You know, some days there really is just nothing going on. From a strictly Arsenal point of view of course. There’s obviously stuff going on everywhere but most of it I don’t care about.
What little there is this morning isn’t really worth talking about. I suppose, if we really wanted to, we could talk about Jack Wilshere saying money isn’t an issue for him and the likes of Man City hold no appeal. The moment you do that, however, someone will say, ‘What about Gael Clichy?’
And you might say, ‘What about Gael Clichy?’, and they will say, ‘Remember that thing he said?’, and you might say, ‘I vaguely do, what was it again?’, and they would say he said, ”’I really believe if you are a player who thinks only about money then you could end up at Manchester City”‘, and then you’d have to say ‘Oh’.
Would it be worth pointing out that they are, in fact, two very different people and what one says isn’t necessarily relevant to what another says? Or that in general it’s probably for the best to ignore everything a footballer says for the duration of his career because you never know what can happen in the football etc etc blah blah blah? Maybe it would, but then you’d be arguing about something someone who doesn’t play for us any more said two or three years ago using some kind of gloomy oulook to back that up against somebody who accepts that they cannot predict the future.
If you could predict the future, and the best you could do was to argue with somebody over where a footballer might end up, I would suggest, politely of course, that you were underusing your power. If I could see the future with great clarity I’d make sure to discover what happened to people I didn’t like, then I’d walk up to them in the street, look at them with pity and say ‘Oh, sorry about what happens to you on April 18th 2014’ and they’d be all ‘What happens to me on that day?’ and I’d be all ‘I can’t tell you lest I destroy the world by fucking around with time and destiny and all that’.
You can imagine them, not going out that very day, staying indoors to ensure they stay alive, little realising that the fridge they bought two years previously was one of a batch which had been sabotaged by a terrorist group and fitted with explosives due to go off on that date. At some point they would go to get themselves a strawberry Petit Filous then KABAM. You can’t escape the future.
So, you can see it’s pointless discussing Wilshere’s comments about Man City. We could look at his comments about how criticism of Arsene Wenger is a joke. Again it’s one of those that would cause division. Some people would say ‘Yeah, it is a joke. What Wenger has done for this club is amazing etc etc etc’, leading someone else to say ‘But look, we haven’t won anything for a billionty years and six and we’ve just lost to Sp*rs and the team is playing like pack of window-licking gnus with their boots on the wrong feet’.
And everyone would miss the point that criticism of Wenger is not a joke.
How many hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb? Some obscure number you probably don’t know about.
That’s a joke. Fuckin’ hipsters (sorry, Jords). I mean, I know where’s Jack’s coming from and all but I’m doing my best to avoid the inevitable. Surely the happiest people in the land are the dentists of Arsenal fans, such is the gnashing of teeth at everything that happens.
As an aside, how many people who read the Beano and Dennis the Menace as kids pronoucned the dog’s name as ‘Guh-nasher’? I can’t be alone in this. I mean, if a gnu is a guh-nu why couldn’t Gnasher be a Guh-nasher? Leaving aside the differences in species, that one is the actual name of something and the other a given name, and that one animal actually exists and the other is a cartoon. Just me then. Ok. Be like that.
We could look at Wojciech Szczesny taking to Twitter to put right some stories that were in the press, and while it is nice to see a player correct the shit-stirring that some of these rags perpetuate, it’s not that interesting really. I do sense that one day SZCZ is going to break the Twitter with something he says so we’ll wait until then.
Finally, a big thank you to everyone for their feedback on yesterday’s post. It is nice to remember the good stuff from time to time. And it’s funny the way Arsenal can get into your life in the strangest ways. Many years back, when me and Mrs Blogs were looking for a house we happened upon a charming place on the South Circular Road here in Dublin.
Well, it was in the estage agent’s window and stuff but anyway, we went to see it, and there, on the wall in the sitting room, was an Arsenal shirt. Not just any Arsenal shirt either, one that had been signed by the team. And it wasn’t nailed to the wall or anything, it was in a frame. There was evidence of Arsenal elsewhere in the house too. There might have been some framed match tickets. This was definitely the house for us. Arsenal stuff? It was a sign!
Anyway, we made a bid on the house and waited, nervously, to see if it would be accepted. In my youthfulness, I had even thought of slipping a note through the door of the house, under the cover of darkness, to advise the occupants of the fact that I too was an Arsenal fan, as if this would somehow make a difference. I didn’t, in the end, but also in the end, we ended up buying the house.
On our first night there, as we counted up all the money we had left in the world (£36.23p), we drank a bottle of wine left for us by the former owners. I bet a Man United fan would never have left us that bottle. And we had happy years there, as I knew we would the minute I saw the Arsenal shirt on the wall.
So, to avoid the Clichy/future predicting/joke-not-a-joke stuff on the arses today, let’s have your stories about how Arsenal, in a strange or distant way, has been part of your life.
Till tomorrow.
