LEE PAYNE

Tag: 2002

  • Looking through my box of comics and feeling old

    In my younger days, I loved The Beano and The Dandy and my mum had both comics delivered to the house each week. I thought the smell of a fresh comic was one of the most intoxicating imaginable and was sold on their bright colours, gentle humour and simple charm.

    I have a large, very heavy box under my bed right now containing pretty much every comic that ever came through the letterbox of my childhood home. When I feel like adult life is getting on top of me, which happens more often than it really should, I open the box and spend a while indulging myself in the innocence of youth.

    It seems that my ‘golden’ period of receiving The Beano and The Dandy was between 1999 – the year I turned 7 – and 2003, when I was 11.

    My box of comics

    There’s a sort of running joke I have with a friend from when I was at university. We often talk about how we’re getting old and that our youth is well behind us. Well, we will both be 30 next birthday (him before me, I must add) which feels like something of a milestone but our chat about pipes, slippers and bowls of mashed up apple might be somewhat premature.

    Still, looking back through my old comics, it’s hard not to smile at how dated these dear old things are. Here are a few examples.

    This issue of The Beano, from December 2002, was giving away a free pack of stickers for your FA Premier League album. Collecting football stickers is still very much a thing, so nothing too bad so far, but look at the players used to advertise this brilliant giveaway! Dennis Bergkamp of Arsenal (retired in 2006), Paolo Di Canio of West Ham (now 53 years old) and Michael Owen of Liverpool (who left the Premier League to join Real Madrid two seasons later).

    A 9-year-old can’t just fill his football sticker album up on an empty stomach, though. He’s got to have breakfast first. How about some Mornflake Oats? You can still buy them, though heaven knows when I last saw an advert for them. The bit that caught my eye was the statement that they are available at Somerfield. That particular chain of supermarkets was taken over by the Co-Op in 2009, and by 2012 all Somerfield stores had been rebranded to that of their new owners.

    I’ve written before about how I’m not into films, but Disney’s Tarzan was one of the few that I have actually seen in the cinema. The film was released in October 1999, but by Christmas 2002 the character was back in an exciting new video game for… the GameBoy Advance. Released in the summer of 2001, the GameBoy Advance took games away from the bedroom and made them portable – for as long as the battery would last, that is. I never had one (I had the original GameBoy, which was in black and white).

    I may not have had a GameBoy Advance but I did have a PlayStation 2. Pretty much everyone I knew who was my age between 2002 and 2006 had one, actually. There was one boy at school who had a GameCube – we all thought he was weird. The PS2 is still the best selling games console of all time (more than 155 million of them have been sold worldwide) but anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to own one in December 2002 had the chance to win one in this competition. Note how you can’t enter online, you’ve got to send your entry in by post.

    Speaking of brilliant competitions, here’s another one. I don’t know if this still happens, but when I was a kid it seemed nearly everyone – boys especially – went through a stage where we’d spend that bit between getting home from school and going in for tea whizzing about on skateboards. I had one myself, but I was utterly useless at it and never did manage to pull off a single trick on it. Here the comic is giving away a skateboard. What could possibly make that prize better? By the skateboard having a photo of your favourite WWF wrestler on it, of course!

    Yes, nowadays it’s the WWE that does wrestling, but until 2002 it was called the World Wrestling Federation. They were forced to change the name when they lost a court battle with the World Wildlife Fund. I swear I’m not making this up.

    Those are just a few examples of how the last 20 years or so have changed the world, seen through the prism of British comics. Wow, does it make me wish I was 10 again. The comics still even have the little sticker on them that the newsagent would use to let the paper boy know where to deliver them. Simpler, happier times.

    If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.

  • My First World Cup

    This year, the World Cup will be more than welcome. Norwich City’s rebuilding job after Premier League relegation can be put to the back of minds for just a month and attentions can turn to the fun, excitement and drama in Brazil.

    This is probably not the first article of this type you have read. You probably know by now that every football fan has a particular World Cup that they consider to be their ‘first’ – not literally, but the first tournament to capture their imagination and the first to live on in their memories. For me, this accolade belongs to 2002.

    As the World Cup began in 2002 I was a few months short of my 10th birthday. With the tournament being held jointly between Japan and South Korea, the time differences meant that matches started early in the mornings here. Before breakfast time. My school must have been very generous because for England matches we were allowed to stay at home and watch before coming into school afterwards, and if your parents were not able to keep you at home for an extra hour or two then the match was played in the school hall on a delay. I can clearly remember heading into school after England had drawn 0-0 with Nigeria and giving a smug-looking smile to my fellow pupils who were having to sit through it not knowing the goalless outcome.

    In literal terms, of course, my first World Cup would have been USA ’94, but as I was not yet two years old I can say with some confidence that I remember nothing about it whatsoever. I was also a late developer in becoming a football fan. I grew up in a family of football fans but much preferred watching cartoons until I was about 8. I can remember laying on the living room floor watching England’s famous 5-1 win over Germany in September 2001 and being utterly inconsolable after Norwich lost the play-off final against Birmingham the following May.

    The 2002 World Cup did not go too badly for England in the grand scheme of things. David Beckham scored a penalty to beat Argentina which made up for his red card against them in 1998 (see video above) and we made it to the quarter finals before a fluke of a free kick from Ronaldinho went over David Seaman’s head and we went out 2-1 to Brazil. I can also remember The Sun, which my dad had delivered every Saturday, putting their cartoon character Hagar the Horrible on the front page as a preview to England playing Denmark. The Brazilians went on to win their 5th World Cup with a comfortable win over Germany in the final.

    To think that ‘my first World Cup’ is now 12 years ago was an eye-opener. 2002 was not a vintage World Cup, but it was my World Cup. As much as I am club before country when it comes to football, the World Cup is such a brilliant tournament that for four weeks every four years I indulge myself in it and revel all the colour and celebration that it has. Inside, it makes me feel warm to think that, to some young boy or girl out there, Brazil 2014 will be their first World Cup.

    Perhaps you will read all about it before the kick off in 2026.