Monthly Archives: December 2016

So, I don’t know what you were up to last weekend, but I spent Sunday lunchtime yelling, screaming and jumping around in front of the TV.  It’s okay, it wasn’t just me, my dad and my sister-in-law were there too, also acting in a way entirely unbefitting sensible grown up people.  Why was this all happening?  Football.

The team I’ve watched for pretty much my entire life, AFC Wimbledon, were playing in the FA Cup.  After thirty seconds they were one-nil down.  With ten minutes to go, they were losing three-nil.  This explained a lot of the shouting.  And then…

They scored.  A minute later, two things happened – firstly, Wimbledon scored again, and secondly the jumping around began.  The next minute, they equalised.  Everyone in the house went crazy.  Then, with eight-and-a-half seconds of the game remaining, Wimbledon scored the winner.  We jumped on chairs and yelled with delight.

Watching football is, in many ways, a foolish way to pass your time.  Every year I spend hours on end watching grown men boot a ball around a field, when I could be, I don’t know, painting my house or writing the Great American Novel, or maybe even marking books.  But, as foolish pursuits go, you really can’t beat it for injecting a large dollop of joy into a grey December Sunday.