The Occasional Pen Portrait

Luke Foster: ''And I within, who came at the wrong time - either too soon, or after it was all too late.'

Mark Creighton: 'This strange hulking presence gnawing its meat was like nothing she had ever imagined, and she felt a profound admiration and pity for the lonely creature.'

Danny Bulman and Simon Clist: 'To antiquity we grant the indulgence of making the origins of cities more impressive by commingling the human with the divine...'

Sam Deering: 'Don't give a damn, what I wanted was to go in the Metro.'

Matt Green: ‘I gave them happiness, but I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet.’



James Constable: 'Awake, my soul, and with the sun, Thy daily stage of duty run; Shake off dull sloth ...'



Billy Turley: ‘Melodrama is perennial and the craving for it is perennial and must be satisfied.’

Darren Patterson's sacking: '...if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe...'

James Clarke: ‘It’s time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars.'




[Images on this page courtesy of Steve Daniels/Rage Online, reproduced here with kind permission]

Other writing

The intensity of spectating: 'There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream...'

Troubled memories: 'We can never go back, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us.'

Miracles in football: 'It is strange a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful histories, that such prodigious events never happen in our days.’

Television and non-league football: '...what kind of sick and twisted impulse would cause a professional sportswriter to deliver a sermon from the Book of Revelations off his hotel balcony on the dawn of Super Sunday?'

Hyping non-league football: '... a high-tempo montage of balls hitting the back of the net, fans gasping, and players celebrating...'

Conversations about football: 'I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves.'

The Manor Ground and Minchery Farm: '...exiled on the edge of the city, isolated and exposed to the elements, the stadium looming defiantly over the land around it.'

Reading match reports: 'For the first time in his experience of writing reports, he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say.'

'Moments' in matches: ‘My moments, her moments. The dog’s moments.’

Superstition and ritual: 'Themes considered include faith, foresight (and the lack thereof), betrayal, inevitability, intoxication, and madness.'

Seasons in the season: ‘It becomes increasingly easy in urban life to ignore their extreme humours, but in those days winter and summer dominated our every action, broke into our homes, conscripted our thoughts, ruled our games, and ordered our lives.’

Pre-season: '...Court Place Farm, a summer's evening, the hopes of a new season have been gently warmed by the sun that now starts to sink behind the trees sheltering the ground from the city around it.'

Image acknowledgements for this page (by post link):

'Miracles in football' image: 'The Resurrection of Lazarus' by Bonnat, courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons.

'Superstition and ritual' image: from 'Darwin and after Darwin' by John Romanes, courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons.

All others WAOU original material.