Pomegranates & Polonies

Mind your beeswax, Fulham-striped friends, the football/fashion dichotomy has just taken a fist to the solar plexus!

You’ve noticed – surely, you have – that our boys have just received a brand-new outfit to peddle their footballing wares in – it’s the butcher’s best ain’t it, and that’s not even close to being a fib.

I like the new kit. It’s simple, like me. And, as we all know, simplicity is the hand-maiden of style’s younger brother.

Well, now that the team are all correctly kitted-out, there’s no excuse for not mounting a realistic challenge on 15th place next season. And if they ultimately under-achieve – like fanny they will! - at least they’ll do so in a dapper fashion.

Anyway, I’m off to spit pomegranate pips at all the teenage polonies scowling down Munster Road – somebody needs to.

And in the meantime my good chums, remember: it’s easier to break the egg of style than to lay it.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Buddhists & Bully-Boys

Fairest Fulham disciples, who are you and where have I been?

You are a sentient sack of bone and spittle what’s using your noggin to pontificate on these words, right now.

Me, I’ve been polishing doorknockers on and around North End Road, and building a life-size curlew out of curled-up cabbage leaves merely in order to earn a bit of spare trouser-cash.

Well, spiritually-leaning chums, in a facsimile of the great Buddhist cycle of Death and Rebirth, football is dead, only to be born again in a few short summer months’ time.

In the meantime, mid-knocker polishing, I‘ve been squatting on the Stevenage kerbside gazin’ up at that beautiful stand, idly shaking hands with my most sombre and deep-lying thoughts.

I’ve been tickling myself into believing that I can hear the matchday hubbub: the fluttering of Fluts, and the monotone boom of the programme sellers.

I fancy I can see the ghosts of former players, taking flight and manufacturing magic from the mastery of their lithe limbs, and limitless imaginations.

I sense I’m somehow seeing the spectres of spectators, drifting through the turnstiles, repeating a similar cycle: that of returning again and again to support their team. And yet another one, that of renewing one’s enthusiasm, weekly, in the midst of relentless, recurring disappointments.

Hope dying, hope being reborn.

Eventually, the reverie gives way, and I realise it’s just the low-level thrum of my grandfather’s pocket watch, ticking away constantly within my best vest pocket, impervious to life’s ups, oblivious to it’s downs.

Then, amazingly for a low-educated (but honest) cripple like me, a small thought hatches itself from within the incubating warmth of me stovepipe. I realise, that that’s how we all need to be in these ever-changing times. Constant like a clock, anchored on a stormy sea, whilst renewing ourselves each and every day.

Well, whilst your testing those telling truths I’m limping from the scene. All that thinking has given me a right backwards headache, and what’s more, I’ve got to pick up some faggots for throwing at the market inspector later on. Fascist bully-boy!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!

Plums & Pom-Poms

My most esteemed cottage-flavoured companions: are you ready?

Internet-ready, battle-ready, oven-ready, HD-ready, ready steady go, Ready Steady Cook, ready for action, Ready Brek, ready or not here I come. I don’t care which stripe you aspire to. Just be ready.

These last weeks I‘ve tried to rally my best black and white chums using, like, verbs and nouns and things. Now, I don’t by any stretch see myself as a cheerleader and, to be brutal, walking ‘round the market bearing a brace of pompoms would have got me a swift toe-cap up the harris many moons ago. Polish on the seat of me tufnells for the sake of a bit of cross-dressing? No thank you, Mr La Rue!

But I’m beseeching you once again to holler to the heavens.

Over a stale lardy bun just yesterday, I was pondering thoughts from within my noggin: we’ve raised ourselves up for the Reading game; we braced ourselves for the Blackburn; we got aroused for the Arse. With the refractory periods becoming ever-more exhausting can we possibly enliven ourselves for the Liverpool?

Mr Jewry (at the next stall), he says that supporting this club is like “eating plums off a barbed-wire plate”. Well, if you love this club right down to your bones and sockets, as I do, then you know all too well that the sweetness of plums in the mouth often carries a bitter aftertaste, however much you masticate.

So this next coming Saturday, mouth full or not, let’s collectively spit pips for our boys.

Indulge in whatever foreplay gets you fruity, get entangled on the terraces, and let’s come together as one. Let’s fill the Fulham air with unrestrained ejaculations, with no worrying about what stains we may leave behind.

Until then, make like monks!

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!