nunoncastors

Sometimes I worry that I’m not particularly pleasant. I wonder if I am, in any sense, a good person. I can’t say why this should matter to me, it seems a tedious thing to muse over, but I almost always surmise that I am not. Nothing is quite so easy to indulge in as self-deprecation and personal dissatisfaction after all. However, it turns out that this long drawn conclusion is not the axiom I previously thought.

I am actually a reasonably decent chap.

Sounds awfully pompous that doesn’t it? I’ll elaborate.

Sunday, as you may or may not know, was a momentous day. The English football team triumphed over mighty, mighty Ecuador in a display of footballing prowess that would have done any Sunday league side proud. Every football fan worth their salt was either in a pub or ‘round a mate’s house with a few brews, shouting encouragement at a side that mysteriously lacks both flair and style in all but the briefest of glimmers. It was a good day, a stirring day. It was a day spoilt by the fact that football-banning orders seem to work.

That doesn’t sound like a bad thing does it, not when you consider their purpose and scope. But the knife cuts both ways. You see, while morons of every class and kind are unable to cause trouble in picturesque towns and cities the length and longth of Europe, many are able to visit local pubs and act like twunts.

More specifically, they’re able to visit one of my old locals and sing songs with less than pleasant overtones. A prime example would be their stirring rendition of “Ten German Bombers” and the similarly delightful “No Surrender to the IRA”. Even if you ignore the provocative nature of these songs you still have to deal with the facts as they stand. Firstly, we were playing Ecuador and not Germany. Secondly, the IRA no longer exists in any meaningful sense. And thirdly, neither song had anything to do with the match, the world cup or anything other than half-witted xenophobia.

It isn’t big, it isn’t clever and anyone saying otherwise clearly has all the sense of my shoe.

But that’s beside the point. The point is this. It struck me that I went to school with some of the people involved in this apish grunting. I grew up with them in the same village and under similar circumstances. We played in the same football team as children and we went to the same Scout Group. Yet there they were referring to Ashley Cole as “charcoal” on account of his skin colour while I sat ashamed to be in the same building as them. I may not be perfect, I may not even be all that nice to be around sometimes, but I could be a lot worse and comparatively speaking, I’m a paragon of virtue and chivalry.

I wonder when we all changed so much.