Sticker politics

While enjoying a trip to North Wales, I've noticed several pro-indy stickers. This one was well positioned near the entrance to Castell Caernarfon.

Yes Cymru stickers are common enough. However on a signpost in Llanberis there was a nice collection of stickers. Not sure what the Manchester City one was about, mind.

The Eryr Wen (White Eagles) is a Free Wales Army sticker. Nid Yw Cymru Ar Werth means Wales Is Not For Sale. 

And someone had embellished the obligatory Yes Cymru sticker with another sticker encouraging people to trust in the Lord always. 

I'm interpreting that to mean even God has got behind the Indy movement.

Scottish Premier League for the night: Celtic v Dundee

When I was growing up my friend Edwin who lived round the corner supported Celtic. (His family were from Scotland.) Back then we collected football stickers and Edwin was keen on trying to get all the Celtic players.

Fast forward 30+ years and I had the opportunity to travel to Glasgow for a conference with work. On the off-chance that I might get to a game I looked up the fixture list and it turned out there was a game scheduled for the day I flew into town. Celtic v Dundee in the Scottish Premier League.

The taxi dropped me off right outside

Booking a ticket was very easy and every seat has a 'view' option so you can see what the view was going to be like. I had asked for advice on the When Saturday Comes message board because I didn't want to end up in with the Ultras. I was safely away at the opposite end.

I got a taxi out to the ground. The driver asked if I wanted to go the quickest route or the fastest route, along the elevated motorway, which also gave you a view of the ground. I opted for that and we arrived with plenty of time to spare. I went into the Celtic Superstore. They had everything you could imagine in there in Celtic colours. You could kit out your house in green and white if you wanted to. I bought a scarf and a programme as souvenirs.

Celtic Selfie (note scarf)

I made a big mistake of buying a veggie burger from one of the many food vendors outside the ground and missed out on the chance of a MACARONI PIE inside! (Although as Cathy pointed out that would be a mightmare from a carb point of view.) Still, the curly fries were good. And I will know to wait until I'm inside next time.

Even the little men on the sign wear hoops

Some people have added their own messages to the signs

I had a great view from my seat. There were a lot of spare seats, including most of my row, so second half I moved along a bit to get some space.

Dundee wait while Celtic huddle

The game itself was not a great advert for Scottish football. Celtic started brightly but soon fizzled out into bland play-it-across-the-park football. There were a couple of chances from free kicks and corners, for both teams. But really Dundee had come to defend and hit Celtic on the break. But Celtic were playing possession football and lying deep themselves, so rarely lost possession.

Celtic on the attack

The Celtic crowd are unforgiving, apart from the Ultras in the opposite corner who bounced along and chanted almost throughout the game. Within a few minutes there were sighs and expletives in response to mis-hit passes. From so high up it was obvious that as a team, Celtic were fairly clueless. The goalkeeper, Craig Gordon, echoed the frustration of the fans when he got fed up that no one was ever ready for a pass or throw to play the ball out from the back. He ended up just hoofing it upfield where it was inevitably headed back by a Dundee player.

And on the defence...

Celtic had one really good chance in the first half when they unpicked the Dundee defence for the only time in the game, but then the striker fired wide. Other than that, Dundee defended solidly while Celtic passed the ball across the park in front of them, and then cut it out when Celtic tried to go forward.

Midway through the second half Colin Kazim Richards came on. He's a much bigger unit now than he used to be. He made an impact, just not a positive one, as every touch seemed to be a foul. With twenty minutes to go, a goal seemed less and less likely and even the Ultras stopped making noise. Dundee could have won it at the death but their unmarked player somehow headed wide from a corner. Shortly after it was the final whistle, with lots of boos from the fans who had stayed to the bitter end.

Heading towards a 0-0 draw

Even with a final score of 0-0, I'm glad I went. It was a new experience, And I would go again if I had the chance. Mainly for the promise of a macaroni pie than the hope of seeing a brilliant game of football.

Psychological insights into "collecting" - taxonomic and aesthetic collections

As I have mentioned a few times recently, I am doing a MSc in Business Psychology. A recent module, about marketing and advertising has been really interesting, particularly a tangent in a recent assignment about collecting. I find this particularly interesting as both Cathy and I have the collecting 'bug', and as a result we have a lot of stuff in our house.

The main psychological research into collecting I've read has been by Russell Belk. He distinguishes 'collecting' from 'hoarding' and 'accumulating', although I reckon they can look quite similar. But for the record, 'collecting' is "the process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical objects or experiences". Hoarding, meanwhile, is defined as collecting several things that are exactly the same, while accumulating is the gathering of things without the idea of completing a 'set', e.g. when a person doesn't throw out newspapers and they just start to pile up.

Collecting experiences: My collection of commemorative scarfs 

That note about experiences is true, I 'collect' football grounds that I have been to and I know several other football fans who do the same thing. It's the motivation behind buying mementoes like half and half scarfs or keeping ticket stubs.

There are different ways of ‘collecting’. Belk distinguishes between taxonomic and aesthetic collecting. Taxanomic collecting is working on the basis that you can complete a set - whether that set is stamps from Zanzibar, or one of each type of Roman coin, or the complete range of original Kenner Star Wars figures from the 80s. I'd say football stickers are a very good example of this - you even get an album showing which ones you need to complete the collection. Taxonomic collectors don't tend to give up when they complete the set. They usually move on to a new set or keep trying to improve their collection with better examples of the objects in it.

Football stickers are an example of taxonomic collecting

Aesthetic collecting is open-ended. It's when you collect a particular type of art, for example, where there is no finite limit. Of the two, taxonomic collecting is more active, with collectors deliberately seeking out the objects they need to complete their collection, while aesthetic collecting is more passive - people add to their collections as they see objects they want with less 'urgency'.

I'd say the Tsum-Tsums are taxonomic and the Groots are aesthetic

I think there is also a middle ground. I'm a member of the British Thematic Association, which is the aesthetic side of stamp collecting. While I have gone out and made my own 'list' of stamps that fit my theme, I also buy things that it simply wouldn't be possible to list. That is very much a case of 'If I see it, I'll decide whether I want it in my exhibition.' There's no way of knowing if my collection is complete because it's not as simple as 'have I got every stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty?' - there are all the envelopes with those stamps on, many of which are interesting in their own right.

My stamp collection on display for a stamp society

Having said that, there are attempts all the time to turn aesthetic collecting into taxonomic collecting - the Boba Fett Fan Club has tried to list absolutely every toy and other piece of merchandise featuring the galaxy's most feared bounty hunter. It's a nigh on impossible job. My collection is pretty much aesthetic in that I buy stuff when I see it but don't go actively looking. (Although I do always check out the Star Wars toys in toy shops and other shops that sell toys.)

My Boba Fett collection

Belk notes one of the more unusual aspects of collecting, in that once a thing is in a collection, it becomes special, precious, and 'sacred'. A collector can't just get rid of it, unless replacing it with a better item. The collector needs to look after the collection. It's kind of like the old saying that what you own can end up owning you because I admit sometimes all this stuff is inconvenient.

But I can't just get rid of it, it's my collection...

2015 in review: The non-fiction books I read

I've already blogged about the fiction I read in 2015. Here are some short reviews of the non-fiction I read during the year. I've divided them up into sections.

Football

I do read quite a few football books. The joke in book group is that I tend to read books about goalkeepers, particularly German goalkeepers. This year I kept up the tradition...

The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper - Jonathan Wilson
This is the book about goalkeepers and starts from the interesting premise that goalkeepers are different, both in terms of the role they play and psychologically. The historical stuff about the development of goalkeeping as a specialist role is really interesting. Unfortunately it gets bogged down discussing the various goalkeepers produced by different countries. While the research into, say, Cameroonian keepers, or the inheritors of Lev Yashin's spot in the Russian national team, can't be faulted, the material does all get a bit samey. There are also a few occasions when the author references stuff with the assumption the reader will know what he is talking about. I got most of them, but some I had to look up.

The Incredible Adventures of the Unstoppable Keeper - Lars Pfannenstiel
I got sent this to review for When Saturday Comes. Lars Pfannenstiel is a German journeyman keeper who ended up playing on all six continents, although never for anyone particularly good. He seems to regularly ditch everything to follow the gilded promises of agents or club owners, which invariably come to nothing. He cuts a fairly naive figure as a result. My (longer) review for WSC is online here.

An Autobiography - Pat Jennings
When I was a kid I collected football stickers (I still do!) and the first collection my brother and I had was Panini's 'Football 85'. The first team in the album were, of course, Arsenal, and the first player was their goalkeeper, Pat Jennings. So, he is one of those players who I can picture really clearly (at least, his sticker!). This autobiography was from 1983 and it's interesting to a point. He comes across as fairly dull, but some of the things he talks about aren't. For example, the stuff people chucked at him from the terraces. He ended up with a dart (!) in his arm on a couple of occasions. There's also a bit late on in the book which just wouldn't appear in a book by a pro sportsman now, when he worries that players playacting and pretending to be injured would make other people think footballers are "poufs". That's a word that doesn't tend to be used these days. Altogether now, "It was acceptable in the eighties..."

Full Time - Tony Cascarino
Not a goalkeeper, but another footballer from a different era. Cascarino played for a number of top clubs and also the Republic of Ireland in the late 80s and the 90s. This was one of the first truly confessional footballer autobiographies and it is really interesting. The section when he talks about splitting up with his wife is raw and honest and you can tell he feels like an utter shit about the way he treated her. There's a revelation that he might not have ever been eligible to play for Ireland after all, and an interesting accounting of where all the money he made disappeared to. It's hard to read the book and not like Tony Cascarino, mainly because he is being honest about how unlikeable he is. I'd quite like to read an updated version to find out what happened to him after he retired.

Theology

Gospel of Freedom - Jonathan Rieder
This is a very scholarly, yet accessible, study of Martin Luther King's 'Letter from Birmingham Jail' that unpicks King's theology of non-violence and liberation to thoroughly explain it. It's rare I would use the term 'life-changing' of any book, but this has really impacted on me. Particularly the challenge of Dr King regarding what kind of 'extremists' we will be. In a world that seems to be dominated by the actions of extremists, the call to be extremists of love and justice, is still powerfully relevant.

Other non-fiction

A Universe from Nothing - Lawrence Krauss
This is trying to make astrophysics simple and it must work because I understood it. Put simply, it proposes that the existence of the universe was inevitable given quantum fluctuations. There is no 'cause' to the universe; it just is. In philosophical terms this means the world is just a 'brute fact' and various cause-related arguments for God's existence are rendered moot.

Too Much Information - Dave Gorman
This is like a book version of Dave Gorman's TV show Modern Life is Goodish. He makes some great points about how spammers ruin Twitter and how bands shouldn't stick new songs on 'Greatest Hits' albums (or release such albums if, in fact, they haven't had many hits!), but generally it's one of those semi-forgettable books you breeze through, chuckle at, and then stick on the shelf to never read again.

So, that's it. All in all I read 22 books in 2015. Not a bad reading rate!

Previous posts:
The Douglas Coupland books I read in 2015
The other non-fiction I read in 2015

Evidence that Wales have finally made it on the international football stage

Wales have qualified for the France 2016 European Championships - their first major tournament of the modern era (they kind of qualified for the Euros in 1976 although they didn't go to the very small final play-offs). It's a wonderful achievement having been nearly men for so long.

But to show they have really arrived, Panini has released a cash-in sticker album chronicling their qualifying campaign. They know how to fleece the suckers.

Says one of the (happy) suckers...

Yes, I succumbed. I love football stickers.
 I couldn't really not buy this.

Doing well on this page...

The one player everyone will want!