HOT AND BOTHERED: Donald Clarke'sfavourite part of the summer is the bit where soccer has ended for the season. Now it's back, but will he give the beautiful game one last chance?
AS REGULAR READERS may have gathered by now, I find this summer lark a bit of a nuisance. I'll tell you one good thing about the season though: there's no bleeding football. For a few brief months, we are offered respite from the tedious epic drama in which, throughout the world, a thousand overpaid young idiots compete with one another for the affections of chequebook-wielding gangsters and flaky female pop stars.
It may be lashing rain outside and Dr Whomay have finished its run, but at least the television is free of Portuguese egomaniacs scowling at rubicund Scottish despots.
Oh no. What's this? The Premier League has not even been back a week and already a familiar drab ennui has fallen over the land. Football fans will, not unreasonably, stare aghast at the last sentence and, if they haven't already lit out for Clarke Towers with hatchets in their tattooed fists, will inwardly urge me to give the beautiful game a chance. I have unhappy news for them.
For a decade and a half of my life, I devoted hours of every week - hours that would have been better spent writing epic verse or playing violent video games - to the task of forcing myself to enjoy football, but, eventually, frustrated by the hostility of the fanatics and the sheer mass of material I was expected to absorb, I realised I was fighting a losing battle and cut the wretched game out of my life.
Mark E Smith, lead singer of The Fall,writing in Renegade, his recent, superb autobiography, finds space to bemoan the decline of football in the 1990s. "It's been hijacked by the Walter Softies," Mark rants, before going on to point an accusing finger at Nick Hornby, David Baddiel, and Damon Albarn. In that threesome's defence, they were, as I understand it, all football fans since childhood.
If you want to see a proper Walter Softy - somebody who began supporting Arsenal as an adult and still doesn't quite understand what a sweeper is - then cast your eyes towards the photo-byline at the head of this article. Do you remember when Eamon Dunphy used to bemoan the Johnny-come- lately, know-nothing fans who only took to the sport after Ireland's success at the 1990 World Cup? That's me, that is.
When I was a kid, it would have been easy enough to classify the boys in my school within a simple Venn diagram. One circle, let's call it F, would contain all the football fans. A second, we'll call that M, would house all the music nuts. Some well-rounded folk might be found in the area where the two sets intersect. A smaller number of eccentrics could be encountered outside both circles jamming their deranged fingers into electrical sockets and planning some future takeover of the universe.
My closest chums and I - M less F, to you mathematicians - could, without drawing breath, name every Cabaret Voltaire release in order, but would have trouble identifying a single First Division football ground. I'm not proud of my ignorance. It's just how it was.
So the situation remained until 1990 when certain events in Italy stirred up a national furore and - no small thing this - New Order decided to release a football song. Living in north London at the time, I elected to support the team otherwise known as Walter Softy United, Arsenal FC, and began devoting an hour a day to close study of the sports pages.
It was, ultimately, to no avail. Having memorised the name of the latest Bolivian thunderboots to catch Arsene Wenger's eye, I would make my way to the pub and, within seconds, find myself being howled at for not appreciating the player's incurable one-footedness (or something). Being a football fan is akin to being a horse or a haemophiliac. It is, it seems, something you are born into and no amount of study or re-education will convince the pure-bred supporter that you are anything other than an imposter.
So what finally made me give it up? Nothing much. One day, in the early part of this decade, I suddenly realised that I was only turning to the football pages out of a pathetic, misguided sense of duty. A lingering trace of Protestant work ethic compelled me to plough through reports of bewildering events at Stamford Bridge and Craven Cottage, but I cared no more for the results than I cared about the fate of the Australian stock exchange.
Edging towards the window like Chief at the end of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, I bunged a heavy object through the reinforced glass, leapt to the ground and made a dash for freedom. The air smells so much fresher here.