SENTINELCELTS

Morning,all.

I received this on Saturday morning from our esteemed roving correspondent in Australia. Wonderful to hear from him again,and hopefully he will update us on his travels and travails.
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Well! Saturday/Glasgow…. Sunday/Perth! 

What can I say?

I suppose for me “32” immediately springs to mind! 

Everywhere I turned on streets, ear-wigged chats, glimpsed tablets or phones, my eyes, ears and senses filtered away the surrounding substance leaving…. ”32…32…32”.

Saturday of course had been defibrillation at it most erratic. Celtic’s style of play under Ange is undoubtedly one of ‘score more than they do’ but my two stents, angina and post TIA tenterhooks could do with a bit less of its consequential by-product of dangling us all over the edge of a volcanic precipice and then for the wanton quantum deviants of universal destiny to unleash the ‘let’s play five a side at the back’   and laughingly shove us towards the fiery abyss of doom and utter chaos far below.

Mind you fair play to those purveyors of chaos theory, they did at least leave me a get out from the agony of eternally roasting nuts that beckoned…..well a sort of get-out.

As the flatline of oblivion beckoned, what was that tugging and slowing my descent? 

A parachute perhaps? A bunjee rebound……if only…..but no!

For me as the game entered its last few minutes it seemed that any hope I had of avoiding the fatal fire of football’s fate had in fact been secured but only with an ever shortening noose, constricting my breathing, my airways, tightening ….. tightening … tighteninggggggggg! 

What had the voices on the airwaves who were there I thought to elucidate, enhance and widen my understanding of this marvellous game? Well, what they provided was a take your pick of banal pointless and irrelevant clichés.

”Devil and deep blue sea’, ‘frying pan or fire’, ‘someone needs to do something’, ‘he’s got a card or two up his sleeve’!

Oh how Hobson would have clapped in glee as (and I’m not sure it was just metaphorical) my hands autonomously reach for that Gordian knot constricting my gullet and blood flow while simultaneously thrusting my knees in a burpee away from the encroaching heat of hades…..bloodied/broken nose or roasted nuts….or just roasted nuts….what a choice.

I turned the sound off. Doom and destruction may have been inevitable, but I’d be fecked if the last thing I was to hear was a concerted belly rumble from the primordial puss of punditry.

And so the gods sniggered at my/our plight….my/.our pain…..oh the pain…damn you Stents, a curse on you Angina…..hell mend you you …you….pathetic Transient Ischaemic Attack..

Oh those with the attention span and perspicacity of a Kris-Boyd-like haemorrhoid (haemorrhoid is actually my own rhyming slang for him) can claim that immediate pressure-wise the Arabs deserved it; but in doing so surely….surely….they would have had to acknowledge that on that same basis and chances made, Celtic should already have scored an unassailable 242 goals….ish!

Anyway, as my symptomatic annihilation settled into the mere suspended animation of acceptance my ever-present psychotic and paranoic black crow cawed its feckin repetitious ear-worm……

“That’s life, that’s football and that’s dickhead commentators for you!” (I have a long simmering thesis on that subject sitting Vesuvius like over the Pompeii punditry where they will all be consumed by an eruption of their own verbal vomit, with only their words preserved in a flood of bullshite for future generations’ glee and ridicule.)

And so, as injury time beckoned …for the match of course this is now termed ‘added time’ … my twisted neck, bloodied nose and knees, and tortured soles (that refers to soles of my feet and is not a misspelling of souls!) it was indeed Injury time.

Mind you notwithstanding the above soulful outpouring (this time nothing to do with my feet), I hadn’t totally given up; that would have required at least acknowledging if not subscribe to the ridiculous  ‘Gerrard’ analysis  of…. ‘if games only lasted 87 minutes….’ or similar dross from the nasal nonentity (as time will show/is showing); but I did have that natural looming desperation of the chained captive and the ‘out of reach’ lit fuse crackling and heading inevitably to…..to….well maybe oblivion would have been an exaggeration, but let’s be honest a football fan’s fatalism knows no unplumbed vacuum.

I mean….a draw on the cards….and with the next day’s fixture looming….. the worst place to find yourself stuck/ensconced would be Perth for the next few days.

In my guts the Damoclean dread scythed; if Celtic didn’t come back with a couple of swashbuckling on target phaser salvos to rescue my sanity and more importantly our points gap, then the atmosphere in the city as all manner of Klingon life-forms materialised, would have me contemplating a future of Buddhist abstinence, spiritual isolation…..and possibly ‘getting utterly pished’.

But then ….oh then….the gloom vanquished as those fingers of quantum justice tipped a new spiral of dominoes.

Was it my imagination or as they fell did they number 32? did they settle in form of the number 32?

Whatever happened all I can honestly say is that what followed (as you can tell from the foregoing) was totally EXPECTED, PREDICTED and aesthetically CONJURED.

Oh how those playful little devious harbingers of fate, doom, destruction can mess with us – oh how feckin fickle they are!

As Spooky action at a distance came to the rescue, that throttling rope metamorphosed into the magical soaring cape of Kal-el invincibility and out of the crevasse of despondency I and generations past present and future soared.

HA! NEVER IN DOUBT-WAS IT! PIECE OF PISH THESE PLANNED GOALS. NO CHANCE FOR THEM TO COME BACK. GENIUS…..NO OTHER WORD…..GENIUS!

And as the United net bulged so the fart-filled expectations of blue meanies across the yet to be civilised outer reaches of the universe were punctured and chemists were inundated with unfulfillable  demands for Anusol….It’s rumoured good old Haemorrhoid himself had to get a properly fitting pair of jeans.

Fingers hammered keys, blogs blogged and Paisley Road west confirmed its pre-eminence as a flowing putrid sewer of illiterate incoherence as the MSM scribblers freed their trapped wind and employed every aspect of their imagination to call the winning scores ‘late goals’.

Huns across alien empires grunted their sphincters with “I feckin knew it…I feckin hate them’s”…. and by myself in those sober contemplative terms the white dove – my other psychotic ever-present guru – jist whispered…”That’s the way you used to do it Matt”.

“Seven Points clear and it’s not new year”….my heart whistled…sang…chanted.

“Just Sunday to see through now and who knows……..32…..it’s a sign I tell you…..32”.

I looked out of my hotel window as the darkness swaddled the distant river in its darkness and the silver stars in their own sparkling sign-language conversed, smiled and chanted a wee ‘hail hail’ with each other.

And so as the following twenty four hours were to unfold…well all I can say is that the fair city heard not a brogue stepping stomp or creep…although the James Webb Telescope has reportedly detected the quantum ripples of kling-ons becoming kling-offs…as civilisation has once again got its arse wiped and the annoying piles scissored clean…..for a wee while anyway.

Well done the Perth Saints.

And so to “32”!

I looked down at my computer screen.

Thirty-two it announced…..THIRTY TWO Degrees Centigrade….PERTH ……Western Australia…..8 days into my trip,,,,only 2,500 miles to go ….Sydney….Sydney FC and Everton that’s the plan.

Mind you….me and plans…..who feckin knows.

After all my itinerary has already changed at least twice….no wait ..’thrice’  -(I’ve always wanted to use that word in a sentence – not in a poem where I needed a rhyme to go with my Chinese meal). But those events (including an exploding camper van which is why I am on a plane) can wait for another time and sleepless night but for the moment I need to go particularly as something small, black, with lots of legs has just crawled up my jeans’ leg….how the feck did that get on the plane?

But before I deal wae the wee nyaaf, I leave you with a thought …..

First there ids the occasional similarity between this Western Australia starburst and our own Scottish gateway to the highlands of imagination.

In both cases I have witnessed men in thongs and ladies in things similar to thongs…I suppose we might call them thing thongs.

The difference of course is that in that ‘fair city’ anyone wearing such garb is usually scampering wae the polis in chase; whereas in this Perth, those wearing such gear ARE the polis!

And so to Motherwell on Wednesday….I’ll tell you about that later, but the exploding camper van has a lot to answer for…..

Hail Hail for the moment

P.S.   A couple in the queue for the plane asked where I was heading. “Divine” I said.

“Divine? Where’s that?”

“Sydney” I replied.

They didn’t say anything just looked puzzled.

“One night in a dream or nightmare it will come to you” and I boarded.

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Above article by ESTADIO