Have you noticed how cold it is? Frosty the snowman has returned. With a vengeance. I’ve had to scrape the ice off my bike in the mornings. Otherwise I couldn’t see where I’m going. Its so cold that apparently people are wearing long-sleeved shirts in Newcastle to go out at night!! That’s cold. Cold enough to… yeah, well, just cold enough. But at least its bright. Sunny. Nice. We have lots of words for this in the UK, to describe the joys of winter. And they are joys. Any day its not raining is a bonus. Brisk. Fresh. In Canada they call this ‘summer’. But really, its all good.

Except in the world of football. Which is in the midst of an horrendous scandal about child abuse. Its football’s turn. We’ve had the BBC, we’ve done government, politicians, the Church, now its football. Because, it would appear, everyone in the 1970s and 80s was a serial child-abusing sex offender, so they’re being uncovered by genre.

You can only assume that the only difference between then and now is that we (think we) have checks on such things. That people working with any children are vetted thoroughly before being set to work in schools, youth academies, choirs, scouts and such. Unfortunately that can only sift out those who’ve been caught before. If they ask a potential child worker if he likes to fiddle with little boys, its quite unlikely he’ll say: ‘oh, yeah, actually I do; ya got me there, how many sick days would I get’.

I have no time for paedophiles. They are simply evil. Castration’s too soft for them, death too quick. They can’t be ‘cured’, there’s never a need for the prefix ‘serial’ because its a life-long addiction.

This problem surfaced last week when half a dozen guys bravely came forward and told their tales of the horrors at the hands (and worse) of a youth coach at Crewe Alexandra. Then it was Manchester City, then Stoke. Bloody northerners; I thought. Typical. And then it came to Chelsea. My almost favourite football club. But being Chelsea, even back ‘in the day’, rather than take appropriate action against the alleged abuses, they decided to hush it up. Pay some cash. Make it go away. So they paid the victim to keep quiet about it. Allowing the fucking monster-in-their-midst to go unchecked. Rather than cause a ‘scandal’ involving the club. Well now they’ve got their scandal. And rather than being about one solitary sick fuck, its about the club itself.

Ok, I’m going out to eat a new fiver. Heard they contain meat.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx