Meringues & Malingerers

Fellow Fulham-leaning down-in-the-mouths.

We remain, do we not, collectively hunkered down ‘neath the swirling clouds of foreboding what’s spiralling up from the Stevenage Road environs; the fallout of this wretched season settling on our psyches like toxic dust on lush foliage.

I reckon soon they’ll need to create a dedicated FFC ward at the Royal Hospital & Home for Incurables, Putney. Padded in black and white it’ll be, with restraints on the beds, and Andy Williams crooning on a never-ending loop.

For solace, I’ve been petting the flower-seller’s daughter’s Maine Coon. It’s a mutually-beneficial pursuit: the cat likes it, and I get to loiter around the lass with the latch-keys to my heart. One day she’ll notice me.

Those of you that have no recourse to feline fondling, consider this lively tonic:

Strip to your skin. Then, patiently re-adorn yourself in your dandiest schmutter. Flick a freshly-laundered silk fogle over your forehead, assume a forthright aspect, and inhale defiantly.

Now re-established, cast a panoramic eye over all the associated joys of your lives in order to swathe these prevailing football-flavoured agonies in a contextualising blanket. This dilemma won’t seem so bad then.

Newly invigorated, reward yourselves with a cunning shufti at my humble lexicon before life swindles you irretrievably.

But first, I sense you wondering where I have been.

Playing gin rummy with a tripe dresser in the back of a maroon Morris Oxford?

Skinny-dipping in a teacup outside Lotte Berk’s?

No, I’ve been needling away at life, with only my innately retarded glee to chivvy me along, spending most of my time, yes, looking like I’ve just found a badger’s nest and can’t stop laughing at the eggs.

But even the slow workings of my dense noggin have revealed to me that, as a club, we most assuredly have our eyebrows on the Queen’s iron. Yes, we are incarcerated in relegation chokey, gazing ‘tween the unforgiving bars as the Premiership escapees gambol in the exercise yard.

Now, I’m not about to drown myself in a half-empty glass of misery water – life has too many greater tragedies to warrant dangling oneself like a human pendulum from Bishop’s Park’s sturdiest bough - but recalling pleasurable instances from this season is like trying to extract winkles with a claw-hammer.

I think it’s true to say that by now the whites are well and truly beaten. Perhaps this is what you get from trying to make a meringue with addled eggs? And who is the man wielding the whisk of blame: Commis Chef Sanchez, or Head Chef Hodgson?

It’s a queer old kitchen whichever serving hatch you look through.

And yet, the sterile parish of Reading calls me thither.

Are we to witness once more a gaggle of flimsy malingerers defiling the sacred black and white? Or will they rally, like the condemned man granted a last repast at the foot of the scaffold?

Whatever the conclusion to this miserable procession of performances, we remain shackled to the source of our misery, for better or worse. All spouses lose their looks eventually, but love, if unconditional, will prevail.

As for making a weekend in Burnley or Barnsley romantic: now there’s a challenge to consider.

Flamin’ scallions and Up The Fulham!