here (a full history of the club can be found on the club’s website here ), but briefly the club won the Essex Senior League in 1996 and merged with Collier Row to become (for one season only) Collier Row & Romford. The next season the club won the Isthmian League Second Division, but problems with the Sungate ground at Collier Row eventually led to the ground being closed, the club being suspended by the League and dropping back to the Essex Senior League. Yet Boro bounced back and won the Essex Senior League again in 2009 to return to the Isthmian League (now known as the Ryman League). Additional cause for celebration was the decision by Havering Council to grant the club planning permission for a new ground at Westlands in London Road, Romford. Having planning permission is not the same as being able to build a ground however and Boro still lack the financial wherewithal to even start construction. In these straitened economic times attracting investors is no easy matter and Romford continue to groundshare, having moved from Aveley to Thurrock this season.

Romford management celebrate the Essex Senior League championship in 2009. Left to right: Mark Lord (Assistant Manager), Paul Martin (Manager) and Colin Ewenson (Secretary).

Anyone who has a few hundred thousand tucked away that they don’t know what to do with is invited to contact the club or me as we would be happy to put it to good use!

You may wonder what the attraction of supporting a club like Romford is. Without detracting from the fanaticism that people feel for clubs in the Premier League, supporting a team like the Boro seems to me to be more real, more involving. Romford supporters may be few in number these days but what we lack in that regard we make up for in our loyalty. We regularly take 30-40 to away games (to put that in perspective imagine Manchester United taking 25,000 fans to an away match), and twenty loyal Boro fans made the 250 mile round trip to Wroxham on a freezing cold and snowy Tuesday in February and made up nearly a third of the gate.

A snowy night in Wroxham. Romford (in yellow) take on the home side in February 2013

To me supporting Romford is not just about going to watch the game. It means a lot more to me than that. I see the same loyal friends week in week out, I get to contribute in some small way to the club by arranging the match officials and writing for the programme. It’s also pretty unlikely that supporters of Premier League clubs ever learn the team line up directly from the manager in the bar before a game!

It might have been so much easier if I had stuck with Manchester United when I was ten, or with Leyton Orient after 1992, but on the whole I think that my life would have been much the poorer for not supporting Romford, after all you never forget your first love, do you?

Up The Boro!

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[1] Ok, so women can be interested in sport too, but it is rarely a primary topic of conversation among them.

The Scariest Domestic Appliance.....In The World!

You may recall the episode of Top Gear when Jeremy Clarkson attached a V8 engine to a food blender and made a smoothie from beef, chillies, Tabasco sauce...and a brick. Well if Mr. Clarkson had a Vitamix Professional Series 500 he wouldn’t have bothered with his experiment. To paraphrase Jeremy, this device is quite simply the scariest domestic appliance...........in the world!

The scariest domestic appliance......in the world!

If you’ve ever been to Starbucks and ordered a frappuccino you will have seen one of these in action. Milk, syrup (or coffee) and ice blended by a machine with a two horsepower motor that spins the blades at 240 miles per hour. Last week I bought one. It wasn’t my intention to do so, but Val and I went to the Ideal Home Show at Earls Court and after a couple of hours of mooching round the exhibits, including Virgin Media’s stand (and more of that later), we gravitated to the food section.

Among the demonstrations was the Vitamix stand. The demonstrator was making smoothies and soups, ice cream and coffees and the amazing thing was that the ingredients went in pretty much whole; a whole pepper (stem and seeds included), carrots, cabbage and ice. And that was in the ice cream (frozen yoghurt and some fruit as well). In fact if you have a problem with your children eating vegetables, get one of these and make some ice cream with carrot and cabbage included, I guarantee that they will not notice.

The demonstration was quite impressive and the finished products were really tasty. The bonus is that you can use pretty much all of the fruit or vegetable; skin, peel, stem et al included. Startlingly the machine makes soup without a heat source; the speed of the blades creates sufficient friction to heat the liquid in six to seven minutes.

Naturally, this being the Ideal Home Show the payoff is that they are trying to sell you something at every stand and a strong will is required not to spend a small fortune, but seduced by the prospect of smoothies, soups and ice cream pretty much to order we decided that buying one was probably a good idea, so we did. Not the top of the range machine you understand but the more modestly priced Vitamix TNC in black, which still weighs in at £450.00

So we dragged it home on the tube, skimmed through the recipes and the next morning, which was a Saturday, plugged the machine in and made a smoothie. This was when the infernal machine made its bid to be the scariest domestic appliance I have ever encountered. We added the ingredients and switched the machine on. Boy is it loud! The ambient noise at the Ideal Home Show had masked exactly how loud this thing is, so it was quite startling to hear it in our kitchen. The funny thing was that it was all sound and no action; the machine appeared to be labouring and the strawberries, banana, orange and ice didn’t seem to be blending terribly well. I turned up the speed and still it was labouring so I turned it up to the highest setting. There was a loud bang. Blue smoke emanated from the machine and the downstairs ring main fused. This was accompanied by an unnerving electrical burning smell. Something was quite obviously not right.

Having recovered our composure we decided that the best course of action was to return the machine to Vitamix. Over the years, Val and I have established a zero tolerance policy on faulty products and the like, so we packed the machine up and set off to Earls Court in search of a refund.  It being Saturday parts of the tube network were closed for engineering work and as it was snowing we decided to drive the twenty odd miles through central London to Earls Court. This had all the makings of an epic saga, fraught with difficulties. Remarkably it was a stress free experience; we even found a parking spot in a side road five minutes walk from the exhibition centre.

We lugged the box up to the Vitamix stand and asked for a refund on the grounds that we had lost a teeny bit of confidence in the product. We were initially offered an exchange; a deal we were reluctant to accept. The manager came and we explained what had happened; by chance the manager was the chap who had demonstrated the machine to us the day before. He took the machine into a back room. Suddenly we became aware that the demonstrations around us had stopped and it had all gone very quiet; we heard laughter. The manager emerged from the back room, shaking his head. He told us we had a duff machine; they had tested it and fused all of the electrics on the stand! He said we could have a refund or could exchange the faulty machine for a free upgrade to the professional model (worth an extra £150, this model is programmable). We dithered for a few moments then decided to go for the upgrade.

Back at home we plugged in our new machine, filled it with the ingredients for soup and somewhat nervously switched it on. Blessedly it worked perfectly, but boy is it unnerving! For a start it’s noisy; you can’t hold a conversation when it is running and although you know it must be safe, you fear that at any moment it will come adrift from its moorings and run amok around the kitchen. Once you get over that it does make exceedingly good soup!

This isn’t an advertising puff (I’m not being paid to say this), but the Vitamix is quite exceptional and now that we’ve got used to the noise and fury we are producing gallons of delicious smoothies and soups.

Finally, while we were at the show we also visited the Virgin Media stand, more out of devilment and the opportunity for a rant than anything. Would you like to sign up for Virgin Media? we were asked. We explained (briefly) our experiences last year with Virgin[1]. The salesman said he couldn’t see why we couldn’t have their broadband installed (well he would wouldn’t he, he’s probably on commission), so we have a surveyor coming in a couple of weeks to see if cable can be connected to our house, which should be interesting. I am not getting excited after last year’s debacle!

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[1] See my blog, “Virgin On The Ridiculous.”

The Eighth Deadly Sin

Apparently (according to my wife) I’m a bit of a control freak. If she’s right, and I’m not a reliable judge on the subject, my control freakery goes into overdrive when it comes to time. I admit that I do have something of a problem with time; some might say it’s an obsession but whatever it is it’s definitely a problem. My problem with time is that I do have a tendency to be ruled by it; I have a mortal fear of being late. Shakespeare said “Better three hours too soon than a minute too late” and while I agree with him in principle, even I think that three hours is a bit strong; an hour is probably about right.

I’m not joking, I have been known to arrive an hour early for just about everything you can name because of my terror at the thought of being even one minute late. I hate the idea of going to a football match or a film or a concert and missing the first few minutes, this results in me kicking my heels waiting for whatever it is to start. That’s not to say that I haven’t ever been late, and sometimes it has been my fault, which I find absolutely mortifying. As far as I am concerned, if I’ve agreed to be somewhere at say, ten o’clock then the latest I would expect to arrive would be about ten minutes to ten. Not everyone subscribes to this protocol however, it is perhaps almost de rigeur for some people to arrive late and while they may call it fashionably late, I would have a very different word for it.

Basically the world is divided into the Punctual and the Tardy. Within each of these groups there are sub-groups so we have:

The Obsessively Punctual

This group of people have a pathological mania with time. They will arrive at airports two hours before the check in desk opens, let alone two hours before the plane leaves. They will arrive at railway stations early enough to catch the train before the train before the one they need to catch to get to their destination very early indeed. These people will arrive for a dental appointment with enough time to spare to read all of the magazines in the waiting room. These people will arrive at work progressively earlier and earlier, to the extent that some people think that they live in the office. These people will be outside shops waiting for them to open, outside theatres waiting for the doors to open, not because they are making sure of their place in the queue, but simply because they allowed an hour for a five minute journey and are now standing in the cold and the rain while their more tardy cousins are still in bed.  I am one of these people.

The Healthily Punctual

These people have a healthy respect for time but refuse to take things to extremes. They will be found in airport check in lines a sensible half hour or so before the desk closes, they will wait two or three minutes for a train that gets them where they are going with a tolerable margin of error. They are the people at their desk at a sensible time in the morning. They are the people that sit next to me five minutes before the curtain goes up when I’ve already had time to count the fibres in the back of the seat in front of me (twice). How I envy these people!

The Healthily Tardy

There isn’t much to chose between these people and the Healthily Punctual, except that they do cut things a bit fine sometimes. They will occasionally miscalculate and have to catch a later train; they will sometimes arrive somewhat breathless in the office at five past nine,  they will reach the airport check in desk puffing and panting just as the attendant is about to close. They will be the last on the plane, they will squeeze through the closing doors on the train as it is about to pull away from the station. For the Obsessively Punctual, or even for the Healthily Punctual, travelling with these people can sometimes be a white knuckle ride, a will we or won’t we experience.

The Habitually Tardy

These people can be relied upon to be late or at best have their more punctual colleagues and friends fretting that they will be. These are the people who arrive at work late more often than not. These are the people who arrive at meetings fifteen minutes after the appointed time and are surprised that everyone is waiting for them. These people always have a reason for being late and it’s never their fault.  The train was late. Well there has been heavy snow overnight, didn’t you notice and think it may be a good idea to leave a little earlier? I missed my bus, yes because you left the house late. These people believe that because it should take an hour to get from A to B, it will take an hour. They don’t factor in any contingency and always assume the best case scenario. In extreme cases these people think that their lateness is endearing; it isn’t. Some senior managers have a tendency to be late, subconsciously they probably think it’s justified because their time is more precious; this isn’t always true. The Habitually Tardy don’t get stressed about being late however, it is everyone else, everyone who is waiting for them that gets stressed (well I do).

Unfortunately, the Obsessively Punctual also stress everyone else out too, I know because I do it to other people (my long suffering spouse especially). I know that she understands that when we have a real deadline like a plane to catch, there is some justification in my anxiety to get there on time. I do accept that on some occasions, when it really doesn’t matter about the time, the artificial deadlines I create in my own mind are unreasonable and unrealistic. I’ve tried to fight it, I’ve tried to be more laid back and sometimes it works (for about a nano second, then we’re off on the spiral into nervousness). I think that I am probably too old to change now, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

I suppose my obsession with punctuality goes back to childhood and my early days at work. As a child I seemed to be forever waiting for friends who were late or never turned up at all. I would anxiously pull back the curtains and peer down the road waiting for someone when we had arranged to go somewhere and on more than one occasion I would end up going wherever it was alone, arriving in the nick of time. Nonchalantly, my friend would later tell me that they had not been able to go; in those pre-mobile phone days (in fact we didn’t even have a landline when I was young) it wasn’t possible for them to let me know. In my early days at work being late was considered a particular offense. We would have to sign in each morning and at 8.55 each day the signing in book would be taken to the manager’s office and the letter “L” would be written in red ink against the names of those who had not yet arrived. There was a stigma over the walk of shame to the manager’s office and the red letter.

So Ladies and Gentlemen, I was going to propose an Eighth Deadly sin; Tardiness but re-reading what I’ve written, I’m not sure whether there isn’t a ninth, Obsessive Punctuality!

The Cult of Ignorance

Last week, millions of my braincells turned up their toes and died, my IQ fell by about 50% and I could actually feel my intelligence oozing away and all because I watched a TV programme. The programme in question was The Only Way Is Essex (TOWIE to those people for whom The Only Way Is Essex contains too many syllables).

The only reason for me watching TOWIE was that the particular episode was filmed in part at Eastminster Riding school, which is where my elder daughter rides on a Saturday afternoon and I thought that it would be interesting to see somewhere I'm familiar with on TV. Of course to get to the part of the programme filmed at Eastminster, I had to wade through the rest of the programme (since I didn't record the programme I was watching it on ITV Player which doesn't appear to have the facility to fast forward). Anyway, at first it was quite interesting, in a ghoulish, car crash TV sort of way, but after about 15 minutes it became by turns sad and also a little bit scary.

TOWIE is one of those programmes that isn't a soap opera, nor is it a fly on the wall documentary, rather it's pretending to be one while masquerading as the other. The people are real, the dialogue is real (sort of) but the situations are manufactured to some degree. Manufactured it appears, with the twin aims of generating conflict and proving how vain and sometimes stupid the participants are. So, in the episode that I watched, we had a discussion take place in the hairdressers about Tintin's hairstyle which confused the boy detective with the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, while another character confessed almost with pride, that his GCSE grades were a D and an E.

Fortunately perhaps, TOWIE's star appears to be in decline. Viewing figures, which peaked in 2011 at an average of 1.72 million had declined to about 834,000 in October 2012. At the show's peak, it won an Audience Award at the BAFTA's. Quite what other BAFTA winners that year like Colin Firth, Natalie Portman and Geoffrey Rush thought about being mentioned in the same breath as the cast of TOWIE is anyone's guess.

Perhaps I shouldn't be too harsh on the cast of TOWIE, they cannot be the only examples of what is a general dumbing down of society, it's just that being on TV they are more visible. Come Dine With Me is another programme in which the contestants, particularly the younger ones, exhibit some spectacularly ignorant misconceptions about food, history and well, just about everything else.

The cult of celebrity, the promotion of people who are famous merely for being famous is nothing new. Channel Four's Big Brother, which when it began was advertised as a social experiment, had that myth exposed in later series which became progressively more voyeuristic and confrontational. If the dumbing down of society in general and TV in particular had already started, it was Big Brother that accelerated the trend; it gave any wannabe the opportunity to become a celebrity and spawned more and more similar programmes that have made more and more people famous, not because they have any talent but simply because they appear on the telly.

Taken to its logical extreme, will we end up with a society not unlike that described in the film Idiocracy? For those of you who haven't seen or heard of it, Idiocracy begins with an experiment to place a US Army librarian and a prostitute in suspended animation for a year. The project is canned and they remain in suspended animation for 500 years; when they wake they find that civilisation has dumbed down to the extent that average IQ is in the low 20's and they are the most intelligent people on the planet. This has resulted from the fact that,as a generalisation, the intelligent put off having a family to the point where it is too late, whereas the dumber elements of the population are doing the only thing they can do well, which is reproduce. The most popular TV programme by this time is "Ow! My Balls!" a sort of exaggerated version of You've Been Framed. The fact that "Ow! My Balls" has a contemporary reference point is one of the scary aspects of Idiocracy. Indeed I'd go so far as to say that Idiocracy is one of the scariest films ever made, not in the horror movie sense, not like The Omen or The Exorcist, but scary in the sense that it is prophetic, it paints an all too plausible picture of what civilisation could become; how much dumber, how much more shallow and superficial.

TV is not solely to blame for the general dumbing down we see around us. In part we can blame technology. The general availability of pocket calculators began the trend. No longer did we need to do long division or use log tables, but as with anything the answers that came out of a calculator were only as good as the information entered. Years ago at work I can recall checking calculations that were spectacularly incorrect because the person who made them trusted what came out of the machine without any sanity check; garbage went in, garbage came out.

Nowadays spell checkers in word processing applications have made the ability to spell redundant. Text messaging, with its abbreviations and acronyms positively encourages bad spelling. To some degree it is valid to say that this is merely the evolution of language, that just as English is now radically different from that spoken or written in Chaucer or Shakespeare's day, so it will continue to develop and that this is not a bad thing. I'd agree if language were enriched and evolving in a way that improves communication and understanding but my fear is that language is instead changing in a way that is debased and devaluing.

Google, a tool that has become so powerful and so all embracing that it has actually become a verb and a generic noun, enables us to access information on almost any subject with just a few key strokes. There is no doubt that the internet and Google are fabulous tools, but by making the acquisition of knowledge so simple they have devalued the process itself. We are creating a generation that knows nothing except how to find things out. This to my mind is a bad thing because the actual process of acquiring knowledge is a gift in itself, learning and remembering facts and figures, language and art, are infinitely more valuable than the ability to type a phrase into a search engine and copy and paste the result into something else.

The internet itself holds two dangers which propagate the dumbing down we see around us. Firstly, how much of what you read on the internet can you trust? If, to quote Mark Twain, "A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants," think how much more quickly falsehoods or simple inaccuracies can spread thanks to the worldwide web. Verifying facts in days of yore might mean referring to an encyclopaedia or two, now people are only too willing to take as gospel what they read on the 'net, particularly if two independent sites quote the same information, even if one may have plagiarised the other. Thus there can be a tendency for the careless or less discerning user to be either unable to find the information they want or to trust the first thing they see, making them vulnerable to ignorance, mistakes, half-truths and falsehoods, or more dangerously to con tricks and scams.

Secondly, the internet encourages superficial reading and the tendency to hop from one link to another, moving from an article on a news website about the political situation in the Middle East to pictures of cute dogs in three clicks. Research has shown that a consequence of the internet has been that concentration levels and the ability to read anything other than bite sized pieces of text have been seriously compromised in recent years.

I suppose to some extent I have found myself in the same position that every generation does eventually, being sceptical of the intelligence of the younger generation. Over thirty years ago, in 1980 (which I confess seems positively recent) Isaac Asimov wrote that “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

Prophetic words; I cannot imagine what Asimov would have made of TOWIE.

Now That’s What I Call a Crisis!

When it comes to reporting sport the media do love their hyperbole. No win is too trivial to be labelled a heroic triumph over adversity, no setback too small to be called a crisis. So we have seen with Chelsea, a club who have apparently been lurching from one crisis to the next. Champions of Europe last season, their failure to qualify for the knock-out stages this season is a crisis. The sacking of popular manager Roberto de Matteo, who led Chelsea to their European win, was a crisis. The appointment of interim manager Rafa Benitez having proved unpopular with the fans is a crisis. Reports of a bust-up between Benitez and Chelsea defender John Terry have been labelled a crisis. With Chelsea fourth in the Premier League at the time of writing, no chance of winning the title and the possibility that they may not qualify for the Champions League next season, another crisis is upon them.

In reality these events are minor setbacks, bumps in the road that will be mere footnotes in the club’s history in years to come. Up and down the country there are dozens, or more likely hundreds of football clubs for whom Chelsea’s crises would be welcome diversions from the mundane, day to day task of fighting to remain in existence. Many of these clubs are unregarded by the majority of football followers and the press, for many of whom football below Championship level is rarely considered.

Two stories have come to light that illustrate the trials and tribulations faced by non-League clubs as they continue to struggle and struggle to continue.

Firstly, as reported in The Non-League Paper recently and on the BBC website, Deal Town of the Kent Hurlimann League are facing a potential five figure bill to replace their kit and re-brand the club. The club’s badge comprises a Roman centurion, a Royal Marine and Deal and Walmer castles. This emblem was awarded to Deal Borough Council in 1968 but local government re-organisation that took place in 1974 removed the right for the emblem to be displayed and now both the local council and the football club have been told to stop using it. The football club reckon that replacing their kit, merchandise and all other items using the badge will cost many thousands of pounds, costs that they can ill afford. Meanwhile the local council face having to change all of their stationery and signage; I love the statement made by Deal mayor Marlene Burnham, who told the BBC that this was an example of "heraldry gone mad".

While it’s quite understandable that clubs and organisations should protect their logos and badges, after all from the point of view of clubs like Manchester United and Real Madrid there are huge amounts of money involved, I can’t see for the life of me how Deal Town using a badge that is now obsolete harms anyone, financially or otherwise. I hope that common sense prevails and that the football club (and indeed the council) are given a period of grace in which to make the necessary changes and minimise the cost involved. Meanwhile, someone down at Deal Town needs to design a new badge.

This story makes you wonder how many other clubs up and down the country may unwittingly be in a similar situation. Lurking somewhere in the Court of Chivalry, deep in the dusty archives there probably sits a clerk, hopefully  with some Dickensian name like Speckle, scrutinising each football club badge and determining the club’s right to use it.

Secondly and more seriously, the very existence of one football club is under threat, ironically from a company who have sponsored both the Premier League and until recently, the Football League Cup. Alton Town are members of the Wessex League and play their home games at the Bass Sports Ground. The club, who are nicknamed The Brewers, were originally know as Courage & Co and subsequently went under the names Bass (Alton) and Bass Alton Town before dropping the Bass prefix in 1992.

The brewers Molson Coors, who now own the Bass Sports Ground have called time and told the club and the several youth teams that share the site that they must leave at the end of the season.  The site is supposedly protected by a covenant made in 1935 between Courage and the local council protecting the land for sport and recreation. Molson Coors apparently believe that they can circumvent the covenant by funding leisure activities elsewhere, a suitably vague undertaking that probably would come too late to save Alton Town if indeed it comes at all. Previous schemes to redevelop the land for housing or a supermarket have been turned down and it is to be hoped that the company are given short shrift on this too. It is of course bitterly ironic that a company that invested millions in sponsoring the Premier League, The League Cup and the Scottish national side should have such scant regard for a small town football club. This is a company whose net income in 2012 was $1.2 billion and who say, in their company values that their aim is “Treating others as we would like to be treated.” No living up to their ethos here methinks.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the beers served in Alton Town’s club house are brewed by Molson Coors; if so the Carling probably has a particularly bitter taste at the moment.

Alton Town have been undertaking a number of initiatives to try and save their club, including an on-line petition which you can sign at http://www.altontownfc.com/saveus.php.

To put events into perspective, Chelsea have been experiencing events that are today’s crisis and tomorrow’s chip wrapper. Two other clubs who are admittedly much smaller but no less important to their officials, supporters and local communities, suffer from real crises that threaten their very existence.

I’ve no axe to grind with Chelsea, but next time you read of a Premier League club in crisis remember Alton Town; now that’s what I call a crisis.

This blog is adapted from the article that appeared under the title “A Raw Deal” in the programme for the Romford v. Thamesmead Town game in Ryman League Division One North on 27^th February 2013