I hid under the coffee table for most of the 90 minutes (plus stoppage time) and I’m still there. I’ve got cramp in places I never even knew I had places. Mel keeps shouting at me to come out. But I can’t. I dived under the table when the 3rd Arsenal goal went in and I’ve laid there, damp with tears shed, ever since. And I’m not coming out. Ever. Well, not until we beat Arsenal next time. I appreciate that won’t be until next season, at the earliest, maybe September, possibly not until about February of next year, but I don’t care. I appreciate that I’ll gather dust. That Joey will definitely kick me. That Lila may lie on the floor to speak to me. But there I shall suffer. In silence. Though silence has never been my strong suit. I must be punished. Offer penance to the gods of football. We nearly came back. But its the ‘nearly’ that kills.

Meanwhile, just to touch back on the ‘culture wars’ once more, because they spoke to government minister about it and she actually made me very angry. Because she said that there is no cause to re-write Enid Blighton’s books, even though they’re completely sexist and racist. She insisted that Shakespeare’s obvious and frequent misogyny was ‘historically valid’, although his antisemitism was totally woke and on message for our times. She thinks we should leave Ian Fleming alone, rather than apply the razor of wokeness to his entire body of work, oozing with millions of sexual offenses, ranging from objectification, physical assault and repeated shagging, but never of ugly birds.

She’s wrong. We must rid ourselves of these terrible examples of humanity at its worst. We must re-write entire histories to eliminate slavery, racism, sexism, bad language, colonialism and The Empire. Because it was evil. We live in a post-millennial world and need to remove all traces of what happened before, in case the children learn how awful we were. We need to pretend that the Romans never indulged in orgies, ate themselves sick, then had sex with the nearest object, be it male, female, animal, mineral or vegetable. Because rather than trying to learn from history, a stupid idea if ever there was, we just need to eliminate the bad bits, the parts where we weren’t very nice, the wars, the slaughters, the religious ‘conversions’ of entire populations, its all got to go.

I’m voting for the ‘woke’ party. Even if we don’t currently have one. Because, in common with all really right-on people, I am stupid and gullible to the point where I should be locked up.

Or left under a coffee table until I realise that ‘its only football’. As if…

Happy Monday

A xxxx