The Premier League season started up again today, and I can't deny a twinge of nostalgia (you might even call it homesickness) for my days in London. It's always an exciting time of year - the football starts up again, and with it stuff like the BBC's Match of the Day, and all of the fantasy leagues from the various newspapers.
I have to count Match of the Day as one of the things I miss most, along with bacon sandwiches and Big Waterstones, the one on Piccadilly. For those who don't know, it's a roundup of the day's Premier League action, showing all the highlights from all the games, along with commentary from the BBC's regular team of top soccer pundits (and Alan Shearer, who always seems to be invited back).
It's kind of an institution, as it airs pretty late on Saturday nights, and on Sundays to show the highlights from that day's matches. This is actually pretty savvy programming by the BBC, if you think about it. Because chucking-out time at the nation's pubs is around 11pm, and MOTD usually starts between 10-11pm, it's a great come-down for a night out, and a chance to sober up with some water or something before you go to bed. Or, if you've been in all night, it's that perfect excuse to stay up just a little later, in case the movies on Channel 4 or Channel 5 aren't that appealing.
Now, it hasn't always been on the BBC, however - for a year or two, back in the early 2000's, rival network ITV got the rights to show the Premier League highlights, but I still remember the celebrations when it went back to the BBC. And despite not having grown up with MOTD, it felt right to me even then, if for no other reason than the iconic theme music:
A big reason for my nostalgia is that watching MOTD reminds me of the first time I lived in England. I was in Southend, just an hour east of London, and getting acquainted with the UK for real, after having visited several times in the previous six years.
One of the first things I learned then is that weekends are different in the UK than they are here. Here, everything's open pretty much as usual on Saturday and Sunday, but there it's almost impossible to get a haircut or a dinner of fish and chips on a Sunday, because those shops are all closed. Supermarkets and department stores will open before noon, but won't let you buy anything until the clock strikes 12 (seriously, I once saw a sales assistant at Debenhams refuse to even tell a customer where something was, because it was too early). Some shops proudly announce that they're open on Saturday, as if it's some new-fangled idea they've just come up with.
What this means is that you have to be super-organized if you want to get anything done on weekends. Either that, or you just sit at home and read the paper or keep an eye on the football scores as they come in. I do remember a lot of very pleasantly lazy Saturday and Sunday mornings where I did just that - leafing through the Guardian while listening to Radio 2 in the living room, with the sun shining on the Thames Estuary... It's hard to beat that.
Now, this will take a little explaining, but another of my pleasures was staying in on a Saturday afternoon and watching the scores come in on Sky Sports News. Sky Sports News didn't feature any game footage whatsoever (because evidently any trace of a man kicking a ball would have cost them billions in revenue from their pay-TV subscriptions).
What it did have was a newsroom full of men in suits and varying levels of agitation, relaying what was happening at each ground across the country. While Jeff Stelling read out the latest scores and scorers, you'd sometimes hear someone shouting in the background, as one of the presenters' teams had just scored. Occasionally they'd cut to Chris Kamara standing on the edges of a stadium, with the tiniest smear of green behind him, offering some hot air or other about what the result meant for the relegation race in the Second Division, as was.
But the best part was at the end of the afternoon, when they had someone read out all the scores, from each league. If you're a fan of mythical place-names, as I am, then you'd be in heaven - Sky went all the way down to the Conference, relaying what Hereford United and Shrewsbury Town had accomplished that day. And then the announcer would move to the farthest reaches of the Scottish Leagues, followed by the Welsh Premier. And every week - EVERY SINGLE WEEK - on hearing the results from Welsh team TNS, Jeff Stelling would crack the same joke: "They must be dancing in the streets of TNS tonight."
Admittedly, one of the main reasons for watching Sky Sports News on a Saturday afternoon was to keep an eye on my team in the office soccer fantasy league, which was rather competitive. But I don't know if that makes the preceding more or less sad, so I'll just move straight along.
I guess the reason I'm so nostalgic for those days, despite living in a dump and working in the worst company ever, is that I felt I could blow an afternoon that way, and not worry about whether I was Getting Things Done or anything like that. I sometimes berate myself a little bit for not having gotten my act together until around 2012 (when I started reading all the self-help and time-management books), but on the other hand, it is nice to remember the Saturdays and Sundays where I could unselfconsciously stay in bed all day, only venturing out for a burger or to do my washing at the laundromat.
Now I do silly things like sign up for half-marathons and try to keep my house clean. I guess that's growing up, but it's kind of a shame sometimes that as we get certain things more in control, we have less time to ourselves, instead of more. I feel like it should be the other way around.
At any rate, I'm unable to catch MOTD this season (unless someone wants to explain how I can torrent it), but at least I'll still be able to follow the Premier League - I've signed up for another office fantasy league. And it looks, from this first matchday, that I'm doing terribly. Nice to know some things never change.
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