Cod Almighty | Diary

World without football

1 April 2020

Miss Guest Diary writes: Judging by all the clips on social media of folks doing keepy-uppy challenges with toilet rolls or personal fitness routines in their garden or cutting their own hair (after a week!), the lockdown has been a shock to the system for many people.

In our house it feels like business as usual most of the time.

My partner has been undertaking his own personal lockdown for nearly 20 years of working from home. As he only occasionally gets called to London or Manchester for a meeting, in many weeks the only time he leaves the house is for the match on Saturday (more of that later). I also worked from home for several years before retiring and now do voluntary work from here, interspersed with stay-at-home hobbies like sewing and baking.

So we have a long-established weekday routine which helps me to avoid constant forays to the biscuit tin or the urge to spend the morning lounging in my dressing gown watching old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. And we are actually getting out more than usual, using our 'allowance' of one form of daily exercise to take a two mile walk around the block.

Sundays have long been the day for doing household and garden chores and all those chores still need doing, but Saturdays are different. It's very hard not having the prospect of any football to watch. After a fortnight of no games, desperation set in and Saturday afternoon found us watching England v Croatia from the 2004 Euros on the BBC red button service. I knew that England had won but couldn't remember the exact score or scorers, so it proved a diverting 90 minutes. I was disappointed that the BBC skipped over half time and started the second half immediately. That put the timing out and just felt wrong.

We then dug out the DVDs of the Wembley matches from 1998, which proved a massive disappointment. In my mind they contained the whole of each match but in reality they are just highlights, irritatingly peppered with reaction shots from people in Grimsby pubs. We gave up at half time in the first match.

Then I made the mistake of speculating what BT Sport are filling their schedules with now they can't have wall to wall matches from the various European leagues. It turns out on Saturday it was a whole string of 'highlights' from the 1970s – all ridiculously tight shorts and mud heaps for pitches. Despite the fact that he was only five years old in 1970, my other half leapt upon this as manna from heaven.

I wouldn't have minded so much if they'd been proper highlights shows but each one was simply a selection of goals from the season, which gets pretty tedious pretty quickly. But what really drove me to distraction was that my partner seemed to be familiar with virtually every single player and goal. By the time he claimed that a free kick by some bloke from Coventry was "really famous" I'd had enough and went back to the keepy-uppy clips on Twitter. Stay safe.