Shiny football sticker disappointment

I'm resisting the temptation to collect the stickers for the upcoming European Championships. Mainly because of the cost, but also because Topps - the company that now has the rights to produce the stickers - has introduced deliberately rarer stickers and 'variations' (different version of stickers) to collect as well. And that annoys me.

However, I'm not averse to free stickers. On a day trip to England yesterday I ended up with some freebies from M&S when I bought some food.

(In Cymru M&S are giving away stickers of Cymru players. I haven't got any of those. Yet.)

As anyone who has collected stickers like this will know, you get a special joyful feeling when the pack contains a "shiny" sticker.

My thrill was short-lived in this case. The shiny sticker was... advertising M&S food!

Ah, well. Less than 3 weeks to go to the Euros.

Chrimbo Snack of the Month - Christmas pudding crisps

I really wanted to like these... I mean, I like Christmas pudding and I like crisps. So...

Here's the rationale behind the crisps.

And if you want to know what's in "Christmas Pudding Flavour", here you go.

They look like normal crisps.

Close up of the flavouring.

Conclusion: Well, I wanted to try them for the blog and at least I got a Snack of the Month post out of it. But they won't become of my yuletide traditions unfortunately.

From a field to Anfield

This is just a silly football-related blogpost highlighting the extremes of watching football. On Saturday 1 February I was at Coronation Park, off Sloper Road in Cardiff watching Grange Albion of the South Wales Alliance Premier League play Merthyr Saints.

Merthyr set up to defend a corner

It was a decent game played in blustery conditions. Grange scored early then failed to score a number of really good chances. A couple of minutes before the end of the game, they conceded a penalty, which was duly converted, and the game ended in a draw.

Coronation Park is a football pitch next to the bus depot (site of a fun day out in times past!). I've given up making jokes about parking the bus, because my friend Tom who I go with didn't think it was funny the first fifteen times I said it. The rest of the ground backs on to houses and an abandoned playpark where the swings have been removed. I walked across the pitch and it's got daisies growing on it. It is literally a field.

Three days later I was watching Shrewsbury Town play Liverpool in the FA Cup replay at Anfield, one of the most famous grounds in football. There had been some controversy about the game because Liverpool were only going to play their under-23 team. Still, this was the first time Shrewsbury had ever played at Anfield and the universe, for once, conspired in my favour because I had some work booked in North Wales the following day, which had been in my diary for weeks before the fixture was announced. So I had a good reason to be in the vicinity.

It's fair to say Anfield was a bit different to Coronation Park.

A blue and amber huddle in a sea of red

8,000 Shrewsbury fans made the trip to Anfield, packing out the away end. It was the first time Shrewsbury had played with a Video Assisted Referee (VAR) and, as you would expect, after Shrewsbury scored, the officials rewound the tape until they found a reason to disallow the goal. What's the point of having VAR if it doesn't prevent one of the biggest clubs in the country going out of the top cup competition, after all? LiVARpool eventually went on and won the game, thanks to one of the Shrewsbury defenders panicking and heading the ball into his own net.

Shrewsbury will never have a better opportunity to win at Anfield than this game, and to lose it to an own goal is such a quintessentially Shrewsbury Town fan experience it almost beats losing for the fifth time at Wembley.

For me the contrast between where I was watching football on the Saturday and the Tuesday was the most amusing aspect. Football is football, whatever the surroundings look like. The game is still the game; the drama is still the drama; the disappointment is still the disappointment.

Really? REALLY?

A bold claim.



When I think back to my childhood, I remember Sodastreams being crap. You had to buy the fabulously expensive syrups (made from unicorn blood and rocking horse droppings judging by the price) and the carbonating canisters, and you ended up with a drink that tasted a little bit like the drink normal people bought in the shops, but not quite. You got the same effect much more cheaply by buying Panda Pops.

Greatest Christmas present ever?

Yes, if you want to get your kids used to disappointment at Christmas.

That would work as a new caption.

"Sodastream - how disappointment tastes"

By the wayside

Disappointment with other people is sometimes hard to live with.

Almost two years ago the (Christian family) organisation I worked for was rocked when the recently departed director left his wife and moved in with the lover he had apparently been having an affair with for almost a year.

We all had questions about it, but ultimately we will never know why he chose to do that. The aftermath was an alienated family, broken friendships, and a sense of questioning wonder that anyone would do that and claim that God was okay with it.

A couple of months ago a couple I've known for several years split up when the husband moved out. There doesn't seem to be a reason why he left. I remember their children being born and he seemed such a doting Dad. As a couple they appeared to be soul mates.

I admit I hadn't seen much of them the past few years, but I wonder how they could have grown apart. Another couple I knew from the same church recently split for good as well, finally getting a divorce after a long rocky patch in their marriage. I went to their wedding. I remember the groom's dad giving a speech welcoming his new daughter-in-law to the family.

Did all that mean nothing?

I've learned there are two errors I can make when facing disappointment with people. Firstly, I can assume that there was something I could have, or should have, done to prevent it. Maybe if I'd been a better friend or invested more in them as people, then they would have talked to me about their problems and I could have fixed things and prevented this from happening.

It's the delusional superhero response. The likelihood is that I would have been sucked in to the row and been forced to take sides.

The second error is to assume that everything that went before was false. This is the 'John Calvin response' to people who 'fall away' - they were never saved in the first place. It's harsh, and it presumes there is no further chance of redemption, but it does provide an answer for why Christians do stupid, sinful things regardless of the consequences; things they know they shouldn't do that hurt the people they said they loved.

Having said all that, though, I don't find the Calvin response satisfactory. It's too simple.

Maybe it's that after a while people think that the rules don't apply to them? That was possibly the case in the first example I listed. It's easy to get blase about matters of faith and believe that God is your buddy who will wink and look the other way whatever you choose to do. Particularly if you're successful at all this 'Christian' stuff; particularly if you have a ministry and people look up to you.

We can forget that we need to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. We can forget that promises matter to God. The thing that angers God the most, it appears to me, is people who break their covenants. Not just their covenants with God, but their covenants with people made in the image of God.

That's why offences against our neighbours - adultery, lying, stealing, killing - are such a big deal in both testaments. That's why - unpopular though it is to say this in church these days - divorce is regarded as a bad thing in the Bible.

I can believe that people mean the things they say and the vows they make, but then can change. I believe they can get overly familiar, even contemptuous, about their commitments, and about their faith. And I'm not so dumb as to think it could only happen to other people. (I'm fairly dumb, but not that dumb.)

When anyone lets their faith go by the wayside, that's a warning that anyone - including me - shouldn't take things too lightly. If we forget the Kingdom is a Pearl of Great Price we might cast it before swine.

Gig review: Florence and the Machine at Cooper's Field, Cardiff

This was an eagerly anticipated 'massive' gig by an artist I have a genuine respect and deep-down love for, and yet I was left quite disappointed by it.

For one thing if you're going to pay £30 for a ticket (once you add on the 'booking fee' aka 'being screwed by the ticket office fee) you expect to be able to hear the freakin vocals. Unfortunately the punch drunk baboon on the sound desk had only been given rudimentary training in knob-fiddling and so the resultant sound was something akin to listening to a car radio underwater. When she spoke between songs she may as well not have had a mike at all.

Or to put it another way it reduced the gig rating in my estimation from a potential 9.5/10 to a barely scraping it 6/10.

The energy was there. The crowd were there and loving Florence in all her dippy, dreamy wedding-dress-wearing kookiness. But it's a good thing that the crowd drowned out Miss Welch during the big hits because that obscured the terrible PA job.

And it was some crowd, crushed into a sweaty, claustrophobic rubbery canvas tent that seemed to keep the heat in, but let the sound out. (I think that was part of the problem. Canvas walls don't reflect audio waves the way walls do.)

So all in all I felt a bit let down.

(It also means I want to see her again somewhere where they get the vocal mix right.)

It may have sounded like anger; actually it was just disappointment

Two people have remarked that a previous blog post about my current job coming to an end sounded ‘angry’ (or made me sound angry). I’m not surprised because sometimes it’s easy to think any criticism or confrontational commentary is anger.

Words can sound angry when you read them in your head, but wouldn’t sound angry if the person said them because far more is conveyed in the tone of voice we use than in the actual words we use. If you heard me saying those things you’d know I wasn’t particularly angry.

That’s not to say there weren’t times when I felt angry. Of course I did. It’s hard to experience a redundancy process – even one you welcome because you have another job to go to – and not feel angry sometimes.

It’s hard not to feel angry when you’re told that the financial crisis has been brewing for over six months. Especially if during those six months one of your jobs was to make sure the Chief Execs expansionist vision statement was turned into posters to put up around the building.

What exactly are you meant to make of that?

It’s hard when you know that people have gotten in touch to say how much the things you’ve worked on have helped them, but then it seems your job is going because only ‘frontline’ jobs are staying. I think my job was frontline. Communicating the mission of our organisation, and providing useful material to the public. Raising funds. Promoting activities.

In what way aren’t those frontline?

And it’s just plain irritating when you ask who you should hand stuff over to and you’re made to feel like you’re being a troublemaker for asking the questions. I genuinely wanted to know who to give things to. In the end I had to make educated guesses.

When people don’t seem to know who will be responsible for the bits of your job that are going to carry on, it does make you wonder how well thought through the plans are.

Is all I’m saying.

It also doesn’t help when you’re in a meeting with a project manager who is on the verge of tears because of the stress. This is someone who is staying and is scared and confused at the prospect. I had to reassure her that things were going to be okay, even though I had no real conviction that they would.

Should it be the responsibility of the people leaving to reassure those who are staying in employment that everything is going to be okay?

And I realise you, dear blog reader, may be reading all these unanswerable rhetorical questions and be thinking ‘Man, he sounds angry!’ But believe me I’m not. I’ve quite literally moved on – into a job where I am both wanted and needed. My first week in the new job saw me hit the ground running with no shortage of urgent projects to sink my teeth into.

I don’t have time to be angry. What I do feel is disappointment.

The thing I’ve said to many people is I never expected to leave my previous job that way. Maybe to move on in a halo of glory, with well wishes and cries of ‘We’ll miss you’. Or even to be thrown out of the building and have the door-codes changed behind me. But never to go like that, as one of over 30 people, and to have my team just dissolved, with no one to replace us, or to take up the baton and promise to maintain the high standards we reached.

I think the greatest cause of my disappointment through all this is the recognition that much of what we worked for is going to be lost. And I can't shake the sense that it's because what we did wasn’t recognised and valued in the first place.