Didier Drogba

He falls on the floor at the mere fluttering of a butterfly in his vicinity; I'm not too keen on his hair and he plays for the team that grates on me more than any other. Chelsea apply a cheese-grater to anything but cheese and cheese-graters need to be kept to cheese or they become very irritating. Crystal Palace should be the team that incurs my wrath the most, but their inconsistency and regular comical defeats amuse me rather than frustrate me, but the dour blue-shirted trophy-laden anti-f00tballers consume me with a rage unlike any other football team. And Mr Drogba with his histrionics and non-conformist striking ways is almost as bad as that Frank chap. I recognise that their ability is part of what angers me. If they were rubbish, I'm sure I wouldn't mind them so much.

Yet (this small three-lettered word represents a drastic mood lurch), Didier is a man to be admired in some respects. Five years ago Ivory Coast qualified for their first ever World Cup and their talismanic striker, DD who had been instrumental in their success, used the euphoric moment to bring a political shift that helped (how much help is impossible to measure) bring about peace in his homeland. As the cameras came into the changing room after the game Drogba sank to his knees and begged the warring factions in the Civil War that had been raging in the Ivory Coast for five years to lay down their arms. Within a week peace had been found and the leaders of the warring factions stood side by side at an African Nations Cup two years later in 2007, a moment when Drogba felt that Ivory Coast had been reborn.

Drogba is maligned regularly by the press and supporters - my opening rant is an example of that - and is surprising that this incredible and powerful act has not been focussed on more to bring a balance to his oddly marred reputation. He will continue to frustrate me because he doesn't need a strike partner, because he scores goals that make me unhappy, because he doesn't always seem to play fair, but more important than that is that he is a man who is passionate about peace and has made his voice heard to bring it about. That's more important than football.

Despair

I found a cool blog today: www.stuffnoonetoldme.blogspot.com and one of its cartoons (the one pictured) caused me to utter an unuttered silent smirk, but also flashed a pang of fear across me that sitting young people down in a classroom is a disastrous concept. Perhaps tomorrow I will instruct my students to run around the field screaming until they feel that their scream can be interpreted into something meaningful. Whilst despair could be a potential route this thought-path could take me down, it won't as whilst I think education makes many mistakes, I hope and think and believe that it has a power for good as well. Thank you Alex Norlega for sticking a probing finger into my mind.

Data

I was approached at work today to be part of something to do with a data-handling initiative. My phrasing is deliberately vague to match my understanding of what is required of me, but all will become clear I hope: I was sucked in by the flattering claim that youth and charisma were required for this task and I to some degree I met both criteria. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with data to be honest - at times I obsess over it to the point where it floods my dreams. One of my favourite night-time activities is to start with the number one and keep doubling it to the point where the number is too long for me to hold in my head. I also quite like inventing maths puzzles out of motorway signs. Yet, despite my soft spot for the numerical chaps, at times they infuriate and frustrate me to the point where I want to claw out my own brain.

You'll be glad that this blog entry is going to feature the more positive version of the numerically schizophrenic me and discuss the curious data behind this very blog. For the last 44 days I have had Google Analytics telling me all sorts of interesting stuff about my readership. 356 people have paid a visit to this blog since August 14th, the most visited day being a sultry Wednesday in August (24th) on a day when I chose disfigurement as my discussion topic of choice. However, it is not this subject that has prompted the most mouse clicks, but the subject deity followed closely by dugong - a serious discussion of my faith and a whimsical poem about a visit to a dugong in Australia.

The United Kingdom is unsurprisingly where most of my readership are based, but 48 different countries have taken a peek. My top ten reads: UK, USA, India, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, Poland, France, New Zealand and Canada, but it is Malaysia who linger longest, spending an average six and a half minutes perusing my ramblings. 182 regional locations are listed also with Hove topping the list and Budapest at a lowly 13.

My most favourite bit of information Google Analytics yields though is what people type into Google to find my site. 52 people have found me through a search engine. Many are attempting to find things beginning with the letter 'D' which is an odd search by someone who clearly has too much time on their hand: 17 of the 52 searches come under this category. My favourite is "ways to escape reality starting with the letter d" which is surely someone trying to look up drugs without typing in the word "drugs". They must surely have been disappointed when they arrived. The next highest search is for my own name which is very satisfying. Oh yes, in 44 days nine people have typed my name into Google, although I'm not sure they were all searching for me. There is another Dave Atherall who lives up north somewhere who rung me up once. He also has twins, but his are girls. We chatted at length about breast-feeding and other matters on the phone some time last year. Other searchings that have found my blog that please me are "rspca put a card through my door after a meddling neighbour", "dansak healthy?" and "dungarees that dangle down at the front". Surely none of these searches found what they were looking for. My one other favourite is "disadvantaged character in of mice and men" because this relates to a new controlled assessment task in the English GCSE course. I hope the students who read my ramblings about Lennie and determinism which flowed into a consideration of Phil Mitchell's inevitable tragic storyline found it helpful.

I will leave you with one last piece of data if you have stuck with me to the bitter end: people like to read me most on a Wednesday.

David Miliband

I am an older brother David who has chewed on the pill defeat.

It tasted pretty foul, I wish it was something I was never forced to eat.

I had six and bit more earth years to prepare for the battle

When Jethro was born - he posed little threat holding a rattle,

But as he grew older, the competition would start.

The battle lines were drawn over the wondrous Mario Kart.

Victories were easy over the sausage-fingered fool;

P'raps I was complacent, but life tempted me out as I finished school.

My fingers became less nimble as I found mosh pits in the city centre.

Mario and Yoshi just couldn't give me enough adventure,

But young Jethro stayed at home honing his skills

Preparing to slip me those poisonous pills

And as I rose blearily from my bed one morning

I should have been wise, should have spotted the warning,

But my pride was about to take a colossal blow

As I nonchalantly switched on the Nintendo.

Jeth's technique was sharper and more exact

While my partying in the centre had left little intact -

Victory was his and I still hang me head

And wonder if I should have stayed at home instead.

And I wonder whether David Miliband feels the same?

Does he look at himself and accept some of the blame?

Did he party too long in the political centre?

Did he neglect his roots when he stopped being a backbencher?

Younger brother Ed was left at home carefully preparing his voice

And in 2010 presented himself as a marginally better choice;

When the votes were counted he got 50.65%

And David's ego took a battering ram dent,

And as the dust settles and DM clears his head

Will he, like me, wish he stayed at home instead?

Drusillas and the Escaped Llama

Two hours ago the phone rang. Having failed to grasp the receiver and dropped it behind the television cabinet in a moment of tired oafishness, I then had to scramble amongst the furry dust to find the voice of Phillip Miles. "A llama's escaped from Drusillas Zoo," he said excitedly, "I thought you'd like to know." This titbit of interesting and obscure information was the entirety of his conversation with a brief lowdown on how the police were trailing Mr Llama included; perhaps the unusually spelt hairy one was attempting to find his or her home in the Andes. Whatever the reasons for the llama's flee, I enjoy the fact that when Phill heard this piece of news, his first thought was to contact me.

I have since trawled the internet for further details, but it seems that the incident is shrouded in secrecy with not a whiff of it on the Drusillas website or anywhere else Google has sent me.

The llamas escape, whilst perhaps just a figment of a tired nurse's imagination, has taken me back to a time a little over a year ago when my fondness for llamas came to a culmination when I took a llama for a walk. My sister had given me the birthday present of a walk with a llama and so I turned up at the Ashdown Forest Llama Park to take Toby for a stroll. There was a llama who shared my name, Dave, but the llama park worker said that our personalities were ill-suited, which seemed to me to be something of a presumption considering she had only met me moments before. What can it have been about Dave the Llama that meant that we were likely to argue? If I had taken him for a jaunt, would I have ended up with a face-full of llama phlegm? Or, was the llama park attendant misjudging both of us and would we have, in reality, got along splendidly and found that we had much in common? I will never know, but I will not complain as Toby was a perfectly adequate companion apart from an early roll around which slightly unnerved me.

Perhaps the escapee, if he is still on the loose, is looking for a llama-friendly home, a like-minded person who knows the joys of wandering through misty glens. If so, perhaps he will alight at my door in the early hours of the morn and invite me for a stroll across the South Downs. I shall sleep lightly tonight in the hope of hearing clattering hooves striding through the streets of Moulsecoomb.

Duffy, Carol Ann and Dad

I never studied poetry at school to my recollection - I'm sure I must have done, but it was so lacking in memorableness that it has completely disintegrated from my memory. Being an adult who enjoys poetry, you would assume that the child me would have had some appreciation of the form, but introductions must have always been far duller than the Liverpool transfer news which occupied my infant brain.

At A level, my English course included zero poetry, a sizeable lack in a subject which surely demands that attention be paid to it. Furthermore at university, I was given the freedom to choose the subjects of my choice and other than a tedious reading of William Wordsworth's The Prelude and a dabble into Goblin Market, my experience of poetry was again rare and meaningless to me as focused almost entirely on novels.

And so I became an English teacher without ever having engaged with a single poem. I stood before teenagers doing more learning than effective teaching, but during my three and a bit years of trying to get people to listen to me, I have fallen in love with the beauty of poetry, the wondrous delivery of meaning in short sharp intoxicating phrases. Current poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy is someone who I have come across because she appears on the syllabus and whilst at times I grapple uncomfortably with her refusal to hide from grimness, she without doubt often writes beautiful and effective stuff. One poem in particular, 'Before You Were Mine', inspired me to pen my own poem. She looked at a photo of her mother before she herself was born and weaved her mother's life onwards from that image. I did the same with a picture of my dad (he's the one that looks a bit like a girl in the picture that heads this blog entry) and this is what came out:

Prickly World

1969 so the back of the picture says,

Vietnam, Woodstock, Harold Wilson and hippies

and I'm not a thought yet, not a blob, not a speck

in your smiling squinting bespectacled eyes.

Long hair was your chosen statement of intent.

A purposefully fought-for freedom fuelled your dreams.

Snug-fitting knitwear was your uniform of choice,

Trying to find yourself in a dark foggy maze.

You were a boy with boy's joys,

adventure scrambling within.

But honey and a sting are a bee-keeper's world.

Alongside the nectary, innocent smile was a prickly world

with prickly truths and a prickle eleven years away called me.

A decade ensured lost to madness, narcotics, oblivion and pain

Until foetus-me knocked on your door and asked for a room.

Nothing you owed me, nothing at all,

Yet you said, 'Come on it, I've room for you in this battered renewed heart.'

I found the biological truth when I was the age of your smile.

I cried because I wanted our blood to be the same,

But what is blood? A red mess on the floor.

What is love? It's what you did when you opened that door.

Diana Ross and the Supremes

In 1963 Martin Luther King climbed onto a stage to utter words that would become a clarion call for equality for African-Americans. The winds of change were swirling, aggressively demanding justice for a people that were still living under the dark shadow of the abolished but not forgotten slavery. It was an exciting, although not a comfortable time to be an African-American. Women like Dorothy Height (previously discussed in this blog) stood not only against racism, but against sexism too, but there were also less obvious pioneers who planted a stake in the ground that would would be shaken but never moved again.

One year on from King's speech and three African-American women, Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard, were finding a success in the mainstream market that no one of their sex and colour had known before. 'Where Did Our Love Go?' was the first of five consecutive number ones. The second, 'Baby Love', made the number one slot in the UK as well and whilst this was their only number one outside America, their catchy motown sound achieved them a total of twelve number ones in the States, the last coming in 1969 shortly before Diana Ross' departure from the group.

I'm not sure Diana Ross and the Supremes were about making a statement about race, but that is surely what makes them such an effective statement. Ross said, "You can't just sit there and wait for people to give you that golden dream. You've got to go out there and make it happen for yourself," and that's what she did. She must have been aware of the potential barriers, but it seems that the Supremes clattered through them nonetheless. Other African-American all-female groups had eschewed femininity and tried to replicate the limited success that some African-American males had had, but the Supremes were proud girly girls who took to the stage in heavy make-up and elegant gowns. King was clearly a hero, but Diana and her mates are important too, if only for being a cultural phenomenon that crossed destroyed barriers by just being pretty good at what they do.

Dogs

A dog wandered past me the other day. It was a muscular black thing, the kind of dog that people purchase as intimidation devices, but this chap seemed quite friendly. Ned and Jarvis both shouted "dog" repetitively as it trundled past us unmarshalled by an owner. I wondered what I should do: I could attempt to catch the escapee, but then what next? And this would be a very tricky task to accomplish with a buggy in tow, so I did nothing, feeling like this was the only realistic course of action, and hoped that someone else would do the good deed and reunite Mr Dog with Mr Owner.

As I walked I observed the dog's antics and my heart shuddered at its recklessness as it gambolled in and out of the road with no sense of the pain that could come if a car boshed it on the conk. I don't know the end of this tale - the last I saw of the dog was when he sent his snout around a block of flats at the end of my road, but the point in it is to comment on the stupidity of dogs. Apparently you're either a dog person or cat person and being a cat person can feel uncomfortably effeminate, but these needy canines that can't venture out alone without putting their life in danger are surely inferior to those clever felines who you can take or leave at your pleasure and don't lick you into a state of extreme unhygienicness every time you walk through the door. They can keep their needy pseudo-love; the cattish aloof affection is where its at.

Discombobulation Limericks

I was standing at Brighton Station

In a state of exaltation

When I was told I was in France

By that old actor Charles Dance

Leaving me in a state of discombobulation

I woke with a discombobulated feeling

As I gazed up at my transparent ceiling

I peered into the sky

And a bird pooed in my eye

While I'd slept, the roof-lovers had been stealing

It's easy to discombobulate Ned

By telling him that blue is red

But when I mistook a blue ball

For a tasty apple

He laughed and said, "The discombobulation has spread."

Deconstructivism

Deconstructivism: it's a long old word that refers to those modern buildings that look a bit like they've been designed by a child struggling to get to grips with Lego instructions and ends up creating something that looks kind of good in a peculiar way, but nothing like the original plan. It has its roots in Jacques Derrida's deconstruction theory which is a complicated concept that had me grappling for an ungraspable understanding when I was at university. Deconstruction says that texts have multiple interpretations that contradict each other, and that these interpretations are limitless, thus making the art of effective interpretation impossible.

This impossibility of finding interpretation was adopted by the world of architecture in the 1980s as designers started to produce fragmented odd looking structures. The link with Derrida's deconstruction is that rules, meaning and the observer's understanding are no longer important with artistic expression allowed to express itself in a whole new seemingly meaningless void. With beauty undefined, fresh undefined beauty was allowed to flourish.

It has its critics however, and Kenneth Frampton from Woking is one of them. He reckons that it is "elitist and detached" and it is true that ownership of such buildings is obviously beyond most people, but we all get to have a look at it don't we, even if our houses aren't likely to resemble crumpled Coke cans in the near future.

I'm personally not sure about all this deconstruction stuff - it is true that understanding of the world around us is complex and often beyond us, but we devalue the understanding that there is out there to be found if we allow ourselves to sit still in a foggy maze without at least attempting to find our way around. When we sit still and deny that meaning is important, I fear that a deconstructive approach to all art forms can be a bit pretentious and pointless, but at the same time, when we start searching and throwing off the straight-jackets of beauty, we can find fresh, invigorating wonderful things.

Disposal

Virginia Woolf, Totteham Hotspur and Richard Henry Biffa: 1882 was a good year for English literature, football and waste disposal as each crawled out of their literal or metaphorical wombs to take their place on this earth. Thirty-seven years later, as England enjoyed a respite from the First World War, the trio each started carving their own little space in history. Woolf released her first work, obscurely entitled Modern Fiction; Spurs were enjoying a season that would see them promoted to the top flight for the first time and Biffa was on the cusp of launching the business that would become a leader in the world of waste management and would obsess a small group of men in a train-spotterish way another 73 years on.

Founder of Biffa, Richard Henry Biffa had a son, Richard Frank Biffa who had a son, Richard Biffa who is the current man in charge of the Biffa empire. It is refreshing that the Biffa name wasn't chosen because of its aggressive connotations, but merely because it was a bloke's surname. There is a danger that we fulfil our names and I imagine the pre-1882 Biffas were playground bullies who graduated to become boxers. Grandad Biffa stopped the cycle of violence with his entrepreneurial venture and the succession of Biffas have seen Biffa transformed from a London-based company collecting clinker and ashes to a forward-thinking national company leading the way in waste management: "It's time to change the way we think about waste," claim the Biffa website, "to see it as a resource with real value that can be secured through recycling, recovery and the generation of energy." They certainly seem to talk the ethical talk. This is less biff and more biffy-wiffy.

As uninteresting as their waste management is, it hasn't stopped some friends of mine whipping their mobile phones out of their pockets to snap a Biffa bin/lorry/skip/worker every time they stumble across one. Their obsessive behaviour has led them to clamber inside bins and has got the most passionate of Biffa-lovers (although the rest of the group will probably claim that they deserve this crown) to get himself into a spot of bother after a company took umbrage at him sneaking around their property snapping rare Biffas. Last night I was at a party and not even my riveting conversation could keep two of these obsessives from scampering out the door when rumour of a Biffa bin up the road met their ears.

As you can probably guess, the gender of the Biffa Barmy Army are predominantly male. There seems to be something in the male psyche that is able to get disproportionately excited about something relatively meaningless. I am not immune to this, with my fondness for badgers and perhaps even this blog residing in an obsessive area of my brain, but the Biffa-love seems to take this a step further, somewhere completely outside the area of interest-value. And yet while I recognise the ridiculousity of their fetish, when I drove past a Biffa bin today, a thrill of excitement burbled somewhere within and I wondered whether their enthusiasm had infected me. We shall see.

Determinism

My sleepy drooping lesson-planning eyes have stumbled across a word beginning with D and rather than give myself the rest that I crave, I instead will stumble around my thoughts and attempt coherence on the subject. The word is determinism and it is the philosophical idea that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. There are a number of different branches to determinism, but the essential nub of it is that life is mapped out on an unalterable course. Do we have no free will in this deterministic worldview? Well, that is a complicated question with further complicated words such as libertarianism, compatibilism, incompatibilism and indeterminism all getting involved. Determinists seem to disagree on whether free will is a myth or not and a simple answer is that determinism complicates the possibility of free will.

I came across this word because it is a word that has been thrown critically in the direction of John Steinbeck's novella Of Mice and Men, a book that has resided on the GCSE syllabus for many a year. Critics say that Lennie's fate is deterministic in that there never seems a viable alternative with Big Len careering unerringly towards his final tragic demise. I guess determinism as a criticism is something that could be thrown at many simple plots with characters often stumbling headlong into tragedy. As I tappetty-tap-tap, Phil Mitchell is slurring nonsense in a drug-induced haze in the background and this is surely also weak determinism, but the criticism is only valid if it doesn't reflect life, so do these tales bear an accurate image of life? My personal stance is that the existence of God who grants us free will creates a paradoxical situation where a determinism of sorts and free will both exist. The criticisms of Of Mice and Men, I think, are misplaced: the plot's simplicity is part of what makes it beautiful and poignant and the apparent lack of free will for the protagonists feels like an accurate reflection of the limited free will the poor and disadvantaged were given in 1930s America.

Defeat

My aging legs (in footballing terms I am reaching the twilight of my career) trotted back across the white line today as I captained CCK (Church of Christ the King) Seconds. With kick-off minutes away I was summoned hither and thither to pluck dog excrement from the grass with a plastic bag and my warmup routine became a jogging between poo treasure hunt. Once the pitch had been cleansed I walked towards the centre circle to shake stinky hands with a chap, Antony Turner, who I haven't shared conversation with for fourteen years, since we went our separate ways at the end of secondary school. His inclusion in the opposing team was slightly concerning because I remembered that he was a far better footballer than I was when at school, but perhaps time would have been kinder to me than to him. I doubted this and my doubt was a justifiable position for he headed our opponents, Montreal Arms, into a lead within two minutes.

From that moment on, our goal was peppered with shots with only brief respite when our strikers made rare forages forward, but our bluntness in attack which yielded just one shot on target during the first half was in contrast to the Montreal Arms' sharpness as they dispatched six past our stand-in goalkeeper Tim Lumgair. I rallied the troops at half-time with tales of a time when we'd come back from 5-0 down to draw 5-5 and tried to draw a crumb of comfort from the fact that the wind and the incline would be on our side in the second half.

The team kept up a wonderfully positive attitude as my words proved to be mere words, powerless to prevent our net bulging at a similarly rapid rate in the face of a breeze that was failing to cause a rustle in any local leaves. The six was quickly doubled to twelve, exceeding my previous biggest defeat of 11-0, but then a moment came which pencilled a stunning silver line around the thrash shaped cloud. After a spectacular (fortuitous and bumbling) run into MA territory from myself, the ball popped about a bit and someone kicked someone and the result was a free-kick forty (twenty-five at best) yards from goal. I'd already fluffed a free-kick in the first half and I wasn't particularly confident that I could actually reach the goal with any power, but I brushed others aside who fancied themselves from this range and stepped back for an excessive run-up. I recognised that the only chance of troubling the keeper was to boot the ball as hard as my puny legs could manage and hope for the best. I did just that and the ball flew centimetres above the grass, straight as a car that's being driven by someone whose forgotten to take the krooklok off into the bottom corner (the picture at the top of the page is the goalkeeper wrapped around the post after failing to grasp my fizzler). My celebration was undignified and embarrassing for my teammates as I whisked my shirt from my torso and performed some odd vaguely acrobatic movement which was a forward roll combined with poor attempt at a break-dancing worm.

We conceded two more, but it now felt like, as Harry Redknapp would brand it, a "great defeat", but perhaps that was just me. However, it wasn't just my goal, but our cheery manner in the face of humiliation that made it great and I guess it gives us a benchmark from which to move forwards. It also, as I'm sure you're well aware, draws me level with my nemesis Fernando Torres, who has taken four games to reach the same tally as me.

Dwain Chambers

"It was either be regular or not. There were a lot of things flying through my mind. A lot of people have said that if they'd been in my shoes they would have done the same thing. I wasn't intending to cheat the system. I just wanted to get even. I was fed up with losing. As far as I was concerned everyone else was doing it. I thought other people were doing wrong. I was losing and I thought, 'I'm not busting my arse to lose.'"

Dwain Chambers divides opinion. Frustration at consecutive defeat and a suspicion that others were cheating to win led him to a position where he willingly submitted his body to guinea pig experimentation to see if he could shave crucial milliseconds off of his 100 metre sprint time. He got caught, did the time and is now back, penitent and desirous of a clean slate to apply his running spikes to.

Whilst some are happy to see Chambers return to the track, many high-profile names such as Sebastian Coe and Kelly Holmes have spoken out against Chambers' return and the British Olympic Association agree - whilst he is allowed to run in other athletics events, the Olympics are a closed door to Dwain.

Life bans for drug cheats make for good headlines, but I feel uneasy about the unforgiving attitude of the athletics hierarchy. Part of Chambers' unpopularity is rooted in the forthright honesty with which he, perhaps unwisely, answered BBC questions in 2006, when he claimed that drugs were needed to compete. This sticky smearing of the athletics world was what caused many to abandon their mercy towards Dwain. An honest assessment is surely better than insincerity though. And surely if he has fulfilled the punishment for the crime he should be allowed to return: where is the justice in denying him? A common argument is that we need to give a clear and harsh message about drugs to youngsters, but surely a message about life being redeemable despite mistakes is an important message too, even if it isn't as headline-friendly.

Doodles

I returned to school today (I am a teacher of English) and during a day of meetings I found my pen wandering across the page whilst writing down things that I need to remember for the coming weeks ahead. I was quite pleased with the result and thought I would share it with you. It started as two brackets reminding me of meetings on Monday and Tuesday, but developed into a duojawed chap in smart attire. His name is Graham Meetingeater.