The Football Season Draws to a close - Part 1

My Saturday team, Mayfield Athletic 3rd XI, had their final match on Saturday 5th May. We needed to win to clinch promotion. I've been involved a little this season but it has mainly been my brother Beaky and Gavin running it. Saturday was also Beaky's last game for the club. At 50 he has decided to concentrate on his veterans' football career.

I took the tube to get to the game which was on the other side of London in Fairlop. On the way we stopped at numerous stations, about 40 in all, but it was at Mile End that my jaw hit the floor. The doors opened and on stepped the oldest living woman I have ever seen, her skin was dark brown although she would be classed as Caucasian. I was just lifting my jaw back into place when her mum followed her on. A teenage boy next to me spat out his Red Bull. They both sat down and began to discuss last night's Eastenders.

The teenager's eyes were on stalks, as if he was seeing creatures from another planet. In a way he was, they were from the last century, if not the one before. He could not drag his eyes away and eventually they noticed.

"Fancy my mum do you sonny?" He couldn't speak, she continued. "He fancies you mum."

"Wouldn't be the first."

"Nor the last. Go on mum, make his day, give 'im a kiss." The mother dragged herself up from her seat and moved towards the kid just as the train stopped again. He got up and flew out of the exit. The ladies cackled all the way to Leytonstone.

They train took ages. As I it approached Fairlop I was thinking about the Road to Recovery. Going to see this game made think of the the reason I was working so hard to get back and it is a goal I need to reach but it is frustrating because I am doing all this just to get back to normal. It is not as though I will have actually achieved anything. Thoughts turned to death but brightened as I walked into the changing room and saw the lads putting on their bright orange shirts. My cockles were warmed and I remembered again that joyous feeling you get when you are about to play game of football.

Snookered

The World Snooker Championship is on at the moment. I have been watching it since the mid 1970s. Every year I have always said that I would go up to the Crucible in Sheffield to see it live and finally I made it. With me not playing sport we decided to make some trips out and Sheffield was one of the first we booked.

A few months ago I had made the same trip up North. On that occasion it was to see an Ibsen play at the theatre, I was rather more excited about seeing the boys on the baize.

As we walked up to the famous old theatre I suddenly got overly excited and started shaking a bit, Katie had to calm me down as I rushed us through into our seats. The lights went down, a hush descended, play began, and then seemingly instantly it was over. Three hours, eight frames, whizzed by like a thundering, whispering train. The Ibsen had been a similar length but that had felt like days compared to this. The true drama of real live sport can not be beaten. I loved every minute of it, and then loved it even more when we went again in the evening. Brilliant.

Back on the treadmill down at the gym I have begun to ramp up the pressure. Each day I am increasing the speed a little, and upping the level of difficulty. My leg is getting stronger, and the thigh muscle is returning. The stats show it and my walking shows it. I can now leg press over 100 kilos, which is past the target set by the hospital before I can go running again. Next ACL circuit training should see me given the thumbs up.

After going to the gym for nearly two months I only just noticed that the sports hall is often used by the local Muslim community for prayers. They take it over, lay down their prayer mats and get down to it. I stuck my head round the door the other day to see what was going on. It wasn't full, but there was a good old crowd. My peep coincided with the end of prayers and so I got spied spying. I thought they'd be annoyed but to my surprise they invited me in. It seems that no one else who uses the gym as a gym has ever shown any interest in them. We chatted happily for a few minutes before I bade them farewell. As I left, they were laughing and joking and seemed to be a jolly bunch.

My other major excitement recently has been my NHS health check. They take blood, do blood pressure, weigh you, measure your waist and so on. The results came and were all ok, but I decided to visit my GP to discuss them. The real reason I arranged this appointment was because Katie thinks I have alzheimers and she finally convinced me to ask the doctor to test me.

I was crapping myself with the knowledge that if I failed my life would suddenly take a dramatic turn for the worse. It was worse than a-levels, degree, and driving test all at once.

"I'm going to tell you a name and address, repeat them back to me and later on I will ask you to repeat them again." Oh shit!! "John Brown, 42 High Street, Kensington." I repeated the details back, phew. "Now I want you to draw a clock face, with the hands at ten past eleven."

How can I do that and remember the address? If they had taken my pulse at this point I'd have been in the danger zone. Suddenly I found it impossible to draw a clock face, I concentrated as hard as I could, all the while trying to retain the address. Clock face drawn and presented, I was ready to announce the name and address but no.

"Now tell me two stories that have been in the news this week." I managed these quite easily, hoping, praying I would now be allowed to do the address. "Just tell me a bit more about that second story." I was sweating. Don't look back at it, can you repeat the address?

Finally, just when I thought my head would pop he asked for the address.

"John Brown, 42 High..." I paused, was it street or road? Aaaaahhhhhhhhh! Go for street. Yes it's street..."42 High Street, Kensington."

Phew. I nearly died, my head nearly exploded but I managed it. The upshot being that..."You don't have alzheimers. Tell your wife you're just not listening or concentrating when she talks to you."

"Maybe it would be better if I just said I had alzheimers!" He chuckled, not the first time he's heard that joke I'll warrant.

The 25% Moment.

And suddenly I'm a quarter of the way through. Seems a little strange that I now only have to go through what I have been through already three more times. This is doable.

An interesting day today started with an audition.

Whilst I was waiting to go in a couple of the receptionists were rooting through the cupboard. All this bending apparently revealed the lower back tattoo of one to the other.

"Ooh, I like your tattoo."

"Thanks."

"What does it mean?"

"Having endured the pain."  Time for a joke methinks and so I chip in.

"Having endured the pain of having a tattoo done?" No one laughs. Tattoo girl replies with utter contempt...

"Actually, having endured the pain of having two back spurs removed, from which I was almost paralysed."

I should have left it but if you've been followed these you'll know I can't. "So having endured the pain of having a couple of back spurs removed you decided to have a tattoo in the place where you'd had the back problem."

"Do you know anything, about anything?"

Fortunately at this point it was my turn to go in. Not the best preparation for an audition.

At the gym, later, I was cycling away when my eye caught some movement to my left. I glanced over, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a rather old bloke also cycling. He'd obviously let himself go and was not exactly an oil painting. He looked tired and sweaty. I looked away and thanked my lucky stars I didn't look as bad as him. A moment later I couldn't stop myself having another look. I wanted to see if he was peddling as quick as me. I look over and it was only at this point that I realised I had been looking at the mirror.


A few people have asked me if I made up the word Crepitus? Of course not. If I could make up words that good I wouldn't be wasting my time doing anything else. Although having said that my brothers and I did make up a word which is brilliant. I spell it 'Chuppetting'. It is pronounced with a good bit of phlegm at the start as though you are clearing your throat. It is the word we use for leaving a football ground when you are trying to go quickly but you don't want to seem like you're running. 

Anyway the Crepitus is loud this week, I can hear it when I walk up the stairs and when I move my leg at night. It sounds like it all needs oiling. I think all the strengthening work is great but I'll be most pleased when I can't hear my knee anymore.

Crepitus - a grating or popping sound.

For nearly a month now I have been going to the gym. It is pretty much the same time every day and yet there is only one other person who I see most days. He dresses all in black like the Milk Tray man, and is what you might call a silver fox. I'm calling him Silver Tray.

Whenever I arrive he is usually on one of the running machines and is normally pelting out the yards. When he finishes he is absolutely dripping in sweat, his kit soaked through. He then does a funny thing. He prowls around the gym, it is sort of a warm down, but it seems as though he is doing it so that everyone there can see just how sweaty he has got, just how much work he has put in. After a full circuit, he dries off a bit and them drips his perspiration over a variety of machines. He's quite polite and tries to dry them off when he's done but that amount of sweat is hard to shift.

All this gym work has had a positive effect on the knee but one thing worries me greatly. Grab yourself an empty bag of crisps, now scrunch it up in your fist. That crunching noise is similar to the noise my knee makes whenever I straighten my leg. I mentioned it to the doctor when I had the last check up. This week I received a letter detailing that visit and to my surprise I was informed of the name of that noise: Crepitus. It's a brilliant Scrabble word and I can pretty much guarantee no one else will know what it means. It is actually a bit of catch all because it can describe the noise of two bones grating together or the sound made by gas, or fluid, squirting through soft tissue.

I took me, my crepitus and myself off to the Cup Semi Final this weekend. Everton offered a tame display and as I sat there at the end of the game I pondered what had gone on in the lead up to the game. To my left the Liverpool end were singing You'll Never Walk Alone, to my right, the Everton end had emptied. At moments like this I like to force myself to endure the pain of the defeat. If you rush away from it, without letting it sink in and witnessing the winning team's celebration, you lose perspective and have no vantage point from which to enjoy your next victory. So I forced myself to stay and suffer their joy. Did I regret the arguments I'd had with my brother over the ticket he gave to his girlfriend? Not really. He was wrong to do it, she was wrong to accept. Did I regret the week's salary it had cost me to pay for the tickets I did get? No, it was Everton's most important game this century and I had to be there. What hurt the most was that we had the better team but a collective inability to function against Liverpool, bred by the manager, meant that we threw away the chance.

As the last of the delighted Liverpool fans danced their way out of the stadium I finally stood up. Katie was quiet, not sure how upset or angry I was. We walked slowly to the bus stop, an empty bus came quickly and we realised that we'd make it home in time to watch the Grand National. Life didn't seem too bad after all even though I broke the silence on the bus with my crepitus as I walked up the stairs.

Nine 1/2 Weeks - Not the Film.

Just because the circuit training is for people who have had an operation don’t go thinking it is not hard work. Under the watchful eye of Clodagh and Minnie we are encouraged to do each exercise to the point of failure. Lunging forward on to the operated knee is, and I know this seems a little pathetic, scary. Every time you lean forward onto it, putting your full weight through it, there is the fear in the back of your mind that it will snap. Such things do happen but nothing serious has befallen anyone so far, although three week Aniston did arrive with a worry that she had done some damage whilst moving a mirror at home.

Kicking a football seems such a long way off at the moment. All I want to be able to do is get to level four of each of the exercises dotted around the gym. These are, as I have said before, all so simple with a healthy knee but all are really tough in our current state. Zooming around them is no good either, you have to do each one with care and attention as it is so easy for your body to trick you as I found when I had been practising the forward dip off a step at home.

In my mind I had been doing it perfectly but once in the gym it was quickly pointed out that I had been cheating myself. Stepping forward, my right hip was dropping forward and down too, thus putting the foot nearer the ground and taking the strain off the left knee.

A whole week of me working on my own had thus had no beneficial effect.

Shit, shit, shittety shit. Everything is tough, everything hurts and everything is vital to a full recovery. Leaving anything out is pointless and knocks you back.

Failure, that is, doing an exercise until you can not do it any more is hard both physically and mentally, because the point at which you can’t do it anymore is also the point at which the knee most feels like it is about to pop. I am so totally aware of every twinge in the knee both when doing the exercises and when going about doing my normal every day stuff. Something has to give because at the moment I can’t think of anything normal, even walking down the street I am concentrating on keeping the knee above the second toe, making sure the stride is even and so on. Hour after hour goes by and all I think about is the knee.

Coming back from the gym is always my favourite time, the work on the bike and walking machine, you may call it a running machine, always loosens up the knee and the walk home feels almost normal. Under the old regime I never used to think about my fitness. Now it’s all I think about. Tomorrow is another day, and another step on the road to recovery.

Wembley Update

As it turns out I am not going to Wembley.

My brother did the right thing but it caused ructions with his girlfriend so I relinquished my seat at the most important football match that Everton have played this century. 

GF has kindly said that if Everton win I can go to the final. 

Signing off until a knee update.

18.68131% Towards Recovery

Seven weeks and two days since the operation, just 31 weeks and 5 days to go till my target recovery date.

The gym has changed my life. I've never been a member of a gym before, except for one year when I got free membership having done an advert for one. In that year I went to the gym three times. The first was to pick up my free membership card, the second was to  use the facilities and the third was later that same day when I returned to pick up my forgotten towel.

It was too far away, four miles, and I was playing football three times a week so didn't have time. Now though I am at the gym more often than most of the staff. I am slowly converting Ms Rable, the receptionist. I'm over-smiling and giving out cheery vibes to see if she will cheer up. It seems to be working although she may be pulling faces behind my back.

The time in the gym itself is all fairly routine now although I am trying to vary what I do a bit more. I went back to see Mr Knee this week for another check up. He was pleased with my progress and said going to the gym everyday was fine but not to do the same thing each time.

"A marathon runner doesn't run a marathon every day in training."

Sound advice from someone who knows.

Ms Rable is actually the receptionist for the leisure centre. She gives me my daily wrist band for the gym. I have no idea why we need this, but every day hundreds of people get a paper wrist band to use the gym. You go through a locked gate and then up to the gym. Ms Rable let's you in after giving you the wrist band, so it seems pointless. I'll ask about it soon.

On entering the gym there is another reception. A young chap, handily named Jim, works there. He does general cleaning and mild sexual harassment of female gym goers. You know the sort of the thing, standing right next to them when they are on the bike, or coming up behind them when they are on the weights. I have not seen anyone complain or baulk at his proximity so I have not intervened but I will keep an eye on him.

Yesterday, Saturday 31st March, I arrived at the the gym at about 11 o'clock. As I opened the door, Jim was sitting behind his desk eating a yoghurt and bran concoction.

"Hi Jim. Is that breakfast or lunch?"

He thought for a moment, looked at his food then back at me, back at his food and then a smile came across his face. "Brunch." He laughed, a big laugh. He seemed to think he had just invented the word. As I walked off I could hear him muttering to himself; "this isn't breakfast or lunch, it's brunch. hmmm. brunch."

It's been a big week with Everton getting to the Semi Final of the FA Cup. A brilliant win at Sunderland, which I watched down the pub with the Tuesday football crowd. This created the year's biggest dilemma. How to get tickets? One of my brothers had lorded it before the game saying if we got to Wembley he knew the someone or other of the FA and he'd get the tickets easy peasy. As it happened, he did. But them texted me.

"Only got two tickets. I'm taking my girlfriend." Just that. Oooh, cold.

I won't bore you with the whole back story of why this is not just wrong but so one wrong and every single person I told this too was astonished. I was telling people I didn't even know and they were amazed.

Here are some example responses:

"You're f@cking kidding." Next door neighbour.
"What is he on?" Old friend.
"He's a f@cking tw@t." Bus driver.
"No bl@@dy way. Moron." Bloke who sleeps in the park with a pram full of old newspapers.
"It's April Fool tomorrow mate." Postman.

Anyway, eventually he realised the error of his ways and changed his mind. It had reached a point where we were on the verge of never talking again, so whilst he made the error in the first place, he stood tall and made the tough call. Well done bro.

It is the second ACL Assault Course Circuit Training tomorrow. Bring it on, I'm getting ready for Wembley, but I won't be wearing this shirt...Everton FA Cup Semi Final Shirt - Wembely!