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I listened to the York City match as we drove to Bournemouth. After looking doomed to be relegated, City pulled off a string of great results and were within a few points of safety, but all the bottom clubs have been playing well and now they’re back in the relegation zone. There’s hope of survival still, but that is typical York. Hope followed by disappointment. If only they’d carried on losing I would never have dared to dream that they might stay up.
Thank goodness that I think football is stupid.
It was strange to be dragged from London to the seaside. The sun was shining and holidaymakers were eating ice cream. I walked down to the beach and had some chips. From the venue you could see the big wheel and the heater skelter. I was back in the function room rather than the big theatre. One audience member tweeted me to tell me that she’d had her sixth form discos in here. I think it’s five years since I played this venue (although the technician asked if it had been 18 months or two years- pretty sure it wasn’t). Weirdly the website selling tickets had decided that there was only one ticket left (when there was clearly room for a couple of hundred more chairs. I don’t know why they wouldn’t want to sell as many tickets as possible, but it was a mild palaver getting more on sale, so sorry if you thought it had sold out and missed it. It was only by chance that I had spotted this.
The 180+ that I had in were an exuberant crowd and once again this was more than I was expecting (though possibly not quite as many as I got in 2012). The reception was mainly good, but a couple in the front row didn’t crack a smile for the whole first half. Well occasionally the man would smirk a bit in spite of himself, but the woman looked positively miserable. I assumed they wouldn’t be back for the second half. But I was wrong. They returned and sat without smiling for the next 50 minutes. They must have been laughing on the inside.
After the show I met a vicar who had come to the show. In contrast to the Bradford man from last night, the vicar discussed my routine with me in a calm and measured way, making some an argument about why the two different genealogies were different (one, he said, went through the paternal line and the other the maternal - though they do match up in places, so not sure what that means - but one being the human and the other divine: I may not quite have remembered this, but it was an interesting argument). There is nothing wrong in being challenged about your beliefs in either direction and it’s admirable that he was prepared to listen to me without shouting out (though he said he had to check himself to prevent that).
So a tale of two Christians: a shit racist one and a reasonable, thoughtful, but committed one. It’s almost like a parable. I am not saying I am Jesus, that’s for other people to say.
Tiredness hitting in at the moment, shown by the fact that I keep falling asleep during the drives (I am not driving), which only happens when I am reaching the end of my energy reserves. But only one more gig to get through in this little run. I zoned out by playing Civilisation II ad perfecting a world where I had very much won the peace. I controlled everything but one city and concentrated on making everything as nice as possible for my millions of citizens. The real world is chaotic and dangerous, but my fake world, pretty much entirely conquered by subversion rather than war, was running smoothly and I enjoyed improving the environment and fixing up the cities without any fighting at all. What if that world is the real world and our world is the video game? It isn’t. Don’t be stupid. What’s wrong with you? Are you crazy?
