Underground, Overground, Wombling Free

So, it’s Autumn, the time when rain and wind step up their game from Summer time, and the cold air homes in on your bones quicker than Ashley Cole on a blonde with a boob tube.

Any sensible race would spend a Saturday afternoon at this time of year indoors but, in this country, bad weather is an opportunity to stand freezing for two hours with horizontal rain driving in to your eyes and blurring the vision as you take in twenty two men who worry the rain is spoiling their hairdos as they kick a football around a field.

Because I spent so much time in Birmingham when I presented BBC1s Pebble Mill At One show, I often go to St Andrews to eat balti curry pies and watch Birmingham City play – you need a strong stomach for both by the way - but my local home team is AFC Wimbledon, an outfit started by local subscriptions when the “big” team Wimbledon moved to Milton Keynes and became MK Dons.

AFC have now worked their way up from the Marigold Glove Conference and the Miracle Stick Oven Cleaner League through the Mister Sheen Divisions, and they are now in with the big boys of the professional Leagues, in League Two.

I have to admit that this is small town football, about as close to what Christiano Ronaldo and David Beckham do as Oxford Street’s January Sales scrums are to World Cup Rugby. But I like it.

AFC Wimbledon have a life sized mascot like most professional teams but, while other clubs have fierce dragons, snarling wolves or red devils to scare the opposition, we have a big, blue, cuddly Womble. He tried on Saturday to get the crowd whipped up in to a frenzy before the teams ran out but a tempest of rain made his fur heavier and wetter by the minute. This eventually impeded his enthusiasm and progress until he was so slow in moving he was in danger of getting a game.

The mascot would have felt very much at home on the pitch as some of the players performed like Great Uncle Bulgaria on crutches or Madame Cholet on rohipnol. One winger is so left footed he has a bright future in panto as the one legged Long John Silver.

Our supporters are very well behaved tho’. None of this flying banners that read No Surrender, or Faithful Till Death. The biggest banner that was unfurled simply read Kent Wombles, which could only scare a very jittery litter lout. Our crowd chants came from just one man who stood next to me looking like a self portrait by Van Gogh with his little pointy red beard and curly ginger top. He also smelled as if he had been too near the paint brush cleaner every time he opened his mouth to shout Who Are Ya? at the opposition supporters. I don’t think he was being aggressive, just confused as to who they were, what day of the week it was, and even who he himself was.

AFC Wimbledon’s ground is small but was packed. It’s situated in a small park area which means that if someone kicks the ball too hard it goes over the stand and disappears for ever as passing kids in the park steal it. After this happened three or four times, no one could find a ball to allow play to continue, leading to an irate lady in front of me shouting “Where’s the ball? Come on. Get on with it. It’s round and white. It rolls down hills. Find one”. Then, as we’re all so polite and posh, she apologised to everyone around her for getting carried away.

At the end, as I walked out after we had won 4-1, supporters of both teams mingled outside and the visitors were wished a safe journey home as they boarded the bus back to Cheltenham.

You wouldn’t get the Wombles and lost balls at Arsenal, Liverpool or Manchester United, but you wouldn’t get half the fun either.

Now watch us go. We’re coming to play your team soon. As Van Gogh would say, “Who are ya?”.

I'll Be There For You

I read an article this week which said that the traditional Spring Clean our mums used to do around the house has now moved ever later in the year and most people do their great “throw out” around about now instead. Unwanted, slightly battered, useless old objects like out of date magazines, photographs, cushions, boxes and husbands tend to get thrown out in September as the promise of Summer fades to the dread of Autumn and its trailing, non identical, evil twin Winter.

I remember when I was a kid that Spring meant my mum asking us to gather old toys and comics ready for the rag and bone man who used to give us a balloon for a few Dandy annuals, a plastic gun, my wigwam and some Thunderbirds T shirts we’d grown out of. We didn’t realise at the time but that’s one really bad exchange rate, and nowadays I like to think our rag man is retired and living in a stately home with his chauffeur and maids. Either that or his early training while ripping off us kids means he’s now a banker.

But I don’t believe it’s just objects that should be tidied out.

I’ve decided to get rid of people who drag me down through their lack of manners or politeness. In the spirit of cleaning out stuff I don’t need, I made a big decision this week and decided to start by ridding myself of someone who has, more than anyone I’ve known, sucked the fun and confidence from my business life. On Thursday I sacked my agent.

Before you think this is just a typical showbiz fit of pique, consider this. My agent has not returned a ‘phone call, text or email from me in almost three years and when I rang last week to ask her to do a deal which would have netted her a few thousand pounds in commission, she didn’t even bother to call back.

Still don’t see why she had to go? Don’t understand why she’s like a Harry Potter dementor sucking the joy out of life? Until three years ago I used to get a Christmas card, birthday card and a call on my birthday. Since then, nothing. No work, no calls, no cards, no courtesy, no sense of responsibility. So why did I put up with it? It’s a lesson I pass on after three years of humiliation, embarrassment and a growing loss of self worth.

I made the mistake of becoming friends.

Friends are great when they are as committed to the friendship as you are. This (ex) agent of mine made our wedding cake, I attended her wedding, her kids’ birthday parties and so on, but when you get nothing back the danger is that you start to make allowances. Friends forgive everything, but mere business partners holler and squeal when things aren’t done professionally. I realised I had made excuses for her, to myself, for years.

Now I feel so much better. Calling old contacts yesterday and being warmly greeted has made me feel wanted and, simply, normal where, until Thursday, I felt useless.

So I’m going to carry on with my Autumn Clean. I’m going to get rid of friendships where I’ve bashed my head against walls to keep contact going. Any friendship boulevard that has been all one way is getting closed down as of now. We’ve all got mates who just don’t give enough and the news is We Don’t Need Them. Get rid. I’ll keep you posted on how I get on.

Meantime, do an inventory of your relationships and be honest. Which of your links can be decoupled so that you soar again rather than getting dragged down by the lack of thought of others?

Life’s short. Let’s get the friends we deserve.

Touch Me In The Morning

My friend Peter called this week and said he had a very important question to ask me.

Now Pete, (I’ve changed the name to protect his reputation and, more importantly, my face) is not the sharpest tool in the box. In fact next to the screwdrivers, saw blades and pointy things in any self respecting tool box he has the sharpness of a duvet filled with jelly, so I wasn’t expecting him to ask my opinions on the revolution in Libya or quantitative easing.

Peter works for the government in the Public Health service as a boss looking after some sanitation department or other and he is a lovely bloke, but I do sometimes think that when brains were handed out he misheard and asked for Drains. Recently he dropped his mobile phone in the holy water font at church. When he claimed on his insurance form he put “act of God” as the reason for the accident.

Actually, Pete’s excuse doesn’t seem quite so silly when compared to the list of daft reasons released this week by the Child Protection Service who chase maintenance payments from missing parents. They are anxious to show us the kind of numpties they have to deal with as some sort of mitigation for the criticism they receive about their lack of results. One father told them he couldn’t pay maintenance as a father because he’d had a sex change and was therefore no longer a man. Another said that he’d used all his money to pay for his ex wife’s boob job, and since he was no longer getting the benefits why not let her new man pay instead? My favourite came from the dad who said he couldn’t pay since he “no longer exists” as he is in the witness protection program.

Suddenly Pete doesn’t seem so bad after all.

Anyway, back to the burning question he wanted to ask me. “If you had to lose one of your senses, which one would you pick?”.

At first I thought he was gently breaking it to me that he was going deaf or blind but it turned out he had been in a bar and had overheard someone else asking a pal the same question. I said I’d think about it and, believe it or not, it has taken over almost every waking moment in my life this week. A silly question, a ridiculous amount of time spent on thinking about it, but I think I have an answer for him – and it came to me yesterday in a toy shop.

I spotted a life size Lego model of Darth Vader and while looking at it from a few yards away I noticed how many people walked past and touched it. Why? I have no idea, but while I had been debating between losing sight, sound or smell I realised then that I would never want to lose my sense of touch.

This was reinforced this morning when I read that this Friday is National Pippa Middleton’s Bum Appreciation Day. Go on, admit it, seeing it is one thing but wouldn’t you just love to pinch an inch, give it a tweak to see if it’s flabby or firm?

Touch means everything to me. I’m lucky that I can see my wife and children, sometimes unlucky that I can hear them, but imagine what it would be like if cuddles meant nothing. A stroke of a cheek felt like absolutely zero. The feel of grass on bear feet didn’t even register. Mind you, why the kids leave grass on our bedroom carpet is beyond me.

A few years ago I was filming in the Tate Gallery in London, and while the lights were being set up I wandered over to a magnificent oil painting and automatically reached out to touch it. A bloke in one of those pullovers with epaulettes on the shoulders, a logo on the breast and stains on the sleeves, shouted at me and tried to force me out of the room. He was quite right of course, and it’s probably not the only time touch has got me in to trouble. But we’ll pass over that.

So Pete, I still haven’t chosen which sense I could do without, but I have decided which one I couldn’t ever lose. It’s Touch - that thing that tells you when you’ve hit something sharp in the toolbox.