By Myles Palmer
I went to the Algarve with three girls and Martin Amis.
Also with me were Ernest Hemingway,George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.
The girls were Mrs Palmer, Miss Palmer and Miss Palmer’s friend Alice, who lives in Wales but used to live round the corner.
Caroline and Alice are seventeen.
I started reading Men At Arms, a Waugh novel I had wanted to read for 20 years.
It is so funny that by page 136 it was making me feel ill and dizzy.
So I decided to read the rest of the novel later and start on Orwell’s Collected Essays to calm down.
Orwell is good on Charles Dickens and droll about Henry Miller.
He says that, “Wodehouse’s real sin has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are.”
Well said, sir! A perfect comment by a serious man.
Writing in 1945 about a famous tour by Moscow Dynamo,he says,”Even the newspapers have been unable to conceal the fact that at least two of the four matches played led to much bad feeling. At the Arsenal match, I am told by someone who was there, a British and Russian player came to blows and the crowd booed the referee.”
What bliss it must have been to live in a world where the newspapers normally CONCEALED punch-ups during a match!
What would Orwell, who was horrified by “bad feeling”, have thought of Roy Keane’s book?
Or his revenge assault on Alfie Haaland? Or Ferguson’s praise for Keane’s “honest” book?
In The War Against Cliche, Martin Amis reviews some of my favourite writers, guys like Nabokov, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Elmore Leonard.
He also has one amusing piece about football, written for the London Review of Books in 1981, comparing the nervous breakdowns of Alf Ramsey, Don Revie and Ron Greenwood.
The Algarve, as you know, is not too foreign.
In fact,the Portuguese are such decent people that it would better if it WAS more foreign.
We now have The Guardian on the same day and also BBC1,C4 and C5 as well as BBC World,Sky News ands Sky Sports.
Since I love to read and swim, but don’t wanna switch off from football completely, this suits me.
I told the girls we had to choose between watching the Community Shield in the apartment or at Coconuts, a sports bar in town.
They wanted to watch it at Coconuts.
When I arrived at 1.30 p.m. last Sunday they had secured three seats right in front of the big screen, which had excellent picture quality.
You can envisage the scene easily enough.
A typical football pub with shirts of many clubs on the walls and ceiling, TV sets everywhere, many punters in red Carlsberg shirts,some small children in green Carlsberg shirts.
A few people, including Caroline, wearing Arsenal shirts.
Liverpool were forceful, physical, as usual.
Gerrard’s scissors tackle on Vieira was totally out of order.
The lively Diouf got past Ashley Cole twice, which few players do.
Second half, there’s a slight commotion behind me and I turn round to see a TV screen I had not noticed,
A handwritten sign under it says : SPURS v LAZIO.
I see a replay : Jamie Redknapp volleys one into the bottom corner. If I was superstitious I would regard this goal as a bad omen for Arsenal, but I’m not superstitious.
Then Vieira starts the move that brings the goal, passing to Bergkamp on the left.
Bergkamp stretches the defence and cuts the ball back across the penalty area, but away from the goal.
Gilberto Silva has made a tasty run towards the near post.
He is in a position 12 yards from the goal.
He has to have the bottle to hit the ball with his weaker foot. And he has to have the bottle to hit it early and hard. And, preferably, low.
He blasts it left-footed through Dudek’s legs !!!!
Tremendous timing and skill, so efficient. A great goal.
His first for Arsenal. And it wins the game.
Gilberto is a modest character, so his celebration is very low-key, a muted aircraft impersonation, a little smile. It’s always good to score your first goal. And to show such good technique in scoring it.
The question arises: If Gilberto is better at shooting than Vieira, maybe Gilberto should get forward more.
Vieira may prefer to use his experience to help his defence keep clean sheets.
Yes, PV4 has occasionally scored with thunderous shots.
But he is a reluctant shooter. He doesn’t want to miss, so he often passes when you want him to shoot.
Arsene will ease Gilberto into English football gradually. He will be on the bench for a while yet.
A good day in Cardiff,then.
Sure, the side can play a lot better. But, for mid-August, it was a very good team performance.
Arsenal were superior, even without Pires and Ljungberg.
They looked powerful enough to beat Birmingham on Sunday.
Maybe my brain will be back in focus by then.
We came back two nights ago and I cannot pick up my London rhythm because I’m so blissed-out.
I thought that I would be wearing trousers, socks and shoes when I got back home but it’s been so hot I’m in shorts and barefoot as I’m typing this, sleepy from the wine at dinner, a bottle from Arseneland, Vin d’Alsace, that Caroline bought at a winery during last month’s school sociology/history trip to Strasbourg and Berlin.
We wanted to drink it ages ago but one of us was always on antibiotics.
But today she insisted we celebrate her two As and two Bs at AS level, so we did. And it was good. She should have bought a crate.
I think kids are like footballers. They make quite a lot of noise but they often lack confidence.
Results give them confidence.
15th August 2002.