Notes from a doctor’s surgery waiting room.
Prior to last season, shortly after dragging the remnants of my ailing online presence towards Substack, in what was most likely going to be an overambitious plan to salvage something out of the wreckage that THE66POW had become; I stated categorically that I wouldn't be blogging about every single game of Association Football that I would be attending across the 2025-26 campaign.
But, being the kind of stubborn cuss that I am - i.e. one who could easily get contrarianism a really bad name - I actually successfully (for want of better wording) completed the onerous task of pontificating, often at length, about each and every one of the 118 games I was present at across the course of the season.
That's not a particularly big number of fixtures for me to take in, particularly in comparison to the top heavy totals of ‘games watched’ that I've achieved (once more, for want of better wording) across previous campaigns, but it weighed in at an average of a usually fairly lengthy and meticulously detailed epistle every couple of days.
There is so much other stuff going on in my very busy and often fairly hectic life, that it amazed even me, myself and I, that this humble scribe somehow found the time, inclination and inspiration to keep on top of the innumerable tasks that narrating my travels entailed. Adding pictures (and the very occasional video) alone, is far more time consuming than you could ever imagine.
So why, you might well ask, include so many images, on what is essentially a writing platform. It's my own personal preference as regards the layout template, is the quick and easy answer to that… and they (the point and hope snapshots) do help to break up my tedious and monotonous text. This monochrome and illustration free epistle, being a prime example of that case in point.
As this account doesn’t need to adhere to any kind of publishing deadline, I’d rather make an effort to present things in a manner that I consider to be done properly, than present a mish-mash of a rush job for public consumption.
Essentially it’s not a race, or a competition of any kind… and it doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to me, if posts appear ten minutes after a game has finished, or ten weeks. Everybody indulging in this kind of caper has their own way of doing things, this is mine.
But, even working within such a loose framework, there's not a chance that I’ll be covering 100% of the games I watch this term in some sort of blog form. More often than not I will be ‘chucking a few words together’ and attaching a few pictures that I capture on my antiquated phone, but I really need to pace myself better.
Recently I’ve suffered a fairly serious injury to, amongst other things, my right arm, shoulder and collar bone. I need to accept that I'm getting old and drop the stuntman persona. Subsequently it’s severely limited the use of my hand for more than a few minutes. Hence, typing and even texting have become problematic and quite painful after a only very short amount of time, never mind any prolonged use. My sex life is completely in ruins!
Any handwritten prompt notes I have taken during games have been rendered somewhat illegible; like something resembling a barely decipherable shorthand/ hieroglyphic/ Sanskrit hybrid cross. I’ve even had to type up this mid-length post in clipped instalments, because of the discomfort. Ah, the joys of getting past it and fragile, eh? Pah! What a wuss I've become in my old age!
But be forewarned, I am on the mend, even though it’s become a much lengthier and far more laborious healing process than I was anticipating. Hence, this long-winded, misanthropic, bullshit blog, with added football content, will be back! What do you mean you hadn’t even noticed I was AWOL in the first place?
As an aside… moving forward, I'm going to cut back on my use of the established social media platforms. They have virtually become a necessary evil and an almost mandatory tool to participate in most walks of life, but the OTT saturation of these online resources by overtly political bodies and pious individuals, spewing forth their biased and mostly polarised rhetoric, lopsided opinions and tunnelled vision, blinkered and entrenched worldview, have become tedious in extremes. And I personally don’t wish to partake in any of that sort of crap. Politics, in the main, are like eggy trumps, inasmuch as people can only tolerate the whiff of their own.
Embracing change, staying one step ahead of technology and keeping up with advances is one thing (okay, it’s actually two, or maybe even three), but that Ned Ludd and myself tend to read from the same page as regards ‘the next new thing’ and the endless stream of internet fads. FFS! Do I look like I ever followed any kind of trend in my life?
Sporadic updates will start appearing on this Substack account imminently in the the very near future and then you will probably all wish that I’d bugger off and go AWOL again.
Transmission ends.
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