In December 2012 the kids asked what I wanted for Xmas.
So I told them.
This year they renewed my subscription to The London Review of Books.
That was what I was reading this afternoon, after we came back in nasty weather from LHR, where we put Caroline and her flatmate on a jet to the Far East.
Attempting to re-assure us, our adventurous daughter, 28, said, “Sometimes I don’t come home for three months, so it will be like I’m in Brighton.”
Not really, babe. (My nickname for her)
Her room is four times the size of my office.
So I love to sit quietly in “Caroline’s room”, in a wicker chair, with my back to a large window, editing my memoir, reading books and the LRB.
While we’re on the subject of recreational reading matter, I’ve become an appreciative reader of The Economist by accident.
Since she told us she was going travelling for 100 days, I figured that we had 3 options: we could cancel the subscription, or maybe pause it, or have the weekly magazine re-directed to me.
The Economist is a long story.
When she graduated, the parents, friends and Sussex students were addressed by the vice-chancellor’s pal Sir Nick Stern.
He gave the graduates a word of advice: When you’re about to take your first job, ask yourself one thing: What am I going to learn here?
Stern was saying: Don’t think you know it all, kids – please keep learning.
After he said that, I decided to give Caroline a subscription to The Economist. But I didn’t tell her about it, just gave her address to the magazine. I wondered what the reaction would be. Fortunately, she enjoyed reading it, as did her flatmates.
Some time later she told me that one of her friends had also been given a subscription by her dad, who is a sociology professor.
Now I’ve asked for the magazine to be sent to me until she comes back to the UK.
Anyway, there I was today, as the skies cleared and the sun came out, sitting in my favoured window seat, reading The LRB.
The second piece I sampled was a review of My Autobiography by Sir Alex Ferguson
Critic David Runciman talks about the United boss being a conspiracist, which isn’t quite the same thing as being a conspiracy theorist.
He says Ferguson is a JFK assassination nut who bought, at auction, an edition of the Warren Report signed by Gerald Ford.
Also : Fergie also owns a personal copy of the autopsy report!
But SAF gives no hint about what he thinks really happened that day in Dallas.
Now, getting back to football, here’s one of the most revealing bits from 2013’s best-selling book:
When it comes to the football business itself Ferguson is much less reticent. He lets us in on the full range of his suspicions. In one of the best scenes in the book, and one of the very few capable of raising a smile, he describes the moment he tried to seal the purchase of Wayne Rooney from Everton in 2004. He was in his office, and the Everton chairman, Bill Kenwright, was weeping copiously. Through his tears Kenwright makes a phone call and hands the receiver to Ferguson. On the other end an elderly female voice berates him: ‘Don\’t you dare think you\’re getting that boy for nothing. That boy\’s worth fifty million pounds.\’
This is Kenwright\’s mother. Ferguson can\’t quite believe it:
David Moyes was giving me the eyes. For a minute I thought it was a get-up, a performance. Bill\’s background was in theatre, after all. It occurred to me while all this was going on that I ought to check Wayne\’s medical records. Was there something physically wrong we had missed? Was this a ruse to push the price up? … Was I being lured into a gigantic sting?
Ferguson is in no doubt that football is a cut-throat business. Give your opponents an inch and they will take you for all you\’ve got. But this doesn\’t just apply to opposing teams. It includes members of your own club, whether in the boardroom or on the pitch.
That\’s why Ferguson sets such a high price on loyalty, because the people you can\’t rely on are the people who will screw you over. There\’s nothing in between. Once Ferguson begins to suspect a player of divided loyalties – to his family, his friends, his image, his career, anything over and above Ferguson\’s Manchester United – he starts to look for ways to let him go.
He picked up some of these lessons from his mentor, the great Scottish manager Jock Stein, a more benign presence than Ferguson but no less ruthless.
Stein taught him never to fall in love with his own players, ‘because they\’ll two-time you\’. He also told him never to think that the owners of a club had the manager\’s interests at heart.
‘Remember, Alex,\’ Stein warned him, ‘we are not them. They run the club. We are their workers.\’ ‘It was us and them,\’ Ferguson adds, ‘the landowner and the serf.\’
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