Ten Things That Made Life Better in 2014

And so the year winds down and I've been incredibly remiss about blogging.  So here's an utterly non-comprehensive list in no particular order of things that have made existence better this year. Take it as read that my family and friends are more important than any of this because ultimately other people are THE most important thing one way or the other. As the hippies told us, we should all try to get along man.  Even if, as Douglas Adams points out, they nailed up the first bloke in history who suggested it.  Anyway...

1.  Doctor Who

It comes first because it's always been there for me and there's so much of it, even if I go off it, there's so much of it I can always revel in the love I've had for it since I was six. This year we got lifelong fan Peter Capaldi taking over the role and basically pulling off the spikier Doctor in a way they failed to in the 80s.  And even better the stories were there to support him - while obviously some stories didn't work as well as others the baseline was high.  None of the stories for me didn't work and all had some sublime moments.  And in Listen, Mummy on the Orient Express, Flatline and the season finale there were stories to rank with the best of previous years.  Let's remind you of the very best things about this year's series (along with Jamie Matheson):

Michelle Gomez as Missy vs Capaldi.  Oh yes. MORE please!

(Special mention for Paul Magrs' sublime The Annual Years, a book which neatly balanced childhood nostalgia with a proper history and criticism of perhaps Doctor Who's most neglected corner).

2. Doctor Who Legacy

Yes, so it's still Doctor Who. But hey, after thirty plus years of substandard computer games we've finally got a decent Who game.  It's a relatively simple premise - you have a five by six board of gems of different colours and by forming lines or three or more gems you battle opponents from the tv series.  The more you play, the more Doctors and allies you accumulate (via winning characters on certain levels and accumulting 'time fragments' and 'time crystals') and the more potent you can make them.  There's a main game (currently on its fourth chapter) with a storyline and sundry offshoot games for a bit of fun. It's simple, addictive and often frustrating as all the best games are.

Seriously, for Who fans there are fewer more fun ways to waste your life.

3. Seasons Of War

One last Doctor Who related one...

More of this early in the New Year but over the last six months I've been involved with Declan May's charity anthology which aims to tell the story of the War Doctor between Night of the Doctor and Day of the Doctor. You might notice from the above that I'm in some fine, fine company.  You can find out more here and donate to obtain an ebook and details of how to get the print version here.

I'll preview my story for the book closer to the release date.  But as a teaser... it's called Always Look On The Bright Side of Life and features pantomime horses, giant purple gorillas and lethal custard pies. 

4. Terrors of the Theatre Diabolique

Something I really should have blogged about a while back and will devote proper time to in the New Year...

Early in the year Dan Barratt, Dalek operator extraordinaire, asked for submissions for a horror anthology he had in mind, one which paid tribute to the old Amicus portmanteau movies of the '70s. As originally conceived it was based around Shakespeare's Ages Of Man speech, structured around a theme that took us from cradle to grave (the latter more than once).   I bagged the 'second childhood' slot and started playing around with an idea of an infernal bargain.  Everything clicked when Dan made a few general requests to the authors and... well, I'll say more very soon.  But along with Always Face The Curtain I think it's the best thing I've ever written.

But why should you buy it?  Because within a simple but beautiful structure that's a beautiful homage to those old films whilst being something uniquely its own, there are six stories that play with the idea of the horror story in very different ways. There's traditional ghost stories, very modern takes and outright horror comedies which combine to form a hugely satisfying whole with a sublime pay-off.  Go donate here and grab your digital copy today and get a link to purchase one of several rather lovely hard copy versions.

5. Red Or Dead

Liverpool FC are one of the great loves of my life.  Literature is another.  David Peace combines the best of both worlds, turning Shankly's time at Liverpool into something almost biblical.  I loved it so much I wrote this  for the fine Two Unfortunates site.

6. Fantasy football

Not so much the standard UK version where I magically managed to kill teams with long term injuries but more the NFL version where you play weekly head to heads against other teams.  In one 14 team league where I'd been a cellar dweller for a good few years I turned things around and finished 12-1, pipping the 11-2 second place team to the regular season title by beating them on the last day.  Course, as things turn out I'd have been better off losing that as I'd have ended up winning the playoffs but by topping the league I ran into the only guy to beat me during the season and won the third place game by a whisker (stealing it by having Emmanuel Sanders of the Denver Broncos score 19 points while AJ Green scored none).  And in my work league I was running in second for most of the year before dumping Odell Beckham right before he hit form... and telling the guy who eventually got second to pick him up.  And I finished third there too for the second straight season.

I know it's totally pointless, but it's a great deal of fun.

7.  Freaky Trigger

I'm of around the same age as Tom Ewing, the site's founder.  His slightly insane project is essentially to review every UK Number One record (along with small offshoots such as their 100 Greatest songs of all time which finishes here with a sublime piece which makes a watertight case as to why this particular song is the greatest of all pop's myriad artefacts).  I've never met Tom but he's got an uncanny ability to burrow to the heart of what a record means (even if it's something as nebulous as a feeling) and communicate it. Hit the search facility and look for any record you love that made it to the top (currently he's just finished the No 1s of the twentieth century). And keep going, because it's addictive and even when he's dealing with bland or mediocre records he's always worth reading. This is what became of the Smash Hits generation.

8. Uptown Funk

Record of the year, no contest.  I love Ronson's production on Amy Winehouse's Back to Black and his own Version (heresy as it is, he does sublime, joyous things to Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before).  Here he even makes me love Bruno Mars, an artist who's output's simply bounced off me before.  The lyric's a standard boast but dammit, the music's distilled joy and irresistibly danceable. Happiness does prevail.

9.  Before The Dawn 

In the modern hyper-connected world there's little better than total surprise.  David Bowie managed it with  the release of Where Are We Now?, somehow conjuring magnificence to a grey January morning by breaking a near decade of silence with a melancholy wander through his own past. 

Arguably that was trumped in February with Kate Bush announcing that she'd be performing in concert for the first time in 35 years.  Take one moment to look at that gap.  Thirty five years. I'd barely started primary school last time she went before a paying audience. And so I blagged a morning off work and, colluding with a friend, managed to grab tickets for the weekend of my wedding anniversary (one of the later shows in the run). Only the six months to wait...

Friends saw earlier shows in the run, and kindly declined to spoil details. But the word was overwhelmingly positive.  Possibly I shouldn't have been surprised given Bush has an incredible attention to detail.  But without, even now, spoiling the experience... it wasn't quite like any gig I'd ever been to. It mixed relative obscurities, big hits and managed to thematically connect two suites that formed full sides of albums and present them theatrically, always teetering on the edge of pretension and silliness but never, quite tumbling over.  It's a trick only the bravest and boldest artists even attempt and even the small number with the nerve rarely pull it off completely.  But here there an incredibly tight band combined with ambitious theatrics to utterly nail it.  And an audience admittedly predisposed to love her showered their adoration down throughout the show, with Bush herself seeming shyly surprised at the affection for her. Sublime and ultimately it's one of the finest live performances I've seen.  And I've been to a lot of gigs in my time.

10.  The continued existence of Clive James

As I type this I've got one of my Christmas presents close at hand - Georg Lichtenberg's 'The Wast Books'.  It's something I added to my wish list after my dawdle through what's probably Clive James' masterwork, Cultural Amnesia. It's a book where James takes a quote as a starting point (ranging from political dissidents who've undergone unimaginable hardship to much ridiculed Hollywood lines) for a series of essays exploring what he sees as humanity's major themes (mostly the major themes that crop up in his lifetime, notably the virtues of liberal democracy).  You can criticise the essays for only skimming subjects in many cases but then the balance between erudition and populism is a fine one. And if the book had delved in such depth it'd probably be an unwieldy three of four times the size.  No, in this case James had applied a lifetime of curiosity to notes down the years and the result stole the breath at times, panoramic, wise and witty.  It finally banished the memories as the batrochoidal chap chuckling at Japanese game shows in the 80s.

It's only over the last decade that I've come to really appreciate James.  In many ways I was the worst age to appreciate him, being too young to read his TV criticism and precisely old enough to watch him chortle and subject audiences to the camp fun of Margarita Pracatan.  Knowing him from those TV shows was like thinking you knew literature by having read Fifty Shades of Grey and The Da Vinci Code.  The form is (barely) there but there's so much more delicious substance beyond that. Silliness is a minor, but vital part of his armoury.

In the early part of the century, having talked to friends or founds an article online - I forget precisely how - I acquired the three volumes of his collected TV criticism.  I followed up with volumes of his literary criticism (At the Pillars of Hercules and From The Land of Shadows) and ended by picking up the collected Always Unreliable, his memoirs of his life until 1980.  There was the endearing self-deprecation, the dazzling way with a sentence and always, always a total lack of contempt but a clear-eyed view of what was possible in various media and why things failed if they failed.  Popular intellectualism has rarely been so dazzling.  

Anyway, this year  I finished the dawdle through the works I own and managed to catch Howard Jacobsen's Brilliant Creatures, a documentary about James and three fellow Australians who'd shaken the cultural world (the others being Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries and Robert Hughes).  So that's why he's here this year.

As is the fact that with his illnesses he's likely not to be long for the world so should be appreciated while he can.  And in tribute I'm going to continue reading as widely as possible and constantly bettering myself is possible.  Because it's a better world that way.

And it continues with that Christmas gift.  Thanks Clive.

Anyway, happy new year!

Football Is Really Fantastic - The Blizzard Issue One (ed Jonathan Wilson)

Football writing in the UK has a bad name. It's always traditionally been looked down on by their counterparts in features sections and in the newsroom, perhaps partly due to the hurried nature of having to compile match reports and the interviewees not necessarily being the smartest or most fascinating people. Even in the Premier League era, when football's become fashionable and a wealth of intelligent blogs about the game ranging through nostalgia, tactics and football's finances have exploded online, it can't quite shake off the stigma. Even FourFourTwo's stuck with the need to make money by having its main features on the biggest stars of the day and needing to sell advertising space.

Which is where The Blizzard comes in. It's a simple idea this. There's a wealth of great football writers out there, so why not gather as many of them as possible in one place, untainted by the need to pander maximising hits, or to fans who simply want to read the latest club approved platitudes from players. I first became aware of it through Paul Tomkins' tweeting of his potential involvement in the project. Tomkins has achieved a certain level of fame amongst Liverpool fans with his in depth reviews of the first few seasons of the club under Rafa Benitez, which included in depth tactical analysis and application of stats to analyse different facets of the game. He has his fair share of critics, but I've always enjoyed his writing which tends to be thoroughly researched and backed up with as many facts as possible. It was soon followed by other writers I follow on Twitter mentioning their involvement, the higher end of football journalists such as Sid Lowe, the blogger Swiss Ramble and especially editor Jonathan Wilson. Wilson, again, would command respect if he'd never written anything but Inverting the Pyramid, a book which manages to breathe life into the potentially deathly dry subject of prevalent footballing tactics.

So when they offered a test issue as a PDF the decision to sample it was a no brainer. And it hooked me from the first article, Uli Hesse's study of the German club St Pauli. Whilst we all think there's something special about our own clubs (hell, we Liverpool fans will continually let everyone else know exactly what's so special about our club) this articulated precisely the reasons for the passion of the fans, why the story of the club was so compelling. Sold, subject to the first signs of encroaching technological Luddism of my preference for a print version.

Unfortunately the original publication of Issue One coincided with the twin embuggerances of a shortage of cash and the brief biannual sabbatical I take from football to keep me sane. It's largely down to my preference not to get sucked into the riot of speculation, planted stories and wishful thinking that tends to make up the fervid transfer speculation that fills summertime sports sections. I was much quicker when a limited reprint run was announced, snapping up a copy immediately.

Wilson's stated aim of high quality football writing was reflected in the perfect bound book with a pleasingly textured cover which dropped through my letterbox. It's a reassuringly hefty 196 pages long, a mere eight of which are dedicated to advertising and five of those are for the magazine itself plus related merchandise. It comes in eleven sections, each prefaced by an apt cartoon and a tantalising quote from an article in the section. Simply out of interest I initially chose not to work my way through the book but picked out the article which initally caught my eye, Rob Smyth's look at Manchester United's 2-3 defeat to Real Madrid in the Champions League Quarter Finals. It simply caught my eyes as it contained one of my favourite football moments, Fernando Redondo's backheel past Henning Berg which led to a simple tap-in for Raul. I recall the men in our office talking of nothing else the next day. And it's a terrific piece which puts the match back into context, reminding that United were the overwhelming favourites and Madrid millions of miles (and Euros) from the Galactico force they'd become over the next few years. It shows how what was initially perceived as a good result for United, a 0-0 at the Santiago Bernabeu in which they had good chances to win, was actually nothing of the sort. Instead it donated self confidence back to Madrid, making them believe that they could compete with Ferguson's 'we're gonna score one more than you' European champions. And it explains concisely how an insane tactical gamble by Del Bosque paid off thanks to Casillas, McManaman, Roberto Carlos, Raul's finishing and probably the performance of Redondo's career. Smyth finishes by explaining why it's such an important match in European history, and particularly in terms of United's style. And, as with Smyth's day job at the Guardian, he brings across just how thrilling that second leg match was. It's a stunning piece of writing which proves the value of a long term perspective over the hastily compiled match reports of the day and quietly explains just why the match is *even better* than you thought.

I sucked the marrow from the bones of the rest of the book over the next week. I returned to the conventional style of back to front, including a re-read of Smyth's article. Wonderfully the book largely avoids the default Anglocentric viewpoint of much British footballing journalism, covering Israel, Spain, Argentina, Sweden and India amongst others. If part of the remit is to be expansive in terms of coverage, it's admirably fulfilled. By the next World Cup they may even have done enough to render a certain BBC pundit's shrugging lack of knowledge of the likes of Algeria even more redundant than it already seemed to be. Certainly the likes of Wilson would be able to articulately explain what to look for in games without dumbing down in the way the inarticulate ex-pros who tend to comprise British pundits can't.

The real highlights of the book for me were the interviews. Anthony Clavane's David Peace's interview as part of the Leeds section is wonderfully unafraid to be literate, quite unlike anything in mainstream football writing. But it's the other two interviews which are real highlights of the book. One is with a figure familiar to Premier League fans, the other more obscure but equally as interesting. David Winner's interview with Bergkamp has the breathtakingly simple premise of letting a genius with the ball explain simply the how and why of his decisions on the pitch. What's striking is how even now Bergkamp displays a razor sharp mind and memory for detail. It's remarkable for how Bergkamp makes his most revered moments of skill sound so simple, things that almost anyone could do if they had the vision to do them. And then you remember the speed at which he did these things. Essentially it's an extended reminder that the most crucial attribute for a footballer is speed and clarity of thought and, peripherally, an indictment of British football and coaching. The other interview is from the Guardian's Spanish football expert Sid Lowe, who's in-depth knowledge of his subject renders the notion that the only clubs that matter in Spain are Barca and white half of Madrid an absolute farce. His subject is Juanma Lillo, the youngest ever coach in La Liga and ostensibly an itinerant coach. More pertinently, he's the big hidden influence on the Barcelona side currently making a good case for being the best side ever, inventing their 4-2-3-1 formation and being cited by Pep Guardiola as a big influence along with Cruyff. It's captivating stuff which manages to capture the complexities of one of football's more innovative and unusual minds, covering such matters on the sicknes of society and why it's bad when it comes to constructing a football team, why there's no such thing as attack and defence, and why in football the match should matter more than the result (inadvertently, or perhaps advertantly, providing a fine critique of Jose Mourinho's methods though he's never named). It fully justifies Lowe's build up of an innovative coach and thinker who loves a dialectic debate and owns over 10,000 volumes including complete runs of the world's foremost football magazines. As with any interview, the interviewer's role shouldn't be underestimated and Lowe's intelligent and informed enough to ask questions that provoke Lillo into clarifications of thought and further insights into his philosophy. It's not only educational, it's thought provoking and makes you wish that we had football coaches in this country that were even half as articulate. Instead we have the likes of Sam Allardyce regarded as an innovative thinker (which, for the UK, he actually seems to be to some degree). Lowe doesn't fail to note the irony of Lillo currently being unemployed partly thanks to the pupil becoming the master, Guardiola's side beating his Almeira 8-0. I ended hoping that Lillo would find employment again soon, in the hope his sides would be as fascinating as the man and his philosophy.

Elsewhere there's fine variety of article. There are a host of lesser known but fascinating stories, ranging from lesser known stories such as that of the first Israeli football team, through the jawdropping tale of Alexandre Villaplane, France's first World Cup captain who pretty much defines the term 'psychopathic bastard' and puts the tabloid howls about the misbehaviour of Premier League footballers in context, Jock Stein's short spell at Leeds, London's Romanian Sunday league teams through to the story of Vassilis Hatzipanagis, possibly the greatest footballer you've never heard of and certainly the finest never to be capped. There's editor Wilson himself, explaining how Victorio Spinetto injected a certain ruthlessness into the Argentine football mentality. There's a report on the almost unreported over here African Nations Championship and the story of the Danish triumph in Euro 92, amusing and amazing in equal measure in light of the preparations teams make for matches these days. And there are some fascinating think pieces from Simon Kuper and Kieron O'Connor on the possibility of the Premier League boom being nowhere near bursting and the financial legacy of the 2010 World Cup respectively.

This might all make it sound a high minded, serious endeavour, but the cover of a dog balancing a ball on its nose should tell you otherwise. I admit to writing up match reports from my football computer games as a youngster, but McIntosh takes it to a level of art with The Ballad of Bobby Manager, an account of his Football Manager game as West Ham. There's a comic brilliance in his portrayal of West Ham's owners and chief executive Karren Brady, the latter's portrayal as a Bond-esque villain in particular promises some wonderful future comedy. I can only applaud McIntosh for living the dream and getting paid to write about playing Football manager all day. If they ever want the tale of how I beat Chelsea in the Champions League Final with two goals in injury time of extra time, or the tale of Fredy Guarin's swerving 40 yard thunderbolt away at Birmingham earning a Liverpool team reduced to ten men for over 80 minutes a crucial win to edge the title race, or even my turning of Fabien Brandy into a 50 goal a season monster at Crewe, then I'm always available. We'll gloss over the joint Football Manager game where my mate Phil was unbeaten for 36 games before my Liverpool team whupped his lot 5-0 at Anfield to ruin his unbeaten season though.

The only slight disappointment is probably the final article, a series of pen portraits of Scottish players from before the Second World War. The flaw's not necessarily with the article itself, which is as educational about forgotten heroes as anything else in the collection (though by nature, not as in depth as some). It's something of a lightweight article to finish on though, like finishing on a comma rather than a full stop.

The Blizzard may well be catering to a niche market, one that takes its love of football beyond simply watching their team and demands more intelligent coverage. But that's something you can do with modern technology and economic models - catering from a niche is easier to do than it's ever been. I'll freely admit though, that I'm part of the niche it caters to and intend to subscribe come payday. It's intelligent, passionate and funny about a subject that shouldn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, but somehow matters above everything to so many. And it's well worth the investment of your time and money.