Sometimes I have Arsenal related dreams. Last night Ray Parlour was working in my local area as a mobile fish and chip shop man. He had a kind of caravan thing which he motored with a tricycle contraption of some sort, and this contraption also heated up the oil for him to fry the fish and the chips. But if he didn’t get the oil to the right temperature then the fish came back to life and they had baseball bats which somehow they were able to hold despite only having flippers.
Ray seemed quite happy with his lot but it was a strange world, as if everybody had lost all their money and nobody could afford to buy his wares. The last I saw of him was when he turned a corner, rubbish strewn about the streets, and he was whistling a tune I can’t quite remember.
Odd, I know, but a timely dream as there really is fuck all going this morning. The Interlull has choked the life out of everything and here we are, bereft, football-less, bored and doleful, like a basset hound that has just been told there will be no more cheese … ever. If you thought they looked sad before …
There’s a little bit about Robin van Persie saying he’s not a killer striker like Drogba or Torres, but more of a half-killer, half-not killer thing. He says he’s as proud of his assists as he is his goals, which is fair enough I suppose. I just don’t get the whole ‘Drogba as a killer’ thing. Imagine if he was some kind of stealthy assassin. I suppose he’d be quite good as long as he could do it from a distance, what with him being a sly, sneaky cunt, and that. But not every job goes perfectly, believe me, and if he had to engage in hand to hand combat with one of his potential victims then things would be very different. The moment his opponent even looked at him funny Drogba would lying on the ground twitching like Harry Redknapp after touching a live wire. At that point then he would be like an upside down turtle, completely vulnerable to attack, and his career as an assassin would come to a bloody and evisceratingly painful end.
We’re also being linked to Yaya Toure again. I really think there ought to be some regulation here. It’s so indiscriminate. I might just lobby UEFA to prevent this happening year round, confining it to a specific time-frame. A story might appear in the paper and we might say ‘Yup, it’s Yaya Toure season again. Man, only seems like a few weeks since the last one’, in a kind of ‘Shit, it’s nearly Christmas again?’ way.
Toure Jr is unhappy at Barcelona this season as they gave him a big new contract in the summer and then treated him a bit like Hleb. Not that I care but his agent is going on and on about it and the minute he starts the stories appear about him joining Arsenal. In the past that seemed like a reasonable assumption to make, what with his big brother playing for us, but now that his big brother is in the Middle Eastlands can all tabloid journos please refrain from saying he’s coming to us and choose Man City instead? It’d make everyone’s life much easier when he signs for someone else altogether.
Transfer speculation? The Sun links us with teenage Barcelona winger …. zzzz … Gai Assulin. I’m sure if he did sign the Gai Ass shirts would be flying out of the Armoury. And speaking of Barcelona Xavi’s been at the whole ‘Cesc has Barcelona DNA’ stuff again. I’m beginning to wonder if he’s not a robot stuck on repeat. Maybe somebody should hit him in the head really hard to see.
Jack Wilshere is looking for a return to action in the Carling Cup game against Man City and he’s confident Arsenal can go all the way to Wembley. There’ll be plenty to say about that game in the weeks to come. No doubt Pubic Enemy No 1 will play and I want to save my bacon a bit in that regard.
Apart from that there’s little else to discuss. You have until tonight to enter the competition to win the Savile Rogue scarf with thanks to Savile Rogue, the makers of Savile Rogue scarves. See yesterday’s blog for the competition question. In the mailing list yesterday they got a typo which referred to my ‘next dour neighbour’, which is a bit unfair on him. He’s not the most exciting man in the world but he made a joke about a frying pan when I bumped into him in Aldi one day.
He’s not the most exciting neighbour I ever had though. That was a bloke from Zaragoza called Geronimo. Seriously. He lived a couple of doors up from us in Spain. Honestly, that poor bloke’s life was like a soap opera. And he was only 5’2 and his name was Geronimo. ‘Geronimooooooooo’, I used to call and he would say ‘Hola!’. He didn’t get it. I still did it though. I’m nothing if not predictable.
Till tomorrow, curtain twitchers.
