Is it not about time we looked really hard at the state of women’s football and analysed how the lasses measure up against the lads in the beautiful game? Oops, hold on a minute. I have just been told some other scribe had exactly the same idea the other day and that there is little left that has not been examined in the closest possible detail.
Charming. There have been so many other important issues in the last few days such as the bonds between busy people and their pets, like the fate of the Downing Street cat, that I passed over in the belief that I was going to tell you everything I had discovered about fouls, free kicks and the fair sex. Now my faith in being able to report on the imminent emergence of women’s football into a prime national force lie shattered, not unlike my faith in Father Christmas and TV detector vans.
I must take a little care here. Let me just say that when I discovered that the generous Mr S Claus was not entirely the philanthropic old so-and-so I had so vehemently believed, I thought someone was messing with my head. Non-plussed and nine, my world’s bottom fell out.
Recently I heard of a wee girl aged six who told her parents in no uncertain way to quit the pretence over the old codger and to just be absolutely straight with her over her festive gifts coming not from the land of the Laps, but from the store of Argos. Shocked and hurt, they demanded to know how their wee darling had encountered such a grim truth. Hands firmly on her hips, the precocious angel looked at her tearful Mummy straight in the eye and yelled: “I just googled it, right?”
I know how the wee lass feels. My hands are on my hips too but I’m hurting inside. Having just learned there may actually be no such thing as TV detector vans my belief that we live in a fair and just society has been shaken. Way back when TVs had valves and gave off proper interference that would easily have been picked up in the next village – if TV detectors had actually been invented – our family religiously got a conscience-salving TV licence from the Post Office in Breaclete. It ensured we were on the right side of the law when we sat very upright to watch Dixon of Dock Green.
We tutted about a certain family who we had heard were less upright and who decided the authorities would not pay the fare to send detector equipment across the Minch to find Hebridean evaders. We thought it was only a matter of time until a van with an array of coat hangers on the roof roared across the Bernera Bridge and homed in on their cottage.
Oh, they will surely nab them soon. Serves them right. Softly softly, we thought. That was also the name of another cop show that brazen detector-defying family watched illegally. Oh, the shame. Yet knock-knock came there none. Oh, they got a note in the post asking if there was any reason they didn’t have a telly licence and they apparently wrote back with a terrible black lie claiming they couldn’t afford a box in the corner and, well, that was that.
They were never disturbed again and they continued to watch from when the men in sensible tweed suits from the Open University came on BBC2 at something like 6.30am until the similarly-dressed Patrick Moore, who required considerably more fabric than the nyaffs of the OU, signed off in the wee small hours after The Sky At Night. Mind you, I did hear of people who did get a visit from a bespectacled man from the Post Office, who I think claimed he’d been sent by the Home Office.
He turned up at a house in Stornoway one year where a local character had just moved in. He had no telly being a devotee instead of the BBC Home Service. For readers under 35, that was a radio station until 1967 where presenters with plummy accents spoke about politicians with plummy names, like Sir Alec Douglas-Home. It was a bit like Radio Four but with more pzazz. It also had more hiss and more gurgle, but that was because it was on Medium Wave and reception was really quite rubbish.
Anyway, Speccy said he was just making sure his paperwork was in order. “Yeah right, get on with it.” So, do you have a television set? “Nah, cove, I don’t have one of these boxes at all at all. I wouldn’t have time to watch it even if I did.” Ah but, insisted Speccy, maybe he could in to have a look round? After all, he could not help but notice there was a TV aerial up on the roof. “So what?” replied the man from Perceval Road. “There’s a pint of milk on the doorstep but that doesn’t mean there’s a cow in the kitchen.”
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