Now the rule is if you are anywhere near me watch what you say because I'm always observing and listening!
This guy came in 20 minutes after the start of the game. He was quick to tell me that somebody had given him the ticket and he had never been to a football match in his life. He knew nothing about the rules or what was happening. I tried to explain, not sure whether he was having me on or not but it soon became evident he wasn't.
He watched intently and announced "you know I didn't understand what people see in football but now I get it. I really do. Now I really get it."
I went back to watching the game only to be shocked when this person (and I'm not sure how I put this delicately) shouted very loudly: "Run you ----" I couldn't believe my ears. Five minutes later he disappeared. I assumed he had gone for a pie and beer but he was unlikely to know where to go to get one. He never returned and I have to say I was rather relieved.
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I hate those part magazine adverts on television. You know the ones that offer you magazines that build into a full library and actually cost you a fortune.
I used to collect them. I collected one set on rock music, another on the history of cinema, another on art and artists and another called The Game which was about sport. It came time to have a bit of a clean up and clear out and so I decided to sell 12 volumes of The Game which I had been told would be worth a lot of money at sometime in the future.
I had no offers for them on e-bay. Then I tried to give them away but nobody wanted them. I ended up taking them to the tip which always upsets me. I'm quite happy giving things away to a good home but not happy when I have to junk them.
The worst kind of part works are the ones where you construct a model of a ship or an aircraft or, in the latest example, an Eddie Stobart lorry with full working parts. For a start the parts only work if you put them together properly. I have never met anyone who has built one of these part works. Have you?
They always try to entice you by offering the first part for 99p or £1.99, ignoring the fact that subsequent weekly parts are considerably more.
In the case of the Stobart the first one is £1.99, the second part is £5.99 and all other parts are £9.99. It means that you will be spending over £40 a month on the magazine and the model. And (just get this) to build an Eddie Stobart lorry will cost you a mind numbing £1,386.60 if my maths is correct. I would want a real Eddie Stobart for that!
The cheap price of the first edition is obviously to get you hooked on collecting. After all who would buy just one edition? The first edition boasts a front grille, a DAF insignia and sidelights to be fitted to the front of the bonnet. The problem is at that point you don't have a front bonnet to fix them to. So after the first four or so parts you just have a load of bits that will in all probability just get lost in a drawer.
I was tempted for about a nanosecond by a similar part work which is offering the vinyl LPs of Bob Dylan. These of course all come with a magazine describing each LP. In this case the first LP costs £7.99. At least this is stand alone and not dependent on collecting the other parts as with the Eddie Stobart. Nevertheless to collect all 41 albums (30 single, 10 double and one triple) would cost a mouth watering £716.59p. Do I like Dylan enough to spend over £716 on his music. Definitely not.
Of course for just over £2000 you could be as happy as a pig in muck whilst building your Eddie Stobart model and listening to Dylan! I can think of a few thousand things I would rather spend my time doing.
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Spent a lovely morning yesterday with Philip Curson. Philip, who is now in his 80s, was a dispatch rider in Berlin in the late 1950s. His father was one of 97 soldiers killed in the massacre at Le Paradis in Northern France in May 1940. It's quite a story which I will include in a future blog.