The Beautiful Game

A boken world indeed. What have we as humans become when we no longer see the humanity within all of us. Sorry to hear this is happening - Children should be protected and loved, allowed a safe and secure childhood and this...is not that.

So many people knock football. At the highest level it’s been ruined by money and corruption but just a few rungs down the football ladder there’s a game that anybody can play. You don’t need to be gifted, or athletic. You don’t necessarily need to know the rules, and language is never a barrier. It’s even possible for blind people to play football. And let us not forget that you can play it against enemies on bloody muddy battlefields during world wars.

All you need is something to kick. It helps if that something is spherical but an old beans tin or a load of plastic carrier bags bundled together will do. You can play the game with anybody but it’s also the only ball game in the world that you can play on your own.

You don’t need money, but money helps. Just one of Cristiano Ronaldo’s weekly pay packets (after tax… yeah, yeah, yeah!) would pay for that patch of scruffy artificial turf near the Aida refugee camp in Palestine. It would probably also feed the kids’ families for a year.

But it would also be huge relief to those kids and all the nice people in the world if Ben would stop the slaughter.

We established phase lines around soccer fields in Iraq and that's where we got most attacked.  We learned that protection = vulnerabiliity.  Nothing to do with your piece.  Nice piece.

V/R

I know this, kitty, we all knew it, that's why we established the phase lines.  We gave them soccer balls, evens kicked with them, knowing it's not normal times.   We never went there to kill kids or make their lives harder.  But, Jesus, if you weren't there to make the immediate arguemnt, . . . then what?  Did you have a hot shower once a month?   Did you listen to civvies yell at you and call you governtment puppets because you were doing your job and doing  your job meant protecting their right to insult you?  Normal times is perpsective.  Define noramilty, kitten.  

I wish the news commentators and others would stop using this semi-affectionate nick-name 'Bibi'. What's wrong with Yahu... as in Yahoo, Swift's 'human-like monsters' in 'Gulliver's Travels'? What else is he?

This piece acted like a fuse for me, igniting thoughts of everything that's currently rotten to the core in our world. Yahoo, a listed war criminal, genocide exponent and acolyte of the orange turd, removing the only pleasure left to the traumatised victims of his crimes. Then there's football, so hijacked by avarice that nineteen year olds with diamond studs in their ears and a Lamborghini Ludicrous on the drive are paid a quarter of a million pounds a week to illicit unjustified penalties from referees by rolling over six times when tackled and gripping their heads in agony. They're all pushing the boundaries to see how much they can get away with before anyone actually tries to stop them, and it annoys the hell out of me.

There, I feel a bit better now, so I've just put a drop of left-over Christmas Baileys in my coffee and settled down to read the wonderful speech that Mark Carney made in Davos yesterday.

The need to normalise everyday life, however disturbing, by the distanced onlooker seeking comforting platitudes vs a need to survive through small poppets of joy in the moment by those weathering daily horror.

Provactive.

Good write and comments

Lena x