Page 30 - All at Sea Fanzine Issue 68

30
All At Sea Issue 68
Ssleeping with the boss
O there I was, despite the inevitable e ectively sleep below hundreds and hundreds
accompanying hangover, glowing in
the aftermath of what happened at Roots Hall in the dispatch of the league leaders, and attempting with all my might to explain to my wife how good it was. She was very happy for me but I don’t know if she really appreciated my points about o -the-ball movement and pressing high up the pitch, and togetherness and work rate. I was struggling to really get across how excited I was.
So I said it: “I might have to leave you for Chris Powell you know”. To which she immediately replied “Alright then, but you can’t see the kids”. Harsh but fair, but a small price to pay for the opportunity to spend the rest of my days with my favourite ever Southend player and only Southend manager to have a 100 per cent winning record (wonderfully true at the time of writing).
It’s only been two weeks but I am making sure she is given the appropriate impression of my love for that man, but little does she know, I actually slept with him for years.
You may well need to hear me out here, but Chris is a signi cant part of my still growing collection of life memorabilia (or ‘tat’, as many people, including my wife, might like to call it). I must admit to being a sentimental old fool and have never had a particularly good record when it comes to throwing things out, and my collecting of stu ranges from the obvious (programmes, gig tickets) to the slightly odd (I went through a small phase of collecting Wispa Gold wrappers).
Whilst I have lost the desire for the outright weird, I still can’t bring myself to get rid of an awful lot of memorabilia from growing up, and this has been aided by my parents still living in the same house that I grew up in, and having done nothing to the room I frequented as a teenager since. That room is basically a shrine to my sad 90s existence, with a few gems thrown in for good measure.
I have transferred a lot of stu to my own house, the stu that I know will stay with me for years regardless. My wife knows that we
of Southend and Billericay Town programmes, and she reminds me every now and again of the man who died after being crushed by his own magazine collection that fell through his loft due to the weight. I have at least stopped buying programmes regularly as a result.
What she doesn’t know is that if I wanted, I could get the ladder out, head up into the loft and gladly leaf through old copies of the Roots Hall Roar and What’s The Story Southend Glory for hours and hours (not forgetting all the rare editions of Pier Pressure, the rst fanzine e ort from the All At Sea crew). They are all up there, just ready to help me waste days on end in reminiscent glory. We shall also skim over the fact that I also have every copy of When Saturday Comes since about 1995 as it is the tit bits that everyone wants to know about.
For my old bedroom is my tit bit hovel. I understand this could sound slightly weird coming from a 37-year-old married father of two but really, with its existence taking the form of that spare dumping room that a lot of households that have seen no upheaval for over 40 years tend to have, it has been no hardship whatsoever for my old bedroom walls to stay exactly as they were. It’s a little like that scene in Alan Partridge where he walks into his superfan’s spare room, but with way more books.
Still up on the wall, down one end of the room you might think is the jewel in the crown, purely because of its size. It’s a possibly half- size picture of Stan Collymore with “Stan The Man” written above it in an oversized, ugly font. It’s a wonderful picture of him chasing down a ball at pace (something I never saw Tes Bramble do) against Millwall in the Spring of 1993, and let me tell you, if you were to walk in and see it now, you would be left in no doubt as to the size of young Stan’s thigh muscles – just what every school boy wants to stare at as he is lying in his bed.
With that being easily sought after club merchandise though, it doesn’t exactly make noises about how sad I was quite like the collection of nonsense that was blu- tacked on my wall right by my bed itself. For