BEYOND THE IMPLODE 3 - BRITISH AIRWAYS 0

See, I told you he'd sold out, it's the obligatory 'I won't be posting for a while...' post...Church of Me doesn't pull this kind of shit... ENOUGH. You know what this blog's like, from my perspective? A nagging wife who I don't have sex with anymore. Anyway, I was going to pretend I've got RSI but that's already been done and I don't want to pretend to have something worse in case I jinx myself and actually fall ill. Incidentally, I went round to John Eden's pad with some flowers recently, to offer my condolences and see if he needed a hand sending a few emails - only to note he's just bought himself a drumkit and is bashing the skins day and night. So I don't feel so guilty now about dumping this yoke for a while.

Anyway, I'm sodding off to Ireland and Russia for a bit, and then hopping aboard Swastika Airlines to catch Paraguay and Angola in action at the World Cup. A mate wants to take a "Nuclear Power -No Thanks" banner for the Iran-Angola game, which is potentially amusing but we're inept when it comes to silk-screening. And anyway, the stadium in Leipzig will mostly be filled with German locals looking for a ruck with Polish neo-nazi firms, so I'd rather just go for a good old-fashioned Israeli flag. I know this all sounds completely juvenile, well it's the effect football has on me - I can't be blamed. I never understood all this Nick Hornby shit about your team's performance mirroring the profound personal changes in your life. If that was the case, my existence between 1995 and 1999 would have been one big wrist-slash. I still can't remember who scored for Spurs at the League Cup final in 1999 - and I was there at Wembley. It was either Allan Nielsen or Steffen Iversen. The blonde bloke, anyway. What really counts is that on that rainy Sunday afternoon, North London triumphed over Leicester and proved the latter territory to be "shit aahh". This is why I hate football fans who cry when their team loses - you just know they've all got Brazil shirts stashed beneath their beds, along with every other barmy promise mummy made to shelter them from a cruel world where, y'know, people get run down by buses and banks fuck you over and you never get the job you really wanted and your team gets thrashed 6-0 by Leyton Orient. Football philosophy is bollocks.

And what's this obsession with 'real' fans? You're all paying through the nose to watch a game of bloody kickabout, grow up willya? This all started when music journos, who'd previously rejected football as vacuous entertainment for plebs who couldn't possibly recognise the revolutionary potential of U2 or Kurt Cobain's pain, decided they actually liked football after all - however, they came up with this concept of 'real' football supporters based on record collector pedanticness.

Admittedly, it's not something I'm THAT bothered about, especially when I've got loads to do like contacting Ofcom to get compensation out of bungling British Telecom for illegally cutting off my phone for 2 weeks (I've got a new hobby, complaining about everything -seriously, try it! I got £100 off my bank cos they sent a replacement debit card a day late and I threatened to take them to court, pretending I had to waste an hour walking to the nearest cashpoint with a 'business client' - what a laugh), but it can be irritating when Coca-Cola (yeah, cos that's what most football crowds down before a match) and MuckDonalds host these pointless ads trying to appeal to the 'real' fans. I don't know - it's enough to make you want to throw darts at the family enclosure!

My advice to you all, in the meantime, is vote Lib Dem tomorrow. Don't know what your local branch is like, but the ones in Highbury crack me up. To their credit, they're the only party who actually bother to shove promotional material through our block's letterbox, including a fake 'local listings' mag, badly drawn cartoons, a campaign to stop illuminated advertising on the sides of buses, a patently fake handwritten personal letter, a promise to turn Gillespie Road into a nature reserve - I haven't seen political material so funny since the Labour mob in Brent produced a mag with schoolkids' "raps" about drugs and street violence, with some DIY Indian recipes on the back page.

See you in late June I guess, if this is still here. May your gods go with you, and remember, if you love someone, tell them before they fuck off with your best mate.