Dead Ringer - Friday Flash

Victor was a long-distance lorry driver. As a teenager, he’d failed his driving test three times before passing, but four years older and wiser, secured his HGV license at the first time of asking.

He delivered white goods in brown boxes up and down the length of Britain. From factory to high street shops and warehouses in industrial estates.

He often pondered his role in the process. For he always felt invisible. Even though the recipients were all too aware of his paperwork requirements, pink, yellow and blue copies requiring their endorsement, somehow he felt peripheral to everything. As extraneous as the brown cardboard box, or the foam packaging inside.

This may have had something to do with him not being permitted to unload the trailer. He just waited unseen and not even resented, in his cab reading the newspaper. Until the wraiths outside signalled they were done by slamming his tailgate shut. They weren’t allowed however to close his doors, so he always had to leap out and do the job himself. This wasn’t a contract stipulation, but a Trades Union demarcation. The porters had always melted away before his feet hit the ground.

But a chance comment overheard in a pub one Saturday night, provided the spark that could change all these feelings of inadequacy and invisibility. Someone unseen suggested that he bore a passing likeness to the lead singer of a stadium rock band. When Victor went home that night, he printed pictures from the internet and went and scrutinised himself against them in his floor-length mirror. Yes he could see the stranger’s point. He went back to the WorldWideWeb to read up on this world wide celebrity. It took him all night, such was the welter of coverage generated by this man.

When Victor surfaced early Sunday afternoon, his mind presented him with a scheme. Somewhere from the deep recesses of his memory, it had plucked the notion of look-alikes. He could use the resemblance to imitate this famous man and see what second-hand glamour rubbed off on himself like stardust. Then people might sit up and notice him all right.

He paid for a very expensive stylist to shape his hair exactly so. He shelled out for some stage clothes in keeping with the frontman’s flamboyant tastes. He even forked over cash to have several tattoos done for the full simulacrum. He passed out at the needles. He watched endless videos of the man moving, dancing and giving interviews, practising the same in front of his mirror. Until he’d got his man off pat. Stroke for stroke, intonation for intonation. Inhabiting his habits.

Next he looked up the band’s tour dates. After each day's last delivery, he’d disarticulate and drive to the town where they were due on stage. He’d change into the clothes and then proceed to wander up and down the lines of concert goers queuing to enter. Very quickly he was pulled into the ranks time and again, for his photo to be taken with the fans. They knew it was entirely improbable that their idol would be wondering up and down outside the venue two hours ahead of showtime, just to hobknob with his devotees. Far more likely to be sniffing cocaine from the midriff of a naked groupie in the back of a limo. But they were happy to maintain the part-fiction, after all they would see the real McCoy this very night. This guy was the warm up act.

But somehow word of the accuracy of his masquerade spread and soon people were approaching him to open fetes and or judge local talent contests. "Double Take TV" asked him to be present at the side of the red carpet along with other rock and roll lookalikes at a prestigious Awards show and to try and wedge himself in the camera frame when his doppelganger stopped to be interviewed. He had some business cards printed up. An agent contacted him, but he couldn't see the value of giving up a fifteen percent split of himself.

As the earnings built, he boosted his wardrobe to match that of his model. One slight wobble in his career arc was when he was invited to sing live. He realised he'd only taken his impersonation so far, now he needed to go the whole hog. He rehearsed at home. He accompanied CDs in his rig. Now when the unloaders were toiling away, music was booming from the cab and they turned resentful all right. Victor would sing along, emulating the singer's strangulated drawl, ignorant of their curses.

He formed a tribute band and they took off to the next level. Accomplished musicians in their own right, just ones spared the effort of having to compose their own songs. With live performing came the girls. His own groupies. Did he feel bad that they imagined him to be someone else while he was fucking them? Not especially.

The only aspect of his spitting image he didn't replicate, was the prodigious drug intake. But his counterpart's behaviour was becoming increasingly unpalatable as he repeatedly made the front pages of the newspapers with his frequent Court appearances. Victor began to fret, he was so nearly making enough money to be able to give up his road hauling.

He fashioned a voodoo poppet and pinned it in areas trying to restrain the excesses of his lodestar. He sealed its nose to stop the cocaine and festooned the arms with needles to prevent the use of larger ones full of heroin. He could of course touch neither mouth or throat and thereby take away the man's and his own livelihood. He also hovered over the crotch, but decided to let it be as he didn't want to jinx his own good fortune in that particular region.

The sympathetic magic seemed to work as well. The wild man of rock cooled his heels and checked into rehab. In his absence, bookings for Victor shot up. His visibility increased even as the singer's diminished, having dropped out of public sight. Victor was having a high old time of things, until one day a woman lunged out of the shadows and fatally drove a carving knife into his throat.

It was never established whether she knew him to be a lookalike or not. She might have been a celebrity stalker. Or one of the star's one night stand cast offs. She might conceivably even have been a lookalike herself, one of those female serial killers, who took her role just a bit too far. A bit like Victor really.

For his part after nine months, the original wild man of rock emerged from his refuge and became a gentleman farmer. Turning his back on his former lifestyle.

Stoner Songs - My Top 10

DISCLAIMER: I have never inhaled, ingested, injected or any class of illegal drug. I've never bought into the notion that drugs fuel creativity. Why rely on the insertion of an external agency to access what's already in your noggin, no matter how deeply buried? Put the requisite perspiration in and unlock it yourself. If you want to, you know like connect to other consciousnessness, trying casting far and wide into your imagination to see with different eyes while still remaining on terra firma.

But having said all that, there does seem something particular to the rock and roll artist, whereby within its own terms, some supreme art can be wrought from the introduction of aides de memoire-cum-amnesia... Here's a top 10. Please feel free to comment your own suggestions

1) "White Rabbit" Jefferson Airplane.

The grandmammy of them all. Yeah Jim Morrison referenced Huxley while Gracie tips her hat to Carroll, but boy does she belt it out with feeling. "Keep your head" when all around are losing theirs indeed.

2) "Supernaut" 1000 Homo DJs (aka Revolting Cocks)

The sampled radio godjock lends this a political slant as Ministry were always falling foul of the authorities, for um prodigious consumption among other things. But there's no disguising the song's Black Sabbath bombastic riff and the politics get swept up in the general gleeful defiance. The full gamut of stimulants are seemingly on show here, from the drop out to the in your face confrontational. "I find the distance melts away with the spoon"

3) "Come Down Easy" Spacemen 3

"It's 1987 and all I wanna do is get stoned/ All I want for you is to take my body home". In line with my disclaimer, this band make me loathe myself the most for actually liking them, since they had no other reason to exist other than to laud drug use. Their second album was called "The Perfect Prescription". The demos were released retrospectively and titled "Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To" which incisively sums up the introspective circle of it the whole rigmarole. But they had a wonderfully mellow vibe and Sonic Boom before he crawled into his addiction, was a marvellous musician. His lyrics had a with a religious tint to his spiritual quest as witnessed in songs like "Walking With Jesus" which I also highly recommend, whether you allow for such elision of the scared with the profane or not.

4) "Blinded By The Light" The Streets

Quite simply the best song about Es ever. The narrator is waiting for his mates so has one foot in alertness looking out for their arrival, while the drug slowly kicks in to alter his state of mind. The narrator's commenting on the goings on in the club around him, giving it the authentic druggie patter, griping that the drugs aren't doing anything, other than skewing his vision. "My eyes are rolling back, I'm rubbing my thighs with my hand". When he sights his mates, he no longer cares that they're doing the dirty on him. A brilliant tale of drug-induced deracination of the senses. The video's great too.

5) "Police In Helicopter" John Holt

A tale from the socio-economics drug frontline in Jamaica, delivered with the white hot rage borne from implacable strength of conviction. This slice of roots reggae starts with the class deference of "Yes boss, yes, boss, yes boss" but ratchets up the stakes with the simple vow "But if you continue to burn up de herbs, we gonna burn down the cane fields". And cannabis is supposed to be a becalming drug?

6) "Yu Gung (Feed My Ego)" Einsturzende Neubauten

"I'm 6 metres tall and everything is important/ I'm 9 metres tall and everything is more than important/ I'm 12 metres tall and everything is inconceivable" sums up the inflated self mistaken for greater perception. The music manages to syncopate the sensation of the drugs flowing around the bloodstream.

Non-German speakers hoping for an English version in Pussy Galore's cover version, sadly I don't think the band were able quite to render all the song's lyrics, but it remains a wonderful messed up acid blues tribute all the same.

7) "Out Of My Mind On Dope And Speed" - Julian Cope

Mad as a box of frogs, induced by drugs or shacking up with Courtney Love at a formative age, it's hard to say...

8) "No Xmas For John Quays" The Fall

This early Fall track lambasts the withered imagination of the junky, but doubles up with Mark E Smith apparently slating his band in the lyrics of the song recorded as live. The driving brittleness of the music suggests that speed was the drug of inspiration behind this song.

9) "Cocaine In My Brain" Dillinger

"A knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork/ That's the way we spell New York" I always thought corks were associated with heroin scripts, but what do I know? Still a great song though

10) "Smoke Some Weed" - Ice Cube

I love the tone of this, half bragging, half paranoid, half stoned (yes I can do the maths!). The music is perfect for a room shrouded in plumes of heavy, blue smoke and you're slumped on the floor, back against the wall - whadya mean you don't know what I'm on about?

Bad Apple - Friday Flash

Adam wasn't the first man. He wasn't even a runner up, for this was Metroland. Where suburban house after suburban house stretched back in a relentless redbrick vista.

Red had been instituted motif by the landscarperers, since the acreage had been richly laden orchards in its venerable village days of yore. But yore is less when progress comes a coldcalling, influenca business card in hand. Untenable venerable had quickly become pensionable and capitulated under the redeveloper's caterpillar-tracked dozers. But Adam's backgarden of Eden still retained one gnarled, though fecund apple tree.

Adam no longer had an Eve, due to prototypical trust issues as first highlighted in the prologue to that amnesiac genesiac the Pentateuch. No more peachy red lipschtick from her. But he was still yoked to his tree, much to his umbrage.

Why was this tree the blight of his life? How did it make Adam's adam's apple bob up and down like a test your strength machine at a fairground? Or an unfairground as in the case of Adam's knotted Garden of Need.

Notwithstanding that husbands and wives may rip up their contractual vows at the drop of an aitch, a faux pas or the bombshell of some sinful original act, there existed strict council bye-laws forbidding any householder to take an axe to their tree. Only incorpreal corporates had been chartered this perky perk and unless you had limited liability and protection from your creditors, (to wit, those Granny Smiths twitching net curtains in the neighbourhood nosey parker scheme), the arboreal stood untouchapple.

Juicy fresh fruit on tap, what could be more appletising than that? Just how can Adam perennially (not judiciously deciduously) pluck heartstrings and harp on about the bane of homegrown produce?

One has to pre-season early apple errantly, in order get the taste for the seeds of Adam's appleplexy. The runty apples of the litter do just that. They get bumped off the branch by their burgeoning peers and lie in wait in the long grass like booby-prize traps. For post connubial cleft, our Adam was wont to promenade his garden barefootloose and fancy free espousing poetry. Only to come a cropper time and again stubbing his tootsies on unripened, granitelike pome, forcing from him a tart applepeal to the heavens.

Just steel yourself thinking of the branch-borne sweet flesh, Adam my old fruit. Yet rotten luckily the pomade persecution continued giving him the pip. For rarely did he actually get to harvest the toothsome nectarous yield for himself. Since others more fleet-winged and bug-tongued got the drop on his crop. Wasps bored, fruit flies gouged, coddling moths coddled. Pithing and de-coring. Other burrowers bore their young a refectory-cum-nursery within the apples' housing. One way or another, there were very few apples which didn't bear the blackened smut trail of an insect's fly-through take-out. The looming folk wisdom spun at mother's knee, counsels never to swallow an apple's seeds lest a new tree take root in your stomach. Where was the homily against eating swart-perforated fruit rind in order to avoid your belly playing host to a puparium? Intuitively, Adam would forbear from any apple so fly-blown.

But it wasn't just entomological applepropriation that bit into any potential produce for his gaping fruit bowl. Ripened pomme d'arbre inevitably became pomme de terre, as they ground hogged the applerition of Isaac Newton's gravity epiphany. Adam still couldn't utilise them, for if not insect adulterated, then assuredly they were contused by grappleing with the earth. Causing him to wince as he envisioned each bruisapple skin echoing that of his own.

Adam might have left the apples strewing the lawn, to feed their limited nutrients back into Mother Nature's soiled maw. Only he chanced apple eyed a rat scurrying across the green baize and guzzling on one of the fallen rondures. He didn't mind squirrels availing themselves to pocket the fat number 3 pool balls when easy pickings were scarce, but a rat? That was just too applepalling.

So dutifully he applelied himself morning after morning to going outside and collecting up the fallen. His apple-ratus, an inverted plastic bag which he would wedge around the apple and then fold back out. Thus scooping in such a way as not to have to come into direct contact with either the moldering pulpyness, rodent-nibbled, or insect cankered flesh. A technique he had modelled after a neighbour's cleaning up behind their Pomeranian. Then he would proceed to the Council provided brown organic waste bin for good riddance to bad apples.

However this action also sprouted unforeseen consequences that further appleturnedover his stricken life. Firstly the composting apples gave off the most sickly sweet aroma of fermenting cider that stupefied his senses as if he'd actually quaffed a gallon of apple juice. But more apple pertinently, the bin was flooded with apple sourced maggots. And that at one dread time, opening the lid would release a plague of metamorphosised flies to swarm around his head. We'll also quickly pass on the glut of (sub-)urban fox ordure, as those wily creature circled round without being able to open the lid, nor knock over a bin loaded down with a hundred weight of fruit slurry.

All of this pressed down so grievously on our Adam that he finally snapped and took not an axe, but a chainsaw to the trunk of the tree. Bye-laws be hanged! Oh the unencumbered satisfaction to see the collapplesible lumber splinter and toapple.

But poor benighted Adam had really upset the apple cart. In its longevity, crabby apple roots had curled underneath Adam's house, the lone apple of his eye. So as the tree turned up its toes into death, it pulled and yanked the masonry with it. Adam's pied-a-pomme-de-terre lurched and canted to a crazy splayed angle. Now normally subsidence is something the Council treat very seriously indeed and offer all sorts of assistance to nip it in its tracks. But since Adam had felled his tree, he had apple ceded any indemnification applelickability, Mr Adams, number one man at the Council duly informed him.

Story taken from the flash fiction collection "52FF" available on Amazon Kindle.

Eight Legged Army - Friday Flash

The bull-roarer whirring above my head since sundown. Saturated by the rain shower, the cord demanded constant snapping to keep taut. Hands raw where the hemp had bitten into the flesh, while my shoulders ached with the ceaseless effort. Right now my whole being feels like the groaning stick itself. Finally entered its stream. Its force. Its vibration.

All animals had fled the din, perceiving some great winged predator was overhead. Now the spirits could take up occupancy. Gradually I stilled the roarer and set it down on the ground next to my bundle. I removed a bound leaf wrap and offered it up towards the trees. Sinking down to my haunches, I carefully untied a single binding. I squeezed until one corner of it yawned open, then I brought it to abut my wrist.

Tentatively a small appendage snaked its way through the aperture. It was covered in hair. A second followed, and clamped itself bent at the joint as had the first. Braced like the tribal chief's outriders, twin upright poles hoisting a tent skywards. Two more limbs, then emerged the two parts of a mouth, crested by the fearsome fangs and a pair of eyes. I couldn't help but flinch as the slow moving cortege heaved itself on to my bare arm, its hairs brushing against my own.

Gulping and with my heart pounding like a tribal drum, I pressed my finger down on the creature's head. Immediately my skin was chastised with the prickle of puncturing fangs. Swiftly I tipped up the bundle, forcing the beast to tumble back into the leafy cocoon and resealed the aperture with the twine. I threaded a twig through the two loopholes at either end of the wrap, then balanced the twig across the two receiving cups of stakes planted in the ground. I raked the kindle between them and stoked up the fire.

I glanced at my wrist. A speck of blood was trying to bubble up like pressing one's head through a poncho. But it seemed to lack the necessary energy, though my whole arm was certainly throbbing with pain. My body started to numb. I felt both leaden and yet leavened, as it started to fall away from me. Rocking my torso, I was able to flop so as to lie fully supine. I shut my eyes and awaited the summons of the spirits.

I conceived I was being trussed in the tarantula's silks. Like my body formed part of the covering of a tent back in the village. My bones the poles and mountings for my hide that kept my surging blood from leaking out. I now sensed I was entirely mummified, the mantling being particularly thick over my mouth and eyes, for these prime senses were to be negated.

A fiery agony was flowing throughout my body. But dimly, somewhere just beneath that I was able to feel a pricking along its course. The pricking palpated the pain into numbness, so I was able to breathe some calm back into my diaphragm straining against its silky windings. But soon enough the pricking itself became a fresh torment, scratching and clawing at my mind.

Now I experienced my skin falling away in great flakes. I was being unpeeled. Exposed with nothing to hold them in place any more, my gizzards slithered down out of my abdomen and on to the grass. And then came the great host. Ants, caterpillars, millipedes, beetles, carrion crawlers all, fell upon the scree of me and bore it away on their backs in every direction. I apprehended a column until it disappeared wholly from view into the undergrowth. I envisioned them layering their nests with me. Others casting me in the river. Some further burying me under soil.

Along came larger beasts for my organs. Monkeys, birds, jaguars, each setting aside mutual enmities to harvest this human bounty. They too took me to their eyries , treetop vantages and canopied perches. Gripping me in beaks, talons, jaws and padded fingers. But none were consuming me, of that I was certain, even though there was no longer anything left of me to gauge this by.

Whatever "I" was, seemed to be just hovering above the stained grass where my mass had recently lain. Eyes I no longer possessed seemed resolutely lidded, as my senses went black and blank anyway. Seemed I was embracing death, though still able to commune with it. I was shown all sorts of spirits and supplied their names. Were these to be my companions in the after-life?

Then I was confronted with another host, heading towards the blister of me on the grass. Hordes of tarantulas, each bearing a silky parcel on their backs. Some were dripping water as they advanced, others had bits of foliage snagged among their hairs. On reaching my mark. they set down their packages and unravelled the silks to reveal some slither of my skin or section of my viscera. Had they come to mock me? They had reclaimed me from all parts of the forest. I scarcely dared believe they had gathered up every single shred. Yet here they were sowing me back together, firing hair stitches into skin, shooting silky ligatures for the sinew.

I rose back to my haunches and swivelled my wrist. It moved seamlessly and without pain. I scuttled over to the fire and unhooked the leaf pannikin. I unfurled it to reveal the roasted tarantula. The only indigestible being that of the fangs, yet they made for handy toothpicks to excise any wedged hairs. Ingesting its power and offering praise to its kindred who had revived me, I knew I had attained the realm of the spirits. That I could travel there once all due courtesies had been observed and roam freely to attest its wisdom and lore.

Extinguishing the fire, I picked up my bundle and returned to the village, now a fully fledged shaman. The noble tarantula my spirit guide and familiar.

This story appears in my first flash fiction collection

available from Amazon Kindle

Two Up, Two Down - Friday Flash

It was our dream house. White picket fence, hydrangea and bougainvillea, understated unassailability and overblown fecundity, the lot.

Interiors designed by ourselves. Hand drawn plans, lofty elevations with the highest of intentions. Carving out our own shared space. Shutting the door on the world, just to inhabit one another.

Our abode, a place of constancy, of abiding bricks and mortar solidity. A uniquely private realm in which to abide by its own internal rhythms if not its house rules. Those windows kissed by the sun in the morning. The walls limned with shadows from the electric lights. Our own projections. A place to bide time, until you can abide one another no longer. Once ineffable percolations of each have seeped into tiny cavities in the masonry. Blisters of self bubble the wallpaper and welt the paintwork. The very fabric of the house sweats, colonisation by odour cologne boy and attar girl. Suffused with one another like blocked up pores, we seek to pop one another like blackheads.

A dwelling, a place to tarry and linger. A place to be led astray into, boxed in and ensnared. Instead of dwelling within a condition of happiness, a place to dwell on morbid thoughts and recollections. She's gone now, vacated this space. Leaving me free to roam its walls. To restore and reconcile it, having been divorced from its design through hosting our conflict. For other than the one I may be located in, all rooms are now spare.

I stand in the Parlour. With no one to talk to. I've wearied of shouting at events unfurling themselves on the TV to make myself heard. It can't be deemed a Lounge, since I find I cannot relax here. The sofa dwarves me in its spongy embrace. Nor does it merit the name of a Reception, for though I have removed the rug where we liked to fuck in front of a roaring fire, the bare floorboards only accentuate my lone tread. The fire too is playing up, suggesting sympathies lying with her as it draws not through the chimney, rather choking the heart of the room with its fumes. Her geegaws, knicknacks and trinkets which were meant to be conversation pieces, are nothing of the sort of course since they only silently brook her side of the argument. So I swept them all from sills and mantle, into a cardboard box and evicted them. The piano still stands there, even though I cannot play a note. Removal logistics have defeated me, since it is too outsized to squeeze back through the door. I have at least shut both its lids, so that its works do not mock me with their simulation of the idle bars of my typewriter keys.

The kitchen was never really my province. Its units being fairly neutral, it was the crockery and its ilk that were partisan. They have departed with the figurines. I don't utilise the oven, settling for take-aways, but the washer-dryer presents me no such qualms, though opening its maw to receive its first male-only minotaur's offering, revealed a part undigested former oblation of one of her popsocks. In actuality, I have used the cooker once. The gas hob to ignite the sock and watch it shrivel and burn in the formerly stainless steel sink.

Up the stairs and one is confronted by the possibilities for take off lying behind each closed door verging the landing. But it struck me that the doors could either admit inward, ushering you into the room, or as you leaned forward to open them, they swung out and demanded you give ground before crossing their hallowed threshold. And if positioned within, similar dynamics. The door that opened as if trying to press you back inside the room; or which swung outwards with you hanging on to the handle almost being dragged out of it. We had mounted all these doors ourselves, yet I had been oblivious to the unspoken echelons implied by each's loaded singularity.

Needless to say, the Master Bedroom was nothing of the sort, opening inwardly and seeking to hold me there. A Boudoir, her word, means a place to sulk, how fitting! I had tried aerosols, burning incense and leaving the windows open all day, in order to purge the funk of her. The linen had been disposed of, but her sex still ruffled the room. I had covered the mirrors with cloths, until a buddy pointed out this is how Jews mark mourning. Then I contented myself with smashing them with a hammer, seven years bad luck being a small price to pay, even if they're cumulative sentences. I simply abandoned the clothes marooned within the wardrobes festooned with broken glass.

The Bathroom was an unavoidably wretched strait. Both the medicine cabinet and shower door had been her last direct communiqués with me, but I had managed to wipe clean the hateful lipstick messages, until all that remained were carmine smears. Enhancing the room's locus of blood and dirt and skin. A labyrinth of hidden plumbing running down beneath plugholes and cisterns, with their curves and U-bends for trapping our run offs and effluvia. For all my rubber-gloved bleaching sorties, how she must still reside there, little tiny shards and spoors of hair, nails and other off-cuts. Totems and clippings of her unsympathetic magic, cursing me from beneath the ruts and gouges in the linoleum. She persecutes me from within the pipes, blow darting me to a slow ruin.

So it's hardly surprising that I have retreated to the sanctuary of my Study. I've put a camp bed down, hang my clothes from the curtain tracks and it's here I partake of my meals too. For this was ever the one single room stamped entirely with my cast. Though somehow her poisonous essence even manages to slip under the door and waft itself within these precious walls. I only returned to writing by a typewriter, because every time I switched my computer monitor on, there in lipstick font would appear the message "How can you live with yourself?" No matter what I did to try and change my screensaver, always it would return afresh to taunt me. Somehow she had hard wired it into my system, and I didn't even know she could work a computer! So I junked that, the only possession of mine to disappear along with all of hers. Yet my own words have never since flowed beneath my fingers. The emotional integrity of my room, the refuge for my thoughts, had somehow been penetrated and my prowess was bleeding out.

It wasn't those particular words themselves that were corroding me. It was the groundwork she'd put in underlying them. When she had re-consulted our original ground-plans for the house and overwritten the word 'Study' in my angular uncial, with the word 'Nursery' and appended a heart above the 'u'.

*

This may have been prompted by a weekend of spring cleaning & decolonising the children's annexation of our living space...

Craig Bellamy

I love Craig Bellamy as a footballer. Can't stand him as a human being mind, though I'm told he does a lot of work for charity...

Since he has never played for the team I support, I have no personal investment in his performance on the pitch. I have always been of the attitude that so long as any player turns it on for the match, I don't really care how he spends his leisure time. However, that has increasingly come under pressure because the players earn so much money these days, and are so cut off from both reality and the people who follow them, that the behaviour of some is increasingly unpalatable. I've never been of the opinion that footballers have to be role models, but there's no denying that people look up to them and follow the minutiae of their behaviour on and off the pitch. I manage a kids team, so I see it first hand.

As a player, I've followed Bellamy's career since his start at Norwich City and he is an out and out winner. As well as being a very effective striker who can single handedly disrupt opposing defences with his pace.

While any team sport has to have a discipline about it that keeps players together as a team playing for one another rather than harbouring grudges and feuds within their own ranks, and clearly this has to be under the control of the guy managing the team, English football in many ways does not allow its players to express themselves and to offer their insight from their experience and know-how (stand up Fabio Capello). Of course it can go too far the other way with players being in charge of the team rather than the manager. Craig Bellamy has never been afraid to speak his mind and give his opinion. I for one applaud that.

Bellamy on his form last season, should be part of the Manchester City squad of 25. If he isn't, there have to be good footballing reasons for this. The only one that there seems to be, is that he's been disruptive by challenging the manager's authority. On that alone, Man City are quite entitled to omit him from their nominated squad.

There are only two options; he stays at Man City kicking his heels, because he's not allowed to play as he hasn't been nominated. The other option is that he moves to another team, be it on loan or on a permanent transfer. Man City won't let him go to a rival team challenging for the title, which begs the question if he's that much of a threat, why are they not including him in their squad? Maybe it makes sense to let him go to a rival and trust his reputation to rear its head and have him destabilise these rivals by again challenging the manager there.

Any footballer has the right to refuse to be transferred to a certain club they don't fancy. It's less established by practice, but teams too probably retain the right to refuse certain destination clubs for a transfer-seeking player. Stand-off. If Bellamy is forced to stay at Man City and not play, then the unintended consequence of this new regulation limiting squads to 25 nominated players, is that it is in effect a restraint of trade. He's not allowed to play football. Now no one seems to be breaking any laws through their conduct, so the fault must lie with the football legislators who have instituted this law. They did it in order to try and control the spiralling costs of football, being poured into footballers' pockets in wages and transfers. But the unseen effect is that it will prohibit a whole tranche of footballers from actually being able to play.

I wonder what the Players' Trade Union will have to say about this when loads of its members can't practice their profession for 6 months.

Over to you football authorities. That's another fine mess you've landed us all in. This will be a Bosman situation take two.

Loss Of Function - Friday Flash

Being in traction with his body set rigid in plaster for so long after the accident, he had lost all mobility. Though his anatomy healed in time, his mind had been pensioned off from having to steer it and the two-way connection had silted up. A complete loss of function. His inner gyroscope required to be completely stripped back down and reconfigured.

His physical therapist had to help him relearn every movement. Laying bare the complexity of each motion. Analysing its constituent parts and coaxing and teasing the brain to fire again with meaningful impulse and not just into unrequited, dead air. He saluted the utter sophistication of the toddler him some thirty years ago, who had picked up and unlocked all this innate knowledge in his seamless developmental stride. If only he could return to such an innocent state of understanding and assimilation. But then there were other memories presently held on to that he would also have to kiss goodbye into obliviousness.

Here and now the muscles had to be stoked with energy. Sinew reharnessed with directionality and intent. He could lift up his foot, but the mechanics involved in propelling it and the rest of his trunk forward were intricately convoluted, so that more often than not he just placed the foot back down on the spot rather than lurching forward.

But in time and with cussed determination he was able to forge a whole new template for locomotion. His centre of gravity was skew whiff, he inclined ever so slightly to the left, but he could ambulate, feed, clothe and wash himself once again. He fair approximated a working model human being. Thus dawned the day of his launch back out into the world. Without burning up on re-entry.

But one step outside of rehab's revolving doors (which seemed to shovel him forward with more alacrity than he felt decent) and everything felt wrong (though not instinctively wrong, since he had overridden these with his new neural programming). Not just awry, but cardinally adrift. Concreted paving was not the plush carpet of the physiotherapy suite. It was ineffably harder and more unyielding. It pushed back upon the soles of his feet with far greater force than the shag of the interior. Also the uncracked leather of his new shoes had their own protesting agenda, compressing his toes from above in a deadly pincer with that of the stonewalling upthrust of the paving stones. The gentle breeze at his back felt like a ghostly hand tugging him back. These forces may each have been inanimate, but they still had volume and density making themselves heard and felt in his teeming brain. Feedback, incoming, overwhelming his own surety of self. He slithered down to his haunches on the pavement. He was crushed. Stilled.

But he'd been here once before. This loss of function and reflexivity. When it seemed that he had ceased to own his body.

For what had caused his accident, that made him lose all apprehension of externality acting upon him? When all else around melted from any recognition or awareness? Why, immediately after a fall of course.

In love.

Fallen deep and hard.



The Kiss by Marc Chagall