Sir Alex says it’s the Big Three now.
Followed by Arsenal, Everton and Aston Villa competing for fourth place.
He could be right.
If he is, it’s what I’ve been saying all season.
And that was before Cesc Fabregas was out for four months.
Last night Aston Villa were a bit lucky, as Arsenal were against Portsmouth.
Arsenal got a late goal by Gallas in 81 after a free-kick.Villa got an own-goal after 88 to beat Hull and regain fourth place.
And, before the phone rings again, a few words to wrap up the Arsenal year, Xmas, the Myles year, and peek into 2009 and the recession.
My highlight of this season came against Real Madrid when Jack Wilshere went in for a 50-50 with Spain’s hardest defender. A fair tackle and an amazing moment and a seismic shock to Michel Salgado, who got to his feet some seconds after Wilshere got to his feet.
I thought : Wow! What a player !
As you know, Birmingham and the Sagna injury hit the team very hard after a terrific spell put a Flamini-driven Arsenal on top of the table for six months.
Theo Walcott came through for England with a hat-trick in Zagreb. But Fabio Capello was the real story there. He’s the best manager England have had since Alf Ramsey. Martin Tyler turned me onto a superb biography, Sir Alf, which I’m reading at the moment. I thought I knew all about Alf but the first 20 pages are very, very illuminating.
It’s been a happy year at Palmer Mansions and I hope 2009 will be half as good. Jan retired on her birthday in June, we had a party in the garden that everybody enjoyed, and then a fabulous holiday in Croatia, where we met an American couple while swimming under a waterfall in Krk National Park.
Felicia and Stuart are from California, so I told them we’d just had a visit from my former flatmate Allan Shepherd, who worked at Hewlett-Packard in the research lab. Stuart said, “I used to work at HP. It’s the price of admission to Silicon Valley.”
Spain won Euro 2008 and young maestro Cesc started in the final.
I gather that Arsene Wenger was very taken with the style of football Spain played. Classy anchorman Senna was available but Wenger didn’t buy him. On deadline day, he wouldn’t pay £2 million more than the £12m he had offered for Xabi Alonso.
In August the final edition of The Professor was published by Virgin.
When I first wrote the book I thought it would sell 100,000 but it’s only done 35,000. If I’d known that I might not have bothered. Still, I always wanted write a book about football and that opportunity came up. I put everything I know about the game into it, as well as a load of stuff you won’t read anywhere else.
ANR led directly to the book and it’s a summary of 12 years of ANR. But it’s better than ANR because it’s structured and written much more carefully. If someone reads The Professor after I die, I’ve beaten death. That’s why I like to write books. I’m now writing another.
Xmas has been very low-key, very normal, very enjoyable. Went to a couple of parties, another tonight, a fourth is coming up soon. Parties are fun if you have a few days between them. On our way to the first one we met a friend in the street, who told us a hilarious story about a footballer, which I can’t repeat here because I don’t want to get him into trouble.
So that’s it, really. 2008 is done and dusted.
We’ve had two babies born in our street this year. The doctors had a boy and the actors had a girl. I haven’t seen either child with their eyes open yet. But I hope to see these little Londoners walking towards the end of 2009.
I’ve hugely enjoyed this year, hugely enjoyed Book Slam, where I discovered Toby Litt, hugely enjoyed Croatia, where a band started playing every time we left a restaurant (or so it seemed), hugely enjoyed going to galleries with Mrs Palmer, who is doing an art course every Wednesday and comes home buzzing and shows me what she’s been drawing or painting. Recently she’s been painting Harry, a French musician-DJ who is also a life model. She says, “I don’t do the naughty bits.”
We went to the German Xmas market in Hyde Park and were walking along Piccadilly when she said, “D’you want to pop in the Royal Academy for a cup of tea?” The teachers gave her membership there when she retired. So we cruise into the Henry Casson members cafe and park our bums on a leather sofa and have a latte and a flapjack and then wander round the Braque-Giacometti- Miro-Calder exhibition.
Later Jan takes my best friend Doug to the same exhibition, which she enjoys even more with someone so knowledgeable. Doug, who ran record companies for decades, has amazed me by teaching himself to draw and paint. His best paintings are good and we’re so proud of him. The other day we were in his studio and he gave Jan loads of advice and loaned her a book on drawing. When she was 18 she would have loved to go to art college, rather than teachers training.
At Book Slam I signed up for Apples & Snakes, a poetry email and my son Michael gave me their CD, Twofive : Vinyl to Download, for Xmas. It has 21 tracks and includes one featuring Roger Robinson, a guy I saw with his band Shout at the November Book Slam. His band, a trio, has a phenomenal young sax player whose name I didn’t catch.
Toby Litt’s I play the drums in a band called okay is the most original novel I’ve read by an English writer in decades. His style is quite artful, quite poetic, sort of colloquial-aphoristic, an easy style that sneaks up on you and hooks you and reels you in. As you read it, there are a lot of nice surprises in the next sentence.
If you’ve read ANR for a few years you might think that Myles’s heroes are Denis Law, Peter Osgood, Patrick Vieira and Dennis Bergkamp.
But literature is my first love, football my second love. My heroes are Joe Heller, Nabokov, Maupassant, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell.
In 2009, I think Obama will be useless. Hope I’m wrong on that one.
Most recessions last 18 months and this one won’t last longer than 2009, or into Q1 of 2010. Rolling TV news makes it all seem worse than it is. The stock market has lost 30%, housing has lost 16%, but the economy’s only lost 2%.
Retailers suffer because many make a loss for 48 weeks of the year and rely on 4 weeks at Xmas. They usually pay their landlords 3 months rent in advance and if they run out of cash they can’t pay the rent, so they go bust. If a time comes when there’s enough spare capacity in the high street, the retailers can make the landlords put their rents down. If some of the owners of retail space went bankrupt, it would help everybody.
Either way, the UK economy will either grow by 2% or shrink by 2%. So 98% of our economy is OK.
Don’t worry. I never do. And don’t worry about football. It’s only football. It’s only football !!!!
It’s something we love to talk about, no more than that.