Another one bites the dust...

In my teenage years and early twenties, I had a habit of completely falling for certain films.

To the point where while not become obsessed in a 'dressing-up-like-the-main-characters' or anything, the combination of a good soundtrack and a storyline that sufficiently engaged me, would make me watch certain movies about a million times over.

Highlander is a good example. Lost Boys another. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Flatliners, to a lesser extent, just as an example.

Thus the death today of Corey Haim was rather sad. Sad because I remember him as the fresh faced kid singing along in the bath covered in soap suds unaware he 'god-damn bloodsucking vampire' of brother was a dog nip away from sinking his teeth in.

Sad because he was only 38. Sad because he is another of 'my generation' who has popped his designer clogs. Which makes me feel a bit old. And with Michael Hutchence - who sings on half the soundtrack - already dead, Lost Boys is rapidly beginning to become a rather depressing spectacle.

So farewell Corey. May you not chomp down on so many hard drugs in the after life yet still get those vampires with your Holy water water-pistol and string of garlic around your neck.

He shoots...he blummin' well scores....

Saturday mornings are defined by only one thing. Namely, which chilly field I find myself stood before to watch my youngest play for his under-8 football team.

Now, if this is training - as is more often the case - I'll admit after about 30 mins I lose the will to live during the winter months for the chill factor is almost always in double figure minuses. That, I fear, is a draw back of living on the coast. To say the wind whips over the sea and plunges a few degrees is something of an understatement.

My early Saturday afternoon is almost always spent in a bath trying to get some feeling back in my feet. Ideally, I'd like to be fully submerged in that tank thing Luke Skywalker finds himself in after being attacked by that monster in the ice cave on Hoth at the start of Empire Strikes Back - that looks lovely and cosy.

Anyway, this week was a match. And, as I think I've droned on about on these pages before, a match is ruddy exciting.

Made more so this weekend as my youngest had received a text message from the coach asking him if he fancied playing out of goal for once. Now, without allowing my over riding pride drown out the facts here, he is a jolly good goalie. He flies this way and that with no fear for his own safety. Or, indeed, the fact he's the only player on the team with glasses. So it is left to me to panic he'll get a boot in the lenses one of these days.

However, he does get a bit bored in goal. And he loves, as any young boy does, the thrill of the ball at your feet trying to score or set up goals. So he leapt at the chance.

And it left me anxious for the end of last week. How would he get on. Would his goalie replacement highlight any shortcomings my boy had? I even ended up having one of the other dads ring me up expressing surprise my little one wasn't going to be in goal but saying he appeared as good in training the other night out of goal as he did in it ('he's got a lovely touch, he's a real natural' - not words frequently heard directed in my family's direction when it comes to sporting prowess).

Anyway, I was concerned by the time I lined up at 9.30am yesterday on the side of an artificial pitch for the game. Concerned too for my health as I was hideously under dressed for such an ice cold day.

Ten mins in he'd hardly got a touch. But he looked the part. He marked, he ran into space...but his team were heading into the half time break trailing by a goal to nil. Then he got the ball on the edge of the area. He controlled it. He looked up. He tried a shot...and, just like in the films, slow motion kicked in. It flew...it landed, it bounced...it ended up in the back of the net...

It was everything I could do not to pull my shirt and jumper up, expose to the world the blancmange masquerading as my chest and run around the pitch in celebration. My boy hardly even broke out a smile.

Yeah, the other kid in goal was pretty good, but my little one did me super proud. And personally I hope he's not in goal any more.

Making me cross just thinking about this....

Heaven knows I moan on about various things which don't really deserve a damn good bitching via the medium of my fingers and a keyboard.

But I believe the following rant is completely and utterly justified.

I say simply fake American accents. And in particular two very guilty parties.

1. Carol Decker. Yes. The flame-haired lead singer of T'Pau. A woman who I had a ridiculous crush on when I was a teenager. The first group I ever saw live. A group I would go and see live all the way until she alone was flying the flag for the group in front of about 70 disinterested fans in a tiny little room in Maidstone. A woman who is guilty, without question, of adopting a US twang to her voice. I point to 'T'Pau Live' as proof (just found it on Spotify) and it is pronounced and ridiculous. She's from sodding Shrewsbury for Heaven's sake. Not, repeat not, San Francisco.
A shame.

2. Joss 'fucking' Stone. God I despise this woman. Which is odd. For she is attractive and I quite liked her first album. But she is perhaps the perfect example of why you can be the most beautiful woman on earth and I would be completely unmoved (I appreciate I am breaking no hearts here, but just saying). For her personality is, from what I have seen on TV and the media (and I appreciate that may not be entirely truthful, but life's not fair is it?) bloody awful. Attention seeking. Tick. Over the bleedin' top. Tick. Ego the size of a small planet. Triple tick. Fake fucking American accent...don't get me started.

I am sure everyone will agree this post is justified.

Banks are complete b*stards...but you knew that anyway didn't you?

I like post. I still get a thrill out of seeing what the postman has delivered. Even though in this day and age it's almost always just junk stuff with a splattering of bills.

Can't remember the last time I actually got a letter where someone used handwriting (remember that?) to write to me. Quite miss it. I used to be a big letter writer back in my youth.

However. One letter I despise. What makes it worse is that while 80 per cent certain what it is when I see it, the 'not sure' 20 per cent means I have to open the bloody thing to be sure.

It looks, to the untrained eye, like any normal letter. Any normal letter from my bank. My big bastard bank.

But there is a subtle difference. The type face is different to the normal bank statements I never open. It is slightly nicer, I always think.

Junk mail, you might think? Nah. The thing is wafer thin. It is a one sheet missive. And no-one ever sold anyone anything with so little persuasion.

No. This letter is the stomach sinking one. The one that tells me that I am over my overdraft limit. And my overdraft limit is pretty blummin' chunky. So to go over it is not to be sniffed at.

It informs me that all the time I've used my card since they could be arsed to write me a letter will cost me £22. Well, needless to say I've used it billions of bloody times over the last 24 hours. See...bastards.

Annoyingly, only this evening when travelling home I'd thought to myself 'oh, got through the whole month and still in credit'...

I'd thought about how, really, it was a must-do. February is, after all, a short month. I haven't spent much recently (although clearly I have without realising it).

I didn't even take the letter out of the envelope. Just peered in then threw it down and tried to pretend I hadn't read it.

Then I went and wrote a stroppy email chasing up some cash I'm owed elsewhere.

Great big hairy bollocks.

Stubble, bubble, toil and trouble

It is, in my humble little opinion, every man's God given right to faff about with facial hair.

I don't mean put it in curlers, or tie small ornaments to it, I just mean every male should go through the process of letting the stubble blossom.

Its a rite of passage. You need to look like some sort of sweaty Frenchman with a ridiculous misjudged tache, if only so you never, ever, do it again (although my father had a moustache which prompted his work colleagues to describe him as a German homosexual - they had a point as it happened...).

When I was a teenager I started. I grew a little beard. Bizarrely, I can remember a colleague at work saying the beard actually made me look evil. How I craved that sort of ego massage when every part of you aches at not looking stupid.

Of course, I did look pretty stupid, most of the time. I know that now. So what this weird woman was probably saying was that I had moved from appearing simply untrendy to looking like some sort of tragic freak. Darn it.

Anyway. Having been told I look like some sort of Devil-like character and the elongated stubble irritating the heck out of my stupid skin, it went.

Since then I've attempted controlled stubble grow in a slightly George Michael-esque way....(looked beyond twatty)...gone for Indiana Jones bit of stubble (my fat little chins don't carry the rugged appeal of dear old Harrison...and, of course, the obligatory goatee (pretentious and twatty, but I don't need to tell you that).

The fact I have persevered is, in itself, something of an achievement.

Because as in so many different ways, God decided when he dished out facial hair to me, it was going to be unmanageable.

Where do I begin with its faults? It doesn't grow evenly. It doesn't grow at all in key bits - there's a link missing either side of my mouth where the tache bit should morph into the beard...it's just not there. And, perhaps the biggie, the reason I was robbed properly trying it out, it is a multi-coloured affair. Black, red, brown, white...green probably too.

Well, at least it was. Now it is becoming a single colour. Typically that is grey. Just to make me feel really good.

So when at the weekend I cannot be arsed and let it grow, it makes me look about 60. Not cool. Not trendy. Not, crucially, rugged. Just old.

Of course, I put this into the same category of many things. Like the fact I have stupid 'can't do anything with it whatever I wanted to do' hair. It just sprouts out of my scalp and I wage a constant battle to simply stop it looking ridiculous. My wife often thinks I'm a vain sod faffing with it. She's never understood it is not vanity - purely a desperate desire not to be a laughing stock.

I have a dumbass little flat nose, funny nobbly bits behind my ears, too many moles, and don't get me started on the things I could something about (apply the word fat to the following: chin, breasts, stomach, back, face, hands.)

But I am digressing. Ranting even.

Today I can't grow beards or a tache. Well, I can, but I look like Father Christmas. Worse, old man Steptoe.

And, quite frankly, I'd rather not.

Shall we dance?

I have started dancing. Twirling across a metaphorical dance floor, a new partner clutched close to my chest whispering sweet nothings into my ear. Yes...I am looking to buy a new car.

So suddenly I am the friend if not potential future lover of salesmen and women eager to hit sales targets across the county (not literally, of course, well, not unless they really, really need commission and are prepared to sell their soul and, indeed, body to achieve it).

I stroll in and they lick their lips. An idiot with a recession-proof wallet they gasp. They're wrong of course. But why should I spoil their fun. Their hunting process.

So we start the dance. I ask gormless questions I know the answers to. I ask prices I know the cost of. I lead us in these first few steps by testing their honesty and trustworthiness.

And before I know it we're off. Waltzing across the sales floor. They're pressing buttons they know I respond to. I'm hinting at ready cash. I mention financing. They mention how my crap old car I desperately need to off-load as part-exchange may make some money.

Tomorrow our relationship hots up. I test drive. And they know, as well as I do, that at that point I'll be past the point of no return. I'll be so desperate for a new big car all rational thought will be dispensed with.

They will have slipped their metaphorical grubby mitts on to my arse and being gawping down my cleavage (were I a woman...although I cannot deny owning a bit of a cleavage...but you know what I mean).

Then, of course, after the deal has been signed and sealed, after we've done the deed, they'll be off. They'll be no nice note left on the pillow. Just a direct debit form for what will seem like ever, extracting huge sums of cash out of my bank balance.

And I'll feel dirty and used.

What fun this dance will be.

Why I cannot resist a stadium tour....

Bugger. One of the things I planned to do during my week off this week was whisk my family off to London for a tour of Arsenal's Emirates Stadium.

My parents had got me and two of the kids tickets last summer and their expiry date is fast approaching.

Typically, life got in the way of my plans and having only just got my brain in gear sufficiently to try and book it up for this week, there are no places left.

Obvious really. Top football club stadium tours sold out during half term holiday shocker. What an idiot I am.

So that's the big day out scuppered.

Of course, I'm fully aware there is something fundamentally sad about touring a sporting venue. But I don't care. I'm in awe of these places. These theatres of sporting prowess. Because where you look is exactly where historic things took place.

I took my youngest on a tour of the old Wembley Stadium many years ago, when he was only little. We walked up the steps, he picked up a replica cup and held it the speaker-created cheering crowd and 70,000 empty seats. We walked up the tunnel. We poked our noses in the dressing rooms. It was fantastic. Only problem was you weren't allowed even within spitting distance of the hallowed turf. Which I thought was a bit annoying.

But you could close your eyes and picture Live Aid...or Alan Sunderland scoring that late winner in the 1979 cup final...or me struggling to see Prince in 1993.

Once, when I worked in London, I had to go to a press conference at the old Wembley. It was to mark the start of the auctioning off bits of the ground ahead of its demolition (I would subsequently buy some turf, leave in a pizza-style box in the cupboard and be somewhat surprised some weeks later when my stud-marked piece of turf had all died off...I would also make a failed attempt at bidding for the photograph of Prince which hung somewhere in the building).

It was a star-studded delight. Most of the surviving 1966 World Cup squad was there. Henry Cooper turned up, Ken Bates was there, a host of other football figures were about. The fellow who said 'They Think It's All Over...' but whose surname I can't be bothered to find out how to spell, that sort of person. I loved it.

Geoff Hurst was there. I approached him for a comment for a story we were running. He was a right twat. He punched my arm in a playful yet-bit-too-hard blokey way (I HATE it when people do that) and refused to comment. Hat-trick hero you may be Geoff, but you are also a bloody idiot.

Anyway, around this blatant and deafening name dropping extravaganza, we were showed pitchside to where Hurst and the German 1966 goalkeeper posed by the goal line where the disputed goal was scored. I loved being witness to this little bit of history.

More, though, as I stood behind the goal, I stuck my foot out over the rope, ignored all the 'don't think about it advice' and planted my foot on the turf. Ha. Up yours The Man. Up yours old Wembley.