Full/Empty

I think I might struggle now that the football season is over.

For months, I've been using football to mark the passage of time. Midweek games, previews of the weekend's action on Thursday and Friday, the glorious ball-glut of Saturday and Sunday, the post-weekend analysis and match reports on the Monday and Tuesday. And throughout, there's a healthy sprinkling of opinion pieces, meaningless statistics and hilarious jokes about the managers' faces.

The last Saints game was only on Sunday (I was there! The crazy pitch design! Rickie Lambert! The emotional lap of appreciation!), but I'm already feeling withdrawal symptoms.

I burned through the hundreds of 'season in review' articles, and now I'm frantically searching for football journalism. The content is drying up. I feel like a polar bear desperately struggling to maintain my footing on the rapidly melting sea ice.

Soon, I'll be reading about the Tunisian second division, or proposals to make the goal posts more matte.

And what will I do on my weekends now? The ball-glut is over.

This weekend, I'll have to make do with the FA Cup Final, the dramatic deciding game in La Liga, the German Cup Final and probably loads of other stuff. Slim, slim pickings.

I'll have to start doing things and making plans. It will be an ordeal. A vast desert of no football, stretching as far as the eye can see.

Or until the World Cup starts in less than a month. The eye can probably see that.

The World Cup may fill up my time, especially when there's three fixtures per day.

I'll be brave and will make do.

***

I came up with something hilarious in my sleep the other day. I do that a lot, as you might remember. As usual, the thing I came up with was only hilarious when I was in my sleep-state.

Half-awake, I thought: make sure to remember this. It's funny.

I did remember it.

It was this:

Good new band name: Sorbonne Monoxide.

See? That's terrible.

What does it mean? It's not close enough to 'carbon monoxide' and - even if it was - it makes no sense.

A band would have to be pretty low on ideas to agree to that.

A blogger would have to be pretty low on ideas to write about that.

***

The submarine was getting full.

"No more breeding," said the captain, in the mess one day.

"Yes, captain," said the men.

"Yes, captain," said the women.

But nothing changed. Three more babies were born that afternoon. When a senior officer questioned the triple influx, the mother claimed that two of them were "experimental torpedoes" and the other was the chaperone.

The captain, who had risen to that rank despite a strong aversion to confrontation, had notices printed and posted in every section. They read: "SERIOUSLY, NO MORE BREEDING. THE SUBMARINE IS GETTING FULL."

The message took a while to sink in. But eventually, the culture of constant breeding began to change, just as the submarine itself, slowly, gradually, altered its course.

Soon the submarine became less full. No more babies were produced, and a large number of corpses were jettisoned. 

Things were now pretty ruddy roomy. The badminton court was expanded to regulation size.

By the time the submarine surfaced, the crew were so used to wide-open spaces that they struggled with the confinement of life on dry land. Even the ones from Wyoming - which is technically even bigger than the submarine.

And that's how we won the war.

***

I had a muffin just now, baked by the fair hand of Lucy. She always bakes with the fair one. Her unfair hand is muffled in a dozen oven-gloves.

This blog post has been quite formless, unlike the muffin. I should have written it in a paper case.