Like the fireworks that light up the evenings round here, I've fizzled, briefly sparkled and then gone out to fall in someone's back garden, spent. It seems an age since I last saw a game. A lot has happened since I last wrote these notes, yet, nothing really has. Well, nothing you'd think was earth-shattering, anyway.
The lack of convenient Saturday home league games and my own inability to organise a trip to Sarfend, despite it being my nearest away trip, has meant that I've watched events from afar. It reminds me of seasons past when we've been in the Prem; unable to afford a season ticket or to get a match day ticket due to increased demand, watching from the sidelines like the metaphoric fat kid who was always the unused sub in the school team.
I've filled the hiatus with other stuff, mostly work and 'catching up' with friends. My employer, in a pique of earnestness normally associated with benevolent Victorian philanthropism, offered staff the opportunity to pay for Christmas through overtime. Everyone jumped at it. So my weekends have been grey, punctuated with work, the familiar taste of the office seeping though my skin so that, like my work clothes, my life smelt and tasted of it. Still, my end of month salary will have a higher starting number come pay day. The teeming disquiet that we've probably saved them employing extra, needed, staff is easily dismissed when you're expecting an extra couple of grand.
Still, I got over our bad dip in form by the simple method of not seeing it. I missed the Rotherham home game (work) and yesterday (enjoyment) and in between we sort of picked up the necessary at Southend and Rochdale. We're still top with Wycombe, and entering a run of more difficult league matches with a spring in the step and a hope that we'll have this league sewn up by March. The reality will probably be different, of course. It's never that straightforward at Town.
I've missed Tel. We barely meet now. He's busier than our local MP. He passed this driving test thingy, which meant he qualified to drive a white van, and then started work as a self-employed van driver for a former customer, who does the officially named 'Transport and Logistics' and basically delivers gardenware and home furnishings to private homes, businesses and anyone who needs a new shed in November.
I last saw him for dinner two weeks ago. We went for a curry, him eschewing too much drink now that he's driving for a living and instead sipping half pints of orangeade, the holier look raging battle against the distaste. "Need ter keep me licence now ah've got it" is his new mantra. It's his (sort of) apology for being less fun.
We ate the lamb naans and the tandoori chops and the funny red chicken stuff unequally, him staid and sober, me merry and tipsy on the house white and the lagers he encouraged me, by proxy, to drink. It was like having a meal with a recovered and disapproving alcoholic. If he couldn't have one, he'd have one through me. His chat, no longer loosed by drink, centred dully on the new job and deliveries to faceless, barely-remembered clients, with none of the funny asides or interjections of indignancy that you'd normally expect from my former newsagent. It became one-sided and thus my attention wandered, and this irritated him and he re-told the same thing again, and we ended the evening not sharing drunken philosophy over late-night brandies in the local but formally taking our leave. He drove us home in the van. It smelled of commerce and the laquer they put on new wood.
So he's kind of missing from my life at the moment. And that's presented me with a dilemma; should I carry on these reports? I know you all love Tel. I know you love his witticisms, his asides, his failures and his worrying reliance on beer and Spain and dreams of being a Costa del Shop-owner. But it's all died, quickly, in a miasma of duty and sobriety. Even the van's just a DAF.
I went round there last week. It was Mrs Tel's birthday. They had a quiet chinese takeaway at home for a select few neighbours and me. They'd invited Paula and Blake but they weren't available. I'd have even welcomed old snake eyes, such was the formality of it all. Mrs Tel came out with me for a ciggie on their patio (new bench and wooden tables and chairs, I noticed, must be perks of the job) and, as she exhaled the smoke distractedly, she said she was worried about her husband. "'E's bin diff'rent since 'e started this driving lark" she said, resignedly, as though this wasn't an unknown thought. "Every day all I 'ear is "Gotta go 'ere, then ah'm dropping this 'ere, be back at six love" an' 'e's off and gone". She sighed and stubbed the fag out on the patio floor and lobbed it in their garden waste bin. We returned to the 'party' in time to see Tel starting the one about how working for someone was more challenging than owning his own shop.
He's happy with his lot. The driving takes him to new and exotic places, like Huntingdon and Wisbech and Dunmow. He has to attend a Sunday meeting for all the drivers when his rota is provided for that week; sometimes early shifts, sometimes late ones, sometimes East Anglia, sometimes Greater London. The company have given him a pre-paid credit card for diesel, and a red polo shirt with their name on it in yellow print, like a Man United home shirt. He has a regular 'driver's mate', some pre-Uni kid called Callum, earning his keep and his future tuition fees by sharing the cab with Tel and helping him transfer stock from the van to the customer. "'E's orlright, bit of a toff but 'e works lark a demon. 'E's goin' ter Reading Uni in September so ah won' 'ave him too long". No funny little stories about their business relationship. It's all highly proper.
So I've filled the void by seeing old friends and working and drinking too much and not going to games. I missed the cup yesterday, a mixture of antipathy (a tenner to sit somewhere new with ten-odd thousand others when my regular drinking buddies weren't coming didn't fill me joy. So we went and had a drink away from the Town and had a bloody good laugh and it was a good day) and apathy putting paid to my first experience of us playing in the first round of a competition I usually can't be arsed with after Christmas. I knew we'd play the second string. Just knew it. Still, Lincoln's quite nice for Xmas shopping and that.
I'll be back. I dunno when or where. Hopefully Tel's new-found work ethic won't last and we'll be mates again. It's like hoping Emyr Huws recovers sufficiently to play the form he was in before the niggles started. Or hoping Freddie Sears makes it back before Christmas. It's the hope that kills you. I've said it before. I hope I don't say it again. |  |
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