The Damned United

The Damned United is David Peace's brandy-fuelled adrenalin rush through the 44 days in 1974 when Brian Clough was manager of Leeds United FC. The novel rams straight into the narrative on Day One, with Clough entering the club he hates to take over and take control. he despises the players and the coaching staff for their hard style of cheating football. As an emerging football fan at this time it transports me back to a time when I disliked Leeds for being a dirty, fouling and successful team and to when I first remember Cloughie, Ol' Big 'Ead ranting on the telly. The prose twitches and struts through the mind of heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking, heavy-swearing Clough as he meets the players he hates with a passion and fears out of fear at his own failings. The ego-mouth of English football is shown to have a fragility of confidence at Elland Road. But this is played against the self-believe that in part created his rise at Derby County where he took a losing second division side to English Champions in the late 1960s. They even went to a European Cup semi-final, only to lose to a Juventus side who had given gifts to the match referee.

The Damned United surges through the days at Elland Road, carrying me along with it at a pace that rushes the mind. The tobacco stained corridors, sweat-stinking changing rooms, motorway journeys and late night bargaining are all brought to life in a repetitive prose that makes you feel that you are stomping along the corridors, around the corners and onto the training pitches with Mr Clough.

I recommend it not only for football fans but for anyone interested in biography-based novels and modern English fiction. The text repeats on itself, charging faster-and-faster as it runs through the thought processes of a man possessed - by his genius, by his mission, by his alcoholism but most of all by football.

Weather...

...its good in England or bad, its whether we put up with it. It's a relief to have a couple of whole days in a single row if good weather. Being outside makes such a difference, not penned in, not fetted, open and expansive. Your body feels more alive, your mind wakes up, your senses reach out.

I'm reading a book about the Little Ice Age which lasted from the 1300s to the 1800s so they say. Not so little for one person's life. Fascinating reading about the Norse discovery of what were to become the Americas, probably named after a Welsh merchant in Bristol who funded Cabot's voyages. They not only used currents to swing round and down Newfoundland but benefitted from the Medieval Warm Period which cleared coastal Greenland and the neighbouring seas  of glaciers and pack ice and allowed year-round settlement. But they found the indigenous people of America too hostile for them - presumably the only people that the Vikings did find too hostile given how they marauded and settled from Greenland to the Ukraine and, by subsequent generational proxy to Sicily (disguised as Normans).