According to a nice old lady, in a recent interview with Victoria Wood, the Second World War would certainly have been lost had the Nazis only been able to interrupt our imports of tea. She worked at Bletchley Park where Britain’s greatest ever war hero Alan Turing used to chain his mug to the radiator to stop any light fingered cryptanalyst from filching it. So great was the risk to our island home should Turing’s enormous brain pan be deprived of its regular cuppa.
The risk to our safety and security and the spectre of concentration camps being erected on the outskirts of Newark-On-Trent is considerably less if I don’t get anything written for Positively Arsenal this morning, but such is the moribund state of my imagination that I have made a pot of that fine fluid in the hope it keeps me lucid long enough to invent some form of verbiage for your edification. I’ve opted for a blend of Assam and Kenyan black leaf teas put together by Taylor’s of Harrogate, apparently if one believes the crest on the packaging, Prince Charles drinks it. But I shan’t allow that to put me off.
I’d love to be able to look into the leaves at the bottom of my cup and tell you that they suggest an historic victory on Sunday but the precious caffeine in my brew is only going to help in keeping me awake and not actually bestow any kind of prescience upon me. Sorry. In any event isn’t it somewhat premature to be looking so far ahead? Well, maybe not. Let’s face it as the matches run out, like sand in an hour glass, every grain suddenly seems more important, more detailed and significant. We look forward to each game with ever more keen anticipation, like an old man knowing each passing spring brings him perilously closer to his last.
A few things have been said about our opponents at the weekend, with some of which I need to take issue. Not least here on this blog penned yesterday by our very own Bradyesque7 in his extremely excellent round up. He said, and I quote, “This is Arsenal vs. Manchester United and it is the game I have been waiting for all season.” Just goes to show how different we all are. It’s the one Arsenal match I hate above all others. I haven’t seen our erstwhile skipper in the vile red and black because I haven’t watched Man Utd this season. I recall one year actually taking the family out for a walk with the dogs rather than watch them. I checked later and it transpired that Adebayor had scored and we’d won so as a tactic it worked rather well. But this isn’t about some silly superstition. I genuinely despise looking at as much as a pair of Man U socks. When it comes to our matches I watch after the event, or on live pause, so I can fast forward through their possession and only watch when we have the ball. Some say it’s a little extreme but I’d rather have root canal surgery carried out with no anaesthetic by a drunken dentist with Parkinson’s disease than look at Ferguson’s revolting face as it pollutes our beautiful stadium.
I do sometimes wonder if the fact that I don’t see them has diluted any negative emotions I might otherwise harbour for Mr Persie. But of course I can’t say as it’s a theory I have never felt the inclination to test. I am however well aware that plenty of other Arsenal fans seem unusually exercised by him.
The entire scenario brings to mind the unfortunate nuptials of an old school friend of mine who was a little unlucky in love. Almost as unlucky as any of my wives have been in fact. His bride, it later transpired, had been conducting a long and highly illicit liaison with the gentleman responsible for the catering at their wedding. They’d hired him as, when approached to rustle up the old vol-au-vents and cocktail sausages he’d offered a remarkably reasonable estimate in regard to his fees. Well no bloody wonder my friend said with admirable understatement when the ghastly truth eventually came out. The point is that when I asked how he could be so sanguine as to the nature of his cuckolding and indeed how he could speak of the dreadful woman with such equanimity, this is what he said. “Simple, Stew, after finding out what she was really like and what she’d been up to, I just don’t love her any more” Well no, I retorted, and I should bloody well think not. Of course you don’t love her, but how on earth can you be so calm when talking or thinking about her? I seemed more agitated when we discussed that bearer of the scarlet letter than he ever did. And do you know what he told me? He said that just because he didn’t love her didn’t mean he hated her. The opposite of love, he told me is not hate it is indifference. And by golly if the scales didn’t fall from my eyes in that instant. The clouds parted, the light of reason shone down and I cried out ‘call me Saul no longer for now my name is Paul’.
He was as correct in what he said as any human being could ever hope to be. If you are sufficiently passionate about the unmasking of our ex-captain and his apparent treachery to indulge yourself in active hatred of him then you obviously still care an awful lot about him. Give it up. Let it go. I am honestly as indifferent to him as every other player in the world who doesn’t play for Arsenal. They exist in some wraith like insubstantial form occupying a kind of football nether world. You know like those things under the mountain in Lord Of The Rings that even Aragorn was shitting himself over. Except not scary. Robin doesn’t scare me. I’m happy for him that he’s finally had a couple of injury free seasons but only in a vague, disconnected, abstract way. I don’t really mind what happens to him. Let him marry the chef if that’s what he wants.
As far as the whole clapping, honour guard mularky is concerned I seem once again to be out of step with popular opinion. My take is we should display our class by applauding the league winners. Precisely in the way we would expect a classy set of away fans to applaud us when we next win the title. Instead of looking like a bunch of whining, snot nosed children who are too emotionally immature to cope with someone else winning instead of them, we should be dignified and unperturbed. I would also like it if our players could stand there and clap them and take a good close look at them and think ‘I want that to be me’. I’d like to think they could use the experience as inspiration to go out there and win the damn thing next time around.
Of course having said that it’s easy for me, I won’t be there. Because naturally the sanctimonious author who just produced a caffeine fuelled rant lecturing you on how to act with adult sangfroid in the face of Red Nose, Judas and all of their revolting little cohorts is too childish and feeble to even bear to watch them play on television. Hypocrisy is a merciless mistress, but I serve her to the best of my ability at every opportunity.
Positively Arsenal 
Merlot,
What you said about Barcelona.
.
Plus there is something deeply disturbing about those dead eyed, ungracious, unsporting, self-indulgent, whinging, cheating, diving, sneakily violent, self-righteous, half an old firm in a joke leaguers, fake underdogs, self-promoting for fake charity, petro money taking hypocrites, national bank ruining, taxpayer stealing, dodgily financed people that I just can’t put my finger on. It’ll come to me.
And adding Puyol, busquts, abidal, to the above and the uber cunt of all time Alves.
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@Frank
I want them to bring him, I want him to start and play the full ninety. And I want him to try 120% and still fail because he is well in Koscielny’s pocket.
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happy birthday George,
great write up stew, but giving up hating the many judases to have left our club over the years is difficult. you cannot treat them like any other players because any other player has the potential to join us. only Keown can be let back in!
Sunday I have no idea how I will react but I’m not classy and though we may want our fans to show class the present lot in the stadium are defiantly not. how can you ask fans who cannot respect their own players and manager to respect an opposition especially one that contains such vermin.
As for tea I normally have a red hot cup at about 15 mins into the first half and early in the second if I’m watching the game at home and according to my superstitions ARSENAL always play better
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So let me get this straight,
Fergi has paid us £25m (23.5 + 1.5m win bonus which we collect on Sunday) and manure pay the skunk £15m per year on a four yer contract? That is insane.
This for a player with an appalling injury record, who goes AWol every season when the clocks go back, chokes in Europe every fucking year and will be on their books until he is 33 years old.
Fuck, if Wenger did that to bring in one player, even if was to guarantee a one season wonder league win whist ignoring every other frailty in the team, we’d string him up and and any reasonably governed board of directors would be outraged at a projected investment of £85m one one player. Manure simply don’t have at kind of money in loose cash. They really really don’t. £400m on the never never at £50m per year interest, what kind of banking system lets them keep spending like fools when still knee deep in debt………….oh. Shit! I get it.
We do.
Coincidently wasn’t that the exact nett residual amount Fergie was given to spend after the glazers trousered most of manures $500m share off load?
Jesus, Fergie must have really wanted this years title bad, real bad to have gambled the entire financial future of the red scum on one skunk.
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@DC
You got that right. Close to 100m for a player who’s already on a downward trajectory (his scoring record this season is worse than the two before)
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Warm birthday greetings George. Have a glass of something, or a cup of tea. Your present arrives, oh, Sunday I’m sure.
Fun, I still have no idea what JvC stands for, except loads of options, none polite.
It’s not the guard of honour I’m interested in, nor the courteous clapping. It’s the score in the 97th minute or whenever the ref decides “I’ve added on enough to the allocated extra time, oh well, sorry your lordship”.
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Judas van C**tie.
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Marvellous piece yet again Steww. Marvellous. Tea is great!
What I could do with £15 million a year… buy a big hat for one. Never been a hat wearer but with 15 million each year to spend I would be able to give it a go. Always imagined that being a hat wearer would mean having a few hats and, outside of a couple of wooly ones from football – do they still do bobble hats? not seen one for a long time – I don’t own a hat.
With 15 mill in the bank (less tax I guess) I could approach my new hat wearing life slowly and considered. I mean, there’s loads of types of hat, where would one start? would it be easy to fall into a ‘specific style’ of hat wearer? Could you get away with being seen as a hat wearer but having completely contrasting styles on from day to day?
A hat wearer is a serious lifestyle choice. As I sit here thinking of hats, for some reason, I can only think of hats beginning with B. Bowler, Bobble, Beret, Boater, Beanie, Busby, Baseball and Bloody Big one. I’m sure the rest of the alphabet has hats too but I guess there’re hat experts (probably in Luton) who will be able to guide me along the way.
Anyway, that’s the serious sort of thing I could do with 15 million, I wonder how wisely Mr RvP will use his each year? maybe buy a large hat with ‘git’ on it.
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Ah, Happy Birthday George
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And of course happy birthday to George!
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Happy birthday George.
How old is that in meerkat years?
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Happy Birthday, George!!!
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Well as a Christian man, also having a Saul to Paul experience, there is no way I am going to applaud any blow wow devils.
Apart from that, this is absolutely brilliant Steww. Top quality…and quite funny! You are good my friend, really good!
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the steww who knew arrived from peru order to ensue , happy birthday kung fu, frank is true, i agree with his view, to hell with that crew.
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It is still the 25th GMT. Still time to wish that lovable biting Meerkat a Happy Birthday. Where would we be without him!
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hunter @11:39pm lol
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11:30 even
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Shit, I missed Kung Fu George’s birthday. Happy birthday, you old fart.
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Lol
Grumpinho. Not old fart.
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Is the net down in Blackburn or George is wasted??
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Happy birthday to Pedantic Georg.
Cheers!
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