LEE PAYNE

Tag: payne

  • My 100th blog post – my favourites from the last 13 years

    In the game of cricket, a century is a significant milestone. Compiling one hundred runs with the bat is very difficult to do and the greats of the game are measured against each other by how many centuries they made. Sadly, despite it being my favourite sport, I have never been good enough at it to get anywhere near 50, let alone 100.

    I have made a century of a different kind, though. This post, the one you’re currently reading, is the 100th I’ve made on my blog! When I started it I was 17 and coming towards the end of sixth form, which feels a very long time ago now. Often several months have passed between entries, but it has always been there as a place to write when I’ve wanted to get something out there. The vast majority of them have been almost entirely ignored, which is par for the course, but a few have unexpectedly gained traction.

    To mark the occasion, I thought it would be interesting to look back over the previous 99 posts and pick out a few that mean a lot to me. Yes, I know it is self-indulgent, but my name is literally at the top. I’m not forcing you to be here!

    Click on the heading to see the post.

    15/3/2010 – The first post: Beckham’s World Cup heartbreak means he must rethink his retirement plans

    The post that started this blog off was a piece of football writing. This was five years before I began writing a regular column for the Eastern Daily Press but it has always been sports journalism that has interested me. Published on 15th March 2010, it strikes me that the style of my writing has not actually changed that much. I think it has just developed to be a bit looser – that first post comes across as a tad uptight (not unlike me really!) and while I appear to be quite happy to express my opinion on the injury David Beckham had suffered playing for AC Milan, putting not only his participation in the 2010 World Cup but also his entire England career at risk, I get the feeling I’m trying too hard to sound like I write for The Guardian. I’ve definitely developed my writing so I can adapt to whatever publication I’m writing for.

    A couple of things about this piece: Beckham never played for England again. My choice to replace him, James Milner, did indeed go to the World Cup that year but (spoiler alert) it did not go well for England and they were knocked out by Germany in the Last 16 – that match that contained Frank Lampard’s ghost goal, hastening the introduction of goalline technology. I also note that my radio station of choice back in 2010 was BBC Radio Norfolk. Not long after this I discovered Chris Moyles on Radio 1 and my life changed. Why, oh why, did I not get into that sort of thing sooner!?

    22/5/2015 – Part of my Norwich-mad dad will be with me at Wembley

    I have written about it in various places before, but my dad died in 2014. Six years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 69. On 22nd May 2015, I wrote this piece about wearing my dad’s old Norwich City shirt to the Championship play-off final at Wembley Stadium. Dad was a lifelong Norwich fan and when my mum and dad split up the main thing we did together was go to Carrow Road with our season tickets. To this day I sit in the same seat, but I sit alone, with my dad’s to my left now taken by somebody else. In May 2015, Norwich had made it to the play-off final, having beaten arch rivals I***ich Town in the semi-finals, and were one game away from promotion to the Premier League. 40,000 Norwich fans made to the trip to London for the occasion, me included. I thought it would be fitting to wear dad’s shirt in his honour on the day.

    My dad in his room in his care home, a Canary from beginning to end.

    Having shared the story on social media, it proved popular and gained the attention of a journalist from the EDP, who contacted me to write up the story for the paper. I can’t seem to find the article on their website, but I promise you it happened. Norwich beat Middlesbrough 2-0 and made it to the top flight.

    14/9/2015 – It’s time to start talking about Wes in the same breath as the Norwich City greats

    I picked this one because I like the way the writing flows and because I’ve plenty of use of this piece over the seven years since I wrote it. Wes Hoolahan, a diminutive Irishman, was my favourite Norwich City player for most of the decade he spent at the club. Full of skill, he could always make something happen and was there at some really good moments for Norwich. I was inspired to write this after he was the star in a 3-1 win over Bournemouth in the Premier League. He was 33 at the time and I felt I wanted to write about him while he was still around.

    Wes Hoolahan

    I was able to bring this back out again when Hoolahan announced he was leaving Norwich in 2018. It got a fair number of readers and is a piece I’m pretty pleased with.

    15/10/2015 – My Durham holiday photo treasure hunt

    Looking back, I was churning out writing pretty well in 2015. I’d had the successes of the dad’s shirt at Wembley story, Hoolahan and I’d also been chosen to write for the EDP’s new Fan Zone page. In October of that year, I went up to Durham to visit my former landlady, who was working there at the time. She set me a photo treasure hunt challenge – she gave me a list of things that I had to find and take photographs of. This was a great way to explore a city I didn’t know very well. As you can see from the post, I completed the task. This was my first real foray into personal blogging, something that I’ve done more of since and it has always proved reasonably popular – much to my surprise, as I’ve always felt I’m incredibly boring!

    3/12/2015 – In search of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs

    2015 again and another attempt at personal blogging. The dinosar sculptures in Crystal Palace Park in South London had always fascinated me and I had read loads about them but I had not visited them until December 2015. I spent one of the days I’d got off work to visit them and I blogged about my trip. I have been to see the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs several times since.

    25/10/2017 and 26/10/2017 – The pain at the Arsenal and Walking the line

    A two-parter. In October 2017, I made a solo (’twas ever thus) trip to London to watch Norwich City play Arsenal in a League Cup match at the Emirates Stadium. I blogged about the trip, with the first part being all about the football match and the second part being about my walk along a disused railway line the following day. Reading it you can tell I enjoyed myself and it makes me want to do something like this again.

    Walking along an old railway line in London, 2017

    5/3/2019 – ‘No one cares’ – the infuriating misogyny on the internet

    When I’m on social media, I’ve never been able to resist arguing with people when I see them posting overtly racist, sexist or homophobic material. Basically, I will call out the arseholes. People tell me the solution is to ignore it, but I haven’t managed it yet. I just continue calling them out until I need to take a break from social media completely to get my head together.

    Bored with seeing women-fearing blokey blokes taking every opportunity to be disparaging about women’s sport, I wrote this piece in 2019. I don’t claim to fight the feminist fight on behalf of women, I’m just a guy that likes sport and I don’t care whether those participating have willies or not. I wrote this so I could link to it when I was arguing with one of these blokey blokes, rather than having to write the same arguments out every time. It feels more relevant than ever now, with the England women’s football team becoming European champions last year.

    8/5/2019 – One year on: Tranquility Base Hotel& Casino by Arctic Monkeys

    This was the first time I had written about music and my love for Arctic Monkeys. The band changed my life when I discovered them, far later than everyone else had. They changed my hair style, they changed the clothes I wore, the way I saw music as an art form. I wrote this piece about the album they had released in 2018, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, and according to my stats it still gets occasional views from the many Monkeys fans around the world. I enjoyed writing it so much that I have since written about their other six albums: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006), Favourite Worst Nightmare (2007), Humbug (2009), Suck It And See (2011), AM (2013) and The Car (2022).

    24/10/2019 – We walked 14 miles… because we wanted to

    On the face of it, this is just another piece of personal blogging about walking 14 miles – Aylsham to North Walsham and back again – with my friend Katie. But when I read it back, I realised that it was actually about as gushing as I’ve ever been with the written word. It is really about friendship, and how the little gang that had taken me in when I’d been so alone (Katie, Megan and Sarah) had made such a difference to my life. Little did we know that the pandemic was just around the corner and our lives would change so much.

    9.4.2020 – Stay-at-home pubs, Coogan films and GTA: what I’m doing to deal with lockdown

    The pandemic was a strange time, wasn’t it? It all happened so quickly, and while it felt like it dragged on, it feels like a lifetime ago now. As supermarket staff, we were actually given letters to show to the police should we be pulled over and asked why we were out and about. Extraordinary stuff. And can anyone remember when Sainsbury’s was only open to NHS staff for an hour every morning, and they would play Captain Tom Moore’s charity version of You’ll Never Walk Alone over the PA system!? Strange times. Anyway, in April 2020 I decided to write about the things I was doing, watching and playing to get myself through lockdown. I think in years to come I’ll be glad I did this – it’ll be a sort of record of that (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime event.

    See also: 3/6/2020 – #GoodStuff – a few things I’ve been enjoying despite all of this

    7/9/2021 – Looking through my box of comics and feeling old

    A piece I wrote about an afternoon spent sifting through some of the many comics I keep in a box under my bed. Not much to say about it, but it got a decent number of readers and people seemed to like it.

    27/3/2022 – I bought a 58-year-old football magazine

    I don’t think I would have written this piece if I hadn’t done the comics one first. Last March, I went to a shop on the Dereham to Fakenham road called Corners (now defunct) and found this football magazine from 1964. I picked out some interesting things from it, most of which were along the lines of ‘weren’t things different back then?’.

    4/7/2022 – I’m nearly 30. Where am I going?

    I was full of angst about turning 30. I find it easier to write than I do to speak, so I blogged about it. Basically, I was about to hit that milestone and I had no idea what I was doing with my life. I am glad I wrote this. Turns out, being 30 feels very much like being 29, but this did me good. I later chose 30 songs that had been the soundtrack to my 30 years and blogged about that too.

    3/10/2022 – The theatre, the sights and the hilariously awful hotel – my 26 hours in London

    If I was a musician, this one would be described as my biggest hit to date. Last September, I went to London for a couple of days with my mum, her other half and their two friends. The hotel we stayed in was so awful it was actually funny. I have just checked the stats and 213 people have read this so far – that’s a lot, considering I usually get 10 pairs of eyes on something I’ve written if I’m lucky. This encouraged me to document my own life instead of writing about sport the whole time. A rule I stick to is never to construct situations purely for the benefit of the blog – like the way people on TikTok (bah) who go to places only to show off to their followers. I simply go somewhere, enjoy myself, take a few photos and spend a while writing about it when I get home. It seems to work.

    3/12/2022 – Christmas was better when I was a kid – and 12 years in retail might have something to do with it

    Finally, my attempt to get into the festive spirit. This piece about my memories of Christmas as a child seemed to strike a chord with people, who were reminded of cherished moments from the past themselves by reading it. I loved that I was able to do that for them. Some I hadn’t heard from in years got in touch to say they enjoyed it, which was a really lovely way to round off the year.

    There we have it then, my picks of the 99 posts I have written for this blog to date. I have pretty much decided that making a living out of writing isn’t going to happen, but I still get enough enjoyment out of it that I will carry it on as a hobby regardless. So, here’s to many more posts on this blog. I hope you’ll join me for the ride.

    If you have any thoughts about the posts I’ve shown you here, do feel free to leave a comment under this post or contact me. I’d love to hear from you!

    All the best,

    Lee

  • Have a wonderful Christmas – and here’s to the new year!

    Merry Christmas!

    All the signs point to these being bleak times: a lot of us can’t afford to put the heating on, Covid is still refusing to go away – like a double glazing salesman who won’t take no for an answer – and Sky News has a permanent graphic in the top corner of the screen telling us which set of workers is on strike today. At the time of writing, it’s the postal workers.

    Yet, despite all of that, I was cheerful and optimistic when I drove home from work for the last time before Christmas last night. I’d even made a playlist of my favourite Christmas songs to soundtrack my 30 mile journey. I’ve written about this banger by The Darkness before but I also highly recommend White Wine In The Sun by Tim Minchin.

    For those of us in retail, the busiest period of the year is almost over. We won’t struggle to find a space in the car park, have five trolleys full of left behinds or have to put up with god awful Mariah Carey covers any longer once the doors are closed on Christmas Eve.

    Ignoring the utter misery that is January, we also have the new year on the horizon – a chance to reflect on what’s gone before and what we want to happen in the year ahead.

    Thinking about it, my 2022 has been about establishing a base, mentally, from which I can build on. Due to factors, I had to move back in with my mum in the spring. Having just turned 30, this is hardly something to be proud of but my mental health has improved dramatically by having a warm, loving and stable home life. I now feel that I can make decisions about the future direction of my life with confidence.

    I would like a new job. I think I’ve said ‘this Christmas will be my last in retail’ every year since about 2012 but maybe this really will be it. That’s very much a work in progress though. We’ll see how that goes.

    I’ll end this piece with a few photos from my year. Thanks for reading, and however you’re spending Christmas, I hope it’s a happy one.

    With mum on a chilly January walk on the beach
    My positive Covid tests when it laid me low in February
    My first day out of isolation, March
    A car catches fire in the car park at work, March
    Breakfast outside at the now-defunct Corners near Dereham, April
    Day out in Cromer, May
    With mum in Cromer, May
    At The Killers gig at Carrow Road in June
    Friday night drink in Wells-next-the-sea, June
    Watching Norwich at Dereham Town, July
    Pet-sitting Oscar, July
    Watching England women in the Euros at the fan park in Manchester, July
    Mum with England batter Jonny Bairstow at Old Trafford, July
    Watching England v South Africa at Old Trafford, July
    With my friend Gavin at Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach in August
    With my friends and family on my 30th birthday in August
    On top of Norfolk’s highest point, Beeston Bump, September
    My night wandering around London in September
    Happy bunny… receiving the new Arctic Monkeys album in October
    At the Blossoms gig at the UEA in November
    Lovely winter walk at Castle Acre, December

  • Christmas was better when I was a kid – and 12 years in retail might have something to do with it

    Christmas was brilliant when I was a kid.

    It’s far from the only thing that I would say was better when I was younger, but I’m not sure it rings true quite as much with anything else. Christmas began as soon as I finished school for the year. I can remember once when the suburb of Norwich I lived in was covered by fog for what felt like a week, combined with the festive films on the TV lending a wonderful winter atmosphere to the build up. On Christmas Eve, a family tradition was to go to KFC for tea and then drive around the city looking at the lights on people’s houses. It really got you in the spirit.

    As an only child (I have a half-sister, but she’s quite a bit older than me), I got lots of presents, as shallow as that makes me sound. I wasn’t one for getting up ridiculously early to open them – I once had to be woken up by my parents on Christmas morning – but there were definitely years when it was still dark outside. My dad would pretend to be interested in what I was unwrapping, but his real role was being in charge of the bin bag that all the paper went into.

    Christmas Day would usually mean going to my grandmother’s house, where you were guaranteed a meal that would leave you unable to move. You were never knowingly underfed at nanny’s. She was an excellent cook, and her Yorkshire puddings were divine. We’d then collapse onto the sofa, slipping in and out of a food coma watching the big Christmas shows on TV.

    Boxing Day saw us play hosts to dad’s side of the family. My sister and her family, along with my nanny and grandad (the one who would buy my hand-drawn comics from me) would come to our house. I would get to play with my nephew and niece, my mum would cook another lovely meal, and then the adults would play cards. I played along on a few occasions, but more often than not that time would be spent putting on a little show for my grandad. The great man would sit through whatever awful acting, singing or dancing (my niece would do that last one, rather than me) we put in front of him. One year, the three of us made our own film using a camcorder. I can’t remember if the camcorder had been a present for someone, but I can definitely remember filming my nephew at the top of the stairs, apparently murdered. The rest is sketchy. I think one of the characters was called Barry.

    The fun didn’t stop there. New Year’s Day would be my sister’s turn to open her home. We’d have buffet style food, rather than a full meal, and we would watch the football scores coming in. These memories are incredibly vivid. Yet there are Christmases in the last decade that I couldn’t tell you about, as I have forgotten them.

    Times change, of course. My mum and dad split up in 2007. All of our Christmas traditions up to that point ended immediately. In 2010, my mum couldn’t taste her Christmas dinner and ended up in A&E, eventually being diagnosed with bronchitis. On Boxing Day 2012, I took my dad – who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for a few years by then – to his last ever Norwich City match at Carrow Road. It had just become too difficult to get him there and back. We lost 1-0 to Chelsea. Then, on Christmas Eve 2013, dad was taken to hospital from his care home. He died on 1st February 2014. He was not well enough to read the card I’d bought him that year.

    Another big difference between Christmas as a kid and now is that I’ve spent the last 12 Decembers working in a supermarket. Provided I haven’t been sacked and not told about it yet, this will be my 13th. Plenty of funny things have happened at work in those years. My favourite is probably when a woman came to the kiosk to ask me for ’50 grams of Golden Virginia’ but instead asked for ’50 grams of Golden Vagina’. Obviously, Christmas is the busiest time of year in that industry so, not only does the build up to it start before the kids have gone back to school, by the time the big day gets here you’re knackered. It wasn’t too bad when I first started, when I was just on the checkouts. I’d just go home with the same six Christmas songs ringing in my ears. But when I moved onto doing the trolleys, it would be like painting the Forth Bridge. By the time I’d brought a line of trolleys to the front of the store and gone to get another, the first line would be gone. It’d also be difficult to get the trolleys in at all, what with the cars queueing round the car park. In 2018, I came home from work the Sunday before Christmas in a state that I can only describe as broken.

    Christmas 2018 – I was broken.

    Since I’ve gradually been given more responsibility, Christmas is busier than ever. It sounds quaint now to think that when I was at school doing anything before 8am felt excruciatingly early, and after 4pm incredibly late. These days I can be at work at 5.45am, or I can still be serving someone with a massive trolley full of stuff at 11pm (though not on the same day, thankfully). All to the soundtrack of a choral cover of Santa Baby, or the frankly bizarre I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas. Last year, for the first time I was given the task of handing out food orders to customers, some of which they had put in as far back as October. It was superbly organised, but did involve me spending time in a dark and cold shipping container in the yard.

    The company are kind enough to allow us to wear a Christmas jumper at this time of year. I cannot stand wearing a collar (I have a thing about things touching my neck) so I will take any opportunity to ditch the usual uniform. As I’m tight – I’m my father’s son – I have worn the same one every year since 2017 and that tradition will continue in 2022. It’s grey with a polar bear on the front. The bear used to light up but the jumper smelled so bad one year that we had no choice but to remove any battery-powered parts and put it in the washing machine.

    The trusty jumper I’ve worn for work every year since 2017

    Christmas is still something I look forward to. Even though work is busy, there’s a nice atmosphere of ‘we’re all in it together’ with my colleagues. The World Darts Championship signals the beginning of the festive period for me, starting a week or so before Christmas and finishing at New Year. As soon as I see the arrows on the telly, I feel warm inside. The day itself is spent with my mum and her other half Dave, the two most important people in my life, and we eat lots of food and have a great laugh.

    Whatever December means to you, I hope it’s a good one. I think we all deserve it.

  • I’m probably never going to be a writer – it might be time to do something else

    You will have to excuse the irony of this. I’m writing about how I’ve been wasting my time writing.

    For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to write for a living. Since I was a child. I think it stemmed from getting The Beano and The Dandy delivered to the house, as well as MATCH! magazine. I would also have a look at my dad’s copy of The Sun on a Saturday (forgive me, I was young). I was fascinated by the different styles of writing, and how the written word could make you feel depending on how it was presented on the page. When I was around 8 years old, I made hand-drawn comics called The Jumbo for my grandad, which the wonderful man paid me the cover price for. I think I ‘borrowed’ the character of Dennis The Menace for it, too, but thankfully I never received a copyright claim from the publisher of The Beano. A couple of years after that, I was mocking up newspaper front pages.

    Now, aged 30, it is clear to me that writing – communicating with the written/typed word – is probably what I’m best at. Despite being the grandson of a respected mechanic on one side and a talented carpenter on the other side, I am entirely useless at anything practical. Actually doing anything with my hands is beyond me. On one attempt to learn how to cook, I tried to crack an egg into a jug and ended up with the yolk all over the worktop and all of the shell in the jug. I also can’t communicate easily by other means. I’m debilitatingly awkward in face-to-face situations, and irritatingly inarticulate when speaking to someone. I have been asked to do a TV show and a podcast before, but tellingly never been asked to do them more than once.

    My TV debut, on the short-lived Mustard TV, in 2016. I haven’t been asked to do TV again in the six years since.

    I did work experience at Archant, who publish the Eastern Daily Press, Norwich Evening News and other local titles in East Anglia, in 2009. I didn’t actually have much work to do – I got a piece in the paper about a couple’s landmark wedding anniversary – but I was able to observe this huge office putting a newspaper together, as well as sit in on an editorial meeting. I really enjoyed it, and I was left feeling even more sure that I wanted to be a journalist. In 2015, the EDP advertised for contributors to a new Fan Zone page, all about Norwich City Football Club. I went for it, not expecting to get picked, but to my surprise I was chosen as one of four columnists and I’m still doing it now. In fact, I’m the only one of the original four still doing it.

    The closest I’ve ever been to getting paid for writing was when I had an interview at Archant in 2017. They were looking for a trainee reporter. Unfortunately, I failed to impress in the interview (face-to-face interactions letting me down again) and I didn’t get the job. Since then, I’ve never even applied for another job, carrying on with pretending to know what I’m doing in a supermarket.

    I have kept this blog going, as I like to write, but I have never pushed it to the extent that would get me noticed. As an introvert, it’s not in my nature to blow my own trumpet. In any case, when I do share what I’ve written, I don’t get many readers anyway.

    This is why I think that’s the case: TikTok. I’ve never been on TikTok myself because I can’t really see the point of it. My mum, however, is borderline addicted to it. She will spend ages scrolling through the app. I’ll often be shown videos from it. I can’t really get my head around it, though, because there is just so much crap on there. I can spend hours writing something, share it, and get maybe 50 readers if I am exceptionally lucky. Someone can record a 30 second clip of their dog farting, upload it to TikTok, and get millions of views. Short attention spans have ruined the art of writing.

    I’m not bitter though. That’s just how it is. After having this dream for twenty years, I have to start to wonder if my writing is really better than anyone else’s. Perhaps it is time to change tact. Do something else. I don’t know what that might be. But maybe the first step is to admit that writing is a dead end.

    Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far.

  • 30 for 30 – songs that bring back memories

    My 21st birthday, 2013

    I’ll be 30 on 25th August – despite my protestations about not being done with my 20s yet. Anyway, the other night I made a playlist of songs that hold memories for me in my life so far. These are not necessarily favourites (I haven’t listened to Cher for a while, I have to say), but ones that take me back to a particular time and place. I hope you find a song you really like here, and look out for the links that look like this – clicking on them will give some extra information about what I’m banging on about.

    SNAP! – Rhythm Is A Dancer

    The number one single in the UK on the day I was born, 25th August 1992.

    Scatman John – Scatman (ski-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop)

    My mum won a hifi system in a radio competition, the kind that would have been way out of our price range, and somehow it ended up in my bedroom. I remember listening to this song on it and being fascinated by it.

    Cher – Believe

    Brings back memories of being driven around Norwich by my mum with this blasting out very loudly.

    Cartoons – Witch Doctor

    Hearing it now, this song is completely ridiculous – but I can definitely remember hearing it at home, where we had it on CD. Some people had Abbey Road… I think it sounds a bit like Scatman John in terms of playing around with mouth sounds, so there could be a link there.

    Dario G – Carnaval de Paris

    Originally released for the 1998 World Cup, though I have no memory of that tournament (2002 was the first one I can recall). This was actually used by Sky Sports as the theme tune to their Premier League coverage in the early 2000s, and that’s where I remember it from.

    Heather Small – Proud

    We all sang in this in the school hall on our last day at Norman First in July 2000. Corny? Yes. Memorable? Definitely.

    U2 – Beautiful Day

    You’ll notice a trend of songs I remember from being theme tunes to TV shows. This was what ITV used for their highlights programme The Premiership, when they briefly held the rights away from the BBC’s Match of the Day in the early 2000s.

    MIKA – Grace Kelly

    A massive hit in 2007, this seemed to be on the radio every morning on the way to school. I was surprised to see MIKA turn up as one of the hosts of this year’s Eurovision – I’d not heard a peep from him for years.

    The Killers – Read My Mind

    I remember listening to this a lot when I was at sixth form – 2008 to 2010. Seeing The Killers perform it live at Carrow Road in June this year was a special moment.

    Arctic Monkeys – Brianstorm

    There will be a lot of Arctic Monkeys on this list – after all, they’re my favourite band. The first album of theirs I actually owned on CD was their second, Favourite Worst Nightmare. This song was track one.

    Arctic Monkeys – I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor

    Their first single and the Arctic Monkeys song I reckon most people will have heard of.

    Alex Turner – Piledriver Waltz

    My Arctic Monkeys obsession led to me discovering Submarine, which is my favourite film. Arctics frontman Alex Turner did the soundtrack and this is my favourite song from it.

    Arctic Monkeys – Black Treacle

    Reminds me of driving backwards and forwards between Norfolk and Essex when I was at university. This is from their 2011 album Suck It and See.

    Pulp – Do You Remember The First Time?

    I can’t remember the first time I heard this song but it always stops me in my tracks when I hear it. Makes me feel nostalgic and sentimental. It’s between this and Babies for my favourite Pulp song.

    Arctic Monkeys – Cornerstone

    Probably my favourite of all Arctic Monkeys songs and one that reminds me of an unrequited love.

    Depeche Mode – Just Can’t Get Enough

    Was played a lot at Carrow Road during the years Paul Lambert was manager (2009 to 2012). Some of the happiest and most successful times Norwich City have had in my lifetime.

    Grandaddy – A.M. 180

    The theme tune to Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe, a programme I have seen many, many times over and still go back to now and again.

    Harvey Danger – Flagpole Sitta

    The theme tune to Peep Show. I first saw the sitcom starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb in a Media Studies lesson at school, oddly enough, but I loved it and have seen every episode more times than is healthy.

    Morning Runner – Gone Up In Flames

    Another TV theme tune – this one is from The Inbetweeners. The sitcom about four lads and their time at sixth form was broadcast exactly when I was at sixth form myself and, I can tell you, it was very realistic.

    The Wombats – Anti-D

    I spent a fair bit of time as a uni student being miserable – this song was released around that time and I can remember listening to it in my more self-indulgent moments in the room I rented in a lady’s house a short walk from the college.

    Cage The Elephant – Shake Me Down

    Another song I can remember hearing a lot during my time at uni.

    Underworld – Caliban’s Dream

    I watched every minute of the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics and can remember being spellbound by this song. They were a great Olympics and they happened just a month or so after my mum and I moved to a little terraced house in Dereham. Happy times.

    Arctic Monkeys – Do I Wanna Know?

    From the fifth Arctic Monkeys album AM, released in 2013. An absolute banger – I saw them live in their native Sheffield in 2018 and this sounded amazing.

    Foster The People – Pumped Up Kicks

    For a little while, I taught my friend to drive in the empty Sainsbury’s car park after work on a Sunday. Our musical tastes were very different. This is one of the only songs we both liked so we played it a lot while she was driving around.

    Arctic Monkeys – One Point Perspective

    Arctic Monkeys finally released a new album in 2018, their first for five years. This masterpiece is my favourite track from it.

    Joe Cocker – With A Little Help From My Friends

    As I mentioned before, I saw Arctic Monkeys live at Sheffield Arena in 2018. This song was played over the speakers just after the gig had finished and the audience were filing out. It reminds me of the complete euphoria of seeing my favourite band in the flesh for the first time.

    Talking Heads – Take Me to the River

    A more recent memory, I can recall driving around listening to this song, just driving for the hell of it and lost in thought.

    Blossoms – Your Girlfriend

    I first heard Blossoms in 2016, when their single Charlemagne was played a lot on Radio X. I really got into them when I heard this song for the first time, sitting in my car at work during my lunch break a few years ago. They are now one of my favourite bands and I’ve got tickets to see them live in Norwich this November.

    The Rolling Stones – She’s A Rainbow

    During the first Covid lockdown, the Wednesday night trip to the pub was replaced by drinks and music in the living room. This song was one of the highlights.

    The Turtles – Elenore

    Another lockdown discovery, and in my opinion the funniest love song ever written.

    If you’ve got this far, thanks very much! This was just a bit of fun for myself really. If you want to carry these songs around with you, I put them in a Spotify playlist.

  • I bought a 58-year-old football magazine

    Garden centres are usually my idea of hell but a few days ago I went to one that was a bit different. It had all the boring things, of course, like pots and plants, but it also had what they called a ‘retro shop’. An eclectic mix of items for sale with the only thing in common with each other being that they had spent years unused in someone’s house/shed/garage. There were old radios, guitars, weird wooden ornaments; it would take hours to go through it all.

    As a former collector of The Beano and The Dandy, my eyes were drawn to a pile of comics and magazines. While neither of those were anywhere to be seen, there were several Marvel and DC Comics titles, including a couple where the ‘new hero’ Doctor Strange – a character first seen in 1963 and recently played by Benedict Cumberbatch in a film – was mentioned on the front cover. Eventually, I stumbled upon a copy of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly.

    The August 1964 issue of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly I bought at the retro shop

    I love this sort of thing. Just like the comics, a magazine is like a time capsule. They quite literally document the time they were published. I have to admit, I’d never heard of Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly. The issue I found in the shop was from August 1964, a full 28 years before I was born.

    The first thing I noticed was that it was in colour. I doubt many people will have seen colour photographs of football matches in 1964. Newspapers were still very much black and white and on the rare occasions a game was televised it would have been in monochrome too, as colour television did not begin broadcasting in Britain until 1967. You can really see this standing out in a newsagent’s.

    I’ve always found something charming about old adverts. They were usually straight to the point and back then there was little regulation of the advertising industry, so the claims made in them were bold to say the least. Look at these two, for example. ‘Actual Tests’ (what actual tests? Who did the tests? What were they testing? How did they do the tests?) prove you can increase your strength 20% in 1 month (how do you measure strength to such degrees?) with astonishing new 6-second exercises! This company even offers to give you your money back if you don’t ‘get the kind of physique girls admire super quick’.

    This one promises to ‘enable to gain up to 6 ins. in height’. I’m pretty sure I get emails about this kind of thing nowadays, but they are usually pledging to help me gain six inches somewhere else.

    I suppose once you had become 20% stronger and 6 inches taller you might then have had the physique that the Manchester City Police were looking for.

    Now for some of the actual football content. As this was a summer issue looking back at the previous season and ahead to the next, the team photographs of the champions of all four English leagues were featured. The Liverpool photo is notable for the presence of both Bill Shankly, who was manager at the time, and Bob Paisley, who was merely ‘trainer’ (first team coach in modern terms) then but would of course go on to take the top job and win six league titles and three European Cups in charge of the Reds.

    Below them are second division champions Leeds, promoted to the top flight under Don Revie. This was the start of a golden period for the club, in which they would be league champions twice and win the FA Cup in 1972. Several of the stars of that side were already present – Billy Bremner, Jack Charlton, Norman Hunter and Johnny Giles.

    This might have been my favourite page in the whole magazine. Readers would write in, offering to exchange, for example, ‘Man. Utd. [programmes] for Sunderland and Arsenal’. Charmingly, many would also seek pen pals so they had someone to talk about their interests with by letter. When you think about it, this was an early form of social media. People have always wanted to reach out to others, it’s just that these days you simply write a tweet and can be bombarded with abuse just seconds later. The best one on this page, for me, was from S. Baird of Accrington, who was offering ‘200 First Division Autographs’ in exchange for ‘Screaming Lord Sutch Wig and Top Hat’. So many questions.

    With my beloved Norwich City dropping like a stone towards the Championship once again, I scoured the magazine for mentions of the team in the hope that things might have been going slightly better in 1964. Alas, the second division table has us sixth from bottom.

    Now we come to the letters page. Paul Carter from Liverpool wanted football to do more for charity. The Charity (now Community) Shield had been going for decades by this point, so he can’t claim the credit for that, but football is certainly used for fundraising purposes on a frequent basis now.

    Finally, I give you D. Kilbride, who doubted Bobby Moore’s suitability to be the captain of England and suggested Jimmy Armfield be given the job instead.

    Two years later…

    Thanks for reading.

  • Things that are winding me up today

    Ahh… it’s Valentine’s Day. Love is in the air. As I write this it’s bang on the time that the lovers amongst us are tucking into a love sausage or making the most of a 2 for 1 offer at Pizza Express, but alas not me. I’ve been repellent to women for a whole 30 years now – an impressive record I’m sure you’ll agree.

    I don’t think it’s related to being alone on 14th February – God knows I’m used to that – but for some reason a lot of things today are getting right on my nerves. Here’s a few of them.

    Hair

    If I had a superpower, I wouldn’t want to be able to fly or shoot webs out of my wrists or anything like that. I’d just like to be press ‘pause’ on the growth of my hair. As someone who has what you might call social anxiety, I find the whole process of going to the barber’s and getting my hair cut difficult. Having gone through it and left with my hair looking nice and tidy, I’d love to be able to halt its progress instead of the bloody stuff being all over the place again four weeks later. The same goes for facial hair – I can’t stand the feeling of a hairy chin so I stand in front of the mirror holding a razor way more often than I’d like.

    Earphones

    How do people get them to stay in their ears? I wear mine while hoovering or on long car journeys (as a passenger, of course) – I don’t know if my ears are just a weird shape or something but they just won’t bloody stay in! The sound they produce is disappointingly tinny as well.

    The lack of an affordable ad-free YouTube

    You’re welcome to say this is a First World Problem, but I watch a fair amount of YouTube (I’m too old for TikTok) and it is infested with ads. Want to watch an Alan Partridge clip from the 90s? Well you’re going to have to sit through two noisy 30 second adverts first! You can actually pay a monthly fee to get an ad-free YouTube, but because it comes with bells and whistles like being able to continue playing in the background and download videos to watch offline, they charge £11.99 a month for it! If they just offered an ad-free option for, say £5.99 a month, I’d be right there.

    Waking up early on a day off

    My work pattern these days means that I have one day in, one day off, two days in, one day off, one day in and then one day off. Why is it, then, that on the days I’ve got to go to work I feel like I could turn the alarm off and sleep for several more hours but when it’s my day off and I have no alarms set I am wide awake before 7am? It’s infuriating. Going back to sleep isn’t an option, either, as I’m very much a ‘you wake up, you get up’ sort of person.

    Anyway, that’s enough of the moaning. I’m going to leave you with a love song for Valentine’s Day.

    If you know me just a little bit, you’ll be aware that I am a huge fan of Arctic Monkeys. While I wait for their new album (due this year), today I was listening to their early work. The Bakery was a B side to Fluorescent Adolescent, a song from the album Favourite Worst Nightmare that reached no. 2 in the UK singles chart in 2007.

    Alex Turner is a brilliant lyricist and in the early Monkeys stuff he was particularly good at taking very relatable scenarios and putting them to music. In this one there’s a girl he fancies and he like seeing her about the place, and gets a bit annoyed when she’s not around. 2 minutes and 57 seconds of adolescent innocence. Enjoy.

    Thanks for reading this load of old moaning. I’ve not been doing much writing recently – not been in the best place, mind wise – but hopefully I’ll soon be back on track!

    Lee

  • This one’s for you, dad…

    Latest newspaper column

    As you probably know by now, I write a column for the Eastern Daily Press. It’s about Norwich City FC and there are four of us who write one to be published in the paper on a Tuesday during the football season. We rotate, so I have one every four weeks.

    When I realised that it would be my turn on Tuesday 1st February, thoughts turned to my dear old dad. On 1st February 2014, he passed away at the age of 69 from Alzheimer’s disease. He was a mad Norwich fan and is largely responsible for me supporting the club, so I thought it would be nice to dedicate my column to him.

    Click here to read it now, and if you happen to be in a shop tomorrow you can read it in the paper as well.

  • Thoughts on Norwich City and the new manager

    Earlier today I was contacted by someone from a website looking for a Norwich fan to answer a couple of questions about how the season has been going, what went wrong for Daniel Farke and what the hopes were for the new manager Dean Smith. As it turned out, by the time I’d written my piece they had found someone else and didn’t need me. So it doesn’t go to waste, here’s what I wrote:

    Verdict on season so far

    It couldn’t have gone much worse. I approached Norwich’s return to the Premier League with some trepidation because I feel as fans we are still damaged from the awful experience we had last time. When the fixture list came out and gave us the champions, the previous champions and the FA Cup winners in our first three games I was concerned that we would be playing catch up and low on confidence from a very early stage and that is exactly what happened.

    Dean Smith is now the manager of Norwich City

    Verdict on manager

    There will always be a lot of love for Daniel Farke from Norwich fans. When he took over the club had a poor squad, full of players who either weren’t good enough or didn’t want to be here. He played a big role in the development of James Maddison and the money we received from selling him to Leicester helped to get the club back onto a sound financial footing. I have never seen a Norwich manager with such confidence in youth – Max Aarons, Ben Godfrey, Jamal Lewis, Todd Cantwell and Andrew Omobamidele are just some of the academy products that blossomed under his guidance. He had a real connection with the fans and, in supposedly one of the hardest leagues of them all to get out of, delivered the Championship title twice.

    Sadly, he was never able to crack the Premier League. I had desperately hoped that he had learned from two years ago and this time would take us into the top flight with an attitude of ‘unfinished business’. Unfortunately, he shied away from the attractive, possession-based style of play that had brought us success and tried to make the team play in a way that they weren’t capable of. By the end, he didn’t seem to know what his best eleven was or how to arrange them on the pitch and he simply ran out of road. I have seen the world ‘underwhelming’ used a lot in the reaction to the appointment of Dean Smith (including from myself) but the more I think about it, the more I think he fits. He just needs to find the right combination to get the club feeling good about itself again. I am convinced that the squad have not shown anywhere near to what they can do so far and if he can get them going then I honestly think we could still stay up. Good luck to him, we will be right behind him.

  • 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.