Football

As I said in the last blog, you can use anything at all as a metaphor for life. For instance, a banana. A banana is like life. The inner curve, the sweep of time from youth to death, the skin mottling from green to black, full of vitality (potassium and selenium), but destined, as are we all for the compost heap. Amen.

I am trying to bring together my class notes, laughingly known in the trade as "preparation". This I am doing in order to print a book to be able to give to the students and their parents.

So far, I have finished the cover and a bit more.

English speaking countries

  Any road up, football is the metaphor for today. Conceivably you might be able to play football on your own if you pretended to be 22 people and you could run backwards and forwards without getting too exhausted. But, let´s face it, life is pretty much a team game unless you are happy being a miserable old git railing against anything and everything. Not much fun.

Buddleia

An old Rocker

Another old Rocker

A young swinger

Today's metaphor

Next to the gym where I do kung fu

Life is treating me well. Today has been a stunningly beautiful day. The sun has blasted down pretending to be mid-August and the birds have been conscientiously doing their choir practice. The garden is forgiving but rampant.

If life is a game of football that doesn't depend solely on yourself then it would be wise to adopt your strategy accordingly. It seems to me that in football, as in all sports, there is one skill that serves well. The ability to move from a state of relaxation to one of tension, both muscular and mental, in an instant. The sudden change throws one's opponents into panic. In football it is the manager's job to inculcate this strategy in the team. In practice this is too difficult and it is the players themselves that instinctively weave between the extremes of tension.

A selfy

Sluice

To the mill

We lost 3-2 yesterday, after winning for about 70 minutes 1-0. I don't care too much given that middle-aged blokes like me don't usually play football.

It would be nice to stay fit and take Jacky skiing though!!

The loveliest footballer in the whole world

A view from the garden this morning

Today's poem:

Now, God be thanked Who has watched us with His hour, 
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, 
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, 
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, 
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary, 
Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move, 
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary, 
And all the little emptiness of love! 

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending, 
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath; 
Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there 
But only agony, and that has ending; 
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.