My Life as an Arsenal Fan

 “To Charlie George, oh he can hit them”. That is probably my earliest Arsenal memory. It was said by the immortal Brian Moore in the dying embers of the 1971 Cup Final. I was six at the time and I know I was supporting Arsenal that day. Not sure when it began but it was probably in the playground of my primary school. Even though I grew up in Ireland, we had access to British TV and newspapers, and this meant that we could watch the Big Match on Sunday afternoons.  It was the only football on TV back then, apart from Match of the Day which started at an hour when six year olds were in the land of nod.

My parents reckoned I could read football results even before I started school. Apparently, as a three year old, I would grab the newspaper as soon as it was pushed through our front door and loudly call out the results to my Dad. Given that this contained some high scoring scrabble words like Yeovil and Exeter, I still knew all ninety two teams in the four English leagues before I was presented with my first Ladybird book at school.

Everyone in my primary school affiliated themselves to an English football team. Even the ones who refused to take part in our twenty a side games with a tennis ball each break time. Some were under parental or older sibling influence. Some were glory hunters and just picked the best team of the day (looking at you, Liverpool fans) and some, like me, just wanted to be different. Although, given that Arsenal won the double in 1971, my roots may also lie in picking the most recent winner.

I think the truth is that the Big Match was made by Thames TV and they focussed on London teams, of which Arsenal were the biggest and best. They also seemed to have more Irish players than other teams and my nationalist fervour was present even back then.

As a six year old though, I never imagined I’d have to wait another eighteen years before Arsenal would win the league again. I was working in London by then had made regular visits to Highbury. But I wouldn’t say I was a dyed in the wool fan. I had wavered a few times over the proceeding years, as one dreary season bled into another.

That night in 1989 when the drought was finally quelched has been documented by better writers than me. Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch is probably the Gold standard. I had an Irish colleague at work who was a Liverpool fan and live football on TV was becoming a new fangled offering. The game was on a Friday and the odds were stocked in Liverpool’s favour which is probably why my mate invited me to a pub to watch it. The rest, as they say, is history. Michael Thomas scored one of the most famous goals in Arsenal’s history and I remember spilling a lot of beer as I danced around the pub.

That probably sparked my interest for a few years, but life sometimes gets in the way. By 1993, I was living in Luxembourg and had travelled to Amsterdam to play a game of football. In the pub afterwards, somebody mentioned that the FA Cup final was on a TV down the back and that Arsenal were playing. I thought about going down to watch it but then somebody told a joke and I completely forget about the game.

I got back to Ireland in 1996 and the Premier League with it’s associated hype was in full swing. Sky TV showed several live games each week and football had become hip and cool. Arsenal also hired a quixotic French manager that year, who led the club to uncharted heights over the following ten years.

I bought into the whole football experience and lorded it over my friends when we won and accepted their banter when we didn’t. I was also single for most of that time and well paid. So, a Sky Sports subscription kept me company through the cold winters.

Then I moved to Australia and time zones and distractions tested my loyalties. I developed a fondness for AFL and also met the woman I would go on to marry. I watched less and less football and but would read about it and listen to podcasts. 

Living in New Zealand makes it even more difficult to watch English football. I could watch some games in the morning, but I realise now that my sport watching is closely associated with my alcohol consumption. I like beer, but I’m not going to start drinking it in my pyjamas at 8am. 

My lack of interest may also be down to the fact that Arsenal haven’t down anything of significance (aside from the occasional FA Cup) since I left Ireland in 2007.

That all changed last week when they won the league for the first time in twenty-two years. It triggered a spark I haven’t felt in many years. Brought back memories of the 1979 FA Cup when Arsenal threw away a 2-0 lead, just to snatch victory in the last minute, or 2004 when they went through the year unbeaten.

I realise now that one of the greatest costs I paid when I moved to the Southern Hemisphere  was the lack of easy access to Football and the camaraderie and social life it brings with it.

You can’t have everything I guess, I still wouldn’t swap the life I have now for it. Although it would be nice if I could teleport myself back to Europe next Saturday night when Arsenal take on PSG in the Champions League final. That’s a competition they have never won. If they succeed, there is every chance I’ll bounce around the living room with the same enthusiasm as that six year old back in 1971. Sport is a cruel mistress but sometimes she comes home.

Observations on my trip to work

Billy drives the 747 bus from Glen Innes to Panmure. He never tires of telling every new person he meets that that he’s in charge of a 747 and is hoping to work his way up to an Airbus A380.

His routes snakes around my suburb and I used to be the only morning passenger but that all changed when the Orange monster kicked off an oil crisis and the good people of East Auckland figured that they could swallow their pride and catch public transport with the plebs.

He greeted me like an old friend this morning when I boarded.

“How’s Conor McGregor today”, he asked in a broad Polynesian accent. To my great annoyance, McGregor is the only Irish person that a lot of people here can name.

“I’m sure he’s been an annoying prick, as normal” I answered and took my normal seat at the front.

“Why did you become a bus driver, Billy? You should be a standup comedian.”

He chuckled and caught my eye in the rear-view mirror.

“Bro, I got suckered by that job ad that promised a corner office, a $400k company vehicle and getting paid to travel. But it’s all good. I got a cruisey route and no hassle. Just white guys like you with your headphones on and buried in your phones. Beautiful world out their bro, if you look”.

I looked out the window at the half-built housing estate and container yard to my left and wondered where he saw his wonder.

I waved goodbye when we got to the train station. That is also busier since fuel prices went up. I’ve caught the train to work in five different cities, and the process is remarkably similar. The train is always late, unless you are running late yourself and people always try to get on when others are trying to get off.

I took Billy’s advise and left my phone and headset in my bag. Three young Indian students sat in front of me. Two guys and a girl and they danced around each other like peacocks in a mating ritual. One guy tried the jester approach. He talked endlessly, trying to make the girl laugh but trying not to embarrass himself in front of his mate at the same time.

The mate was quieter, he leaned back in the seat, with one foot on the floor and the other on the bar in front of him. He sported a beany and whispy beard and tried his best to adopt a James Dean pose.

The joker moved the subject to phones, and his intentions were clear to me. He was trying to source the girl’s phone number without asking for it. The only problem for him was that his intentions were also clear to the girl and she led him on a merry dance around.

Beany leaned forward and asked for the girl’s phone. He typed in his own number and his phone rang, and a garish Bollywood tune boomed out across the train carriage. They all laughed and beany threw a smile to his friend. Some things never change and finding a novel way to get a girl’s phone number is one of them.

My train ride runs along the coastline for the last couple kilometres. Ferries and sail boats raced across the bay and a large container ship edged its way toward the heads and the sea lanes towards Singapore.

I got off the train in the city and started to walk up Queen Street on my way to work. Queen St is supposed to be Auckland’s premier thoroughfare, but it has sadly seen better times. The city council have tried to plant trees and spruce the place up but it is like putting lipstick on a pig. Its best shops are at the bottom end. As you get further up, phone, vape and empty shops dominate the street scape.

It was 8.45am and the homeless population of Auckland was rousing themselves from a chilly slumber. The council have employed a bunch of rough security guards who would make Ice agents look like choir boys. Their job seems to focus on ensuring that the homeless keep moving and do not sit down, particularly in front of posh shops. Where they are supposed to move to is never discussed. It’s like watching a Samual Beckett play each morning.

Sometimes the homeless push back against the madness of it all. Then the cops are called and they do their bit in protecting capitalism. I passed three cops this morning pressing a guy against a car while they tried to get handcuffs on. Beside them a tour guy was explaining the 19^th century architecture to a group of tourists who were fascinated by the guy being arrested while trying desperately not to meet his eye.

Auckland has lots of social problems. Like most cities, it tries to present a glitzy front while trying to keep a blanket over its festering sores.

If you want a metaphor for the miserable world we’ve created, then a homeless guy sitting outside a Christian Dior shop will do it for you.

Beside my office, a blind busker is doing a marvellous version of an Elvis song. I notice that his collection tin is chained to his ankle, and I wonder what heartbreaking tale lies beneath that decision.  

I catch the lift to the 23^rd floor with its panoramic views of the bay and its cone shaped volcanic islands. I have lived in this city for 10 years and worked in this building for most of that time. It can be a grimy city, a twinkling jewel. A place of awe and desperation.

But I think that Billy might have a point. If you put away the headset and phones, there is a world of wonder out there and it can be seen in the small things and the mighty. We live in a crazy world, but beauty always has a way of breaking through.   

Pa and the visitor

Pa was sitting on the beach, enjoying the fruits of a coconut he had cracked open, when he saw the boat. He immediately shot to his feet. Visitors were rare to his island. It was well off the trade wind routes and well away from the path that anyone would take to get from one place to another.

There had been the occasional visitor in the past but they usually came armed with spears, ready to pillage whatever they could, including the island’s females.

He thought about going for help, but the only village on the island was on the other coast where the reef offered bountiful fish and shelter from the prevailing wind.

As the boat got closer, Pa noticed that there was only one occupant and he felt brave enough to greet him. He waved and when he saw that the sailor was unarmed, he helped him ashore.

They stared at each other for a few minutes until the visitor spoke. Pa didn’t understand all of it but picked up enough to know that coconuts were the target of his trip. His home island had suffered an ecological disaster which had wiped out their crop and he had been sent out across the waves to seek help.

Pa’s island had more coconuts than they could use and every year they would gather up all the rotting remains of unused husks and use them as fertilizer for the vegetables they grew.

Pa offered the visitor as many coconuts as he could fit into his boat, but the sailor shook his head and explained with a mixture of hand movements and broken vernacular that he was interested in a long-term relationship.

He reached into his pocket and took out a small bag filled with roughly crafted coins. Pa stared at them in wonder and asked what use they would be to him.

The sailor walked back to his boat and retrieved a box filled with chocolate and fizzy drinks. He explained to Pa that he would pay for the coconuts with coins and then Pa could use the coins to buy as much chocolate and fizzy drinks as he wanted.

Pa sampled some of the products and his taste buds exploded. He’d spent his like living on a diet of fish, vegetables and coconuts. Refined sugar was as alien to him as space travel.

The visitor sat on the beach and with the help of a stick drew out his plan. He would lend some coins to Pa who would then lend them to his island friends. They could then use the coins to buy the chocolate and fizzy drinks from Pa. To repay the coins they had borrowed and to earn more to satisfy their new found processed food addiction, they would work for Pa during the week to collect as many coconuts as possible. The visitor would return each week with new supplies of chocolate and return with a boat of freshly picked coconuts.

Pa sat down and stroked his chin. His island had never needed money. They had more than enough food to feed themselves, fresh water and if you needed a new house, the village would gather round to build it. They also had the advantage of not knowing what was going on in the rest of the world and therefore had no idea what they were missing.

He looked at the box filled with chocolate and fizzy drinks and realised that this was a window into the wider world that could change everything. He shook hands with the visitor and with the box under his arm, returned to the village, rehearsing the speech he would make as he went.

Six months later, most of the islanders were working for Pa and living on a diet of chocolate and fizzy drinks. They were having to go higher into the mountains to source coconuts and several of them had already been killed trying to desperately fill the weekly quota.

Pa quickly built up a large bounty of coins. It didn’t take him long to realise that he could pay the workers much less than he was receiving from the visitor and sell them the chocolate and fizzy drinks for more than he had paid for them. But he struggled to find anything to spend them on. He quickly lost interest in the chocolate after it rotted his teeth. And the islanders started to resent his wealth with meant he was excluded from most of their social events.

Then the visitor arrived for his weekly visit. As he unloaded that week’s cargo and refilled his boat with fresh coconuts, he explained to Pa that this would be his last trip. He had found another island that could supply coconuts at half the price that he was paying currently.

Pa was speechless. His fellow islanders mistrusted him already. How was he going to explain this? In the end, he took the coward’s option. One thing he had managed to do with his money was to convince the best carpenter on the island to build him a boat. He had planned to use it to travel but never built up the enthusiasm. It had sat on the beach outside his house for months, used only by a family of crabs that nestled in it’s hull.

He waited for darkness and then slipped back to his house. He gathered his belongings and collection of coins and loaded them into his boat. As he was pushing it towards the water he heard a noise behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw the islanders marching towards him carrying torches that lit up their angry faces. They shouted at him to come back. To explain why he had ruined everybody’s life.

But Pa ignored their call and pushed his boat into the waves. He climbed in and started rowing as fast as he could. The islanders tore down his house and cast the nameplate with “Capitalism” written on it into the sea.

My quizzical life

Mary is an expert on soap operas and the lives of the Kardashians. Graham has an encyclopaedic knowledge of every sports result for the past forty years. John doesn’t know what day of the week it is but somehow knows every useless fact in creation. That covers most of the bases, but Margaret is included in the team because she watches about fifty hours of TV quiz shows a week.

Together they are known as “I thought this was speed dating” and they win my local pub quiz every week. They are so good, it makes it boring for the rest of us. It’s like being a decent tennis player in the era of Roger Federer.

But in fairness, we don’t go to win, the chance to catch up with a few mates once a week is a bigger driving force. That and the beer of course. We are all at an age that would also count as a decent score by a mid order cricketer. So, we tend to do well at history questions and mainstream sport. By mainstream, I mean team sports that are popular enough to have their results read out at the end of news.

It’s clear when you look at the successful teams that a mix of genders and ages is the key. I like to think I have good general knowledge, but each week I’m caught out by the fact that I’ve only watched one James Bond movie, never watched any of the Star War franchise, Star Trek or any movie based on a comic book. A question will come up each week on these subjects. I’m also unfamiliar with any popular music recorded after 1989.

The first quiz I took part in was when I was 16. I was in a youth club and through the benefit of two walkovers and a close match against a team that were so dumb they they couldn’t spell their own names properly, we were somehow crowned North East Ireland youth club quiz champions. This qualified us for the national finals, which were held in Leisureland in Galway.

We lived on the other side of the country and boarded a bus in the early hours of the morning for the trip across the island. There were no motorways in Ireland in those days and we had to pick up all the other qualifiers from our region on route. We got to Galway at 10am and were immediately ushered into a stuffy room and seated beside a team of intense looking teenagers in tweed jackets and horn rimmed glasses.

By 10.15am that morning we had lost by what I believe was a record score and were out of the competition. Luckily the organisers had planned for this and brought all the first round losers together for a repechage competition that was great fun.

That weekend is also notable for marking my first ever stay in a hotel. Having a TV in the same room that you slept in blew my mind back then, as was having a bathroom that wasn’t constantly occupied by my three sisters.

I don’t remember any quizzes after that until I got to Luxembourg at the age of 27. The Irish community there is employed either in helping Europeans avoid taxes by investing in offshore investment funds, or helping to set those tax rates by working for one of the administrative branches of the European Union. I was on the tax avoiding side but spent most of my socialising with Irish people working on the other side.

A group of them invited me to a table quiz in the great hall of the European Commission. It was teams of ten and we came up with ‘Tiocfaidh ár lá’ as our name, mainly to mess with the head of the quiz master who was an ex British Army officer who became an EU functionary in those days when the Brits still took it seriously.

We somehow ended up as joint winners and our smartest member (not me, I hasten to add) was invited up to the stage to take on a member from the other team in a tie break question. It’s worth pointing out for the benefit of the story that the other team was called “Court of Justice Jewish Lawyers Association”.

The quiz master smiled when he saw the question. After a night of mangling our team name, he could see that revenge was on the horizon.

“Ok, here goes. Name the twelve sons of Jacob”.

Our team member didn’t even bother writing anything down. He just muttered “I’ll get me coat” and walked off the stage.

When I moved back to Dublin, pub quizzes became a regular thing. I even organised a few myself at work.. These were in the pre smart phone days when the accuracy of answers couldn’t really be challenged on the spot. But I did experience a bit of abuse in the office the next day, when people had time to check and would send me screen prints high lighting that County Louth didn’t actually win the first All Ireland.

Here in New Zealand, most pubs run a quiz on a Tuesday night. It’s not as though the pubs are packed every other night, but on Tuesdays, they are particularly quiet. So, the quiz is a bonus to the publican as it pulls in a lot of punters.  A company in Christchurch saw an opening and they set an online quiz every Tuesday that each pub can run on it’s own.

So, if you are in Invercargill or my local in Auckland, you will face the same question and no doubt end up writing the answer down that one of your teammates was absolutely convinced of, despite the other three all agreeing on a different answer. And the three of you were correct. Maybe that’s actually the secret of a good team. Democracy rather than bullying is best, as it is in almost every other facet of life.

Youth is wasted on the young

It was the summer of 1979. My memory tells me it was sunny, but it probably wasn’t. Three months of summer holidays stretched before me and I had just started a weekend job in a pub which put money in my pocket for the first time. This allowed me to finally buy a decent bike and consign my old Czech made rust bucket to the scrap heap.

We spent that summer playing football, cycling to the beach and exploring the world of girls for the first time. We had no other option. TV was an evening activity, the closest thing to a games consol was a Space Invaders machine in the local arcade and that was beyond our financial reach. Even though the radio had been around for almost 100 years at that point, the number of channels were limited and were certainly not catering for the tastes of fourteen year old boys.

I was a relatively polite teenager, not prone to outbursts or tantrums. But if I did get upset, my Dad would be very quick to remind me of how lucky I was. That things were much tougher in his youth. The barefooted trips to school, the gruel served daily to him and his twelve siblings and the only source of entertainment coming from a rickety old radio that only seemed to work on Sunday afternoons in summer when hurling games were being played.  

My father’s life seemed to start in his early twenties when he had escaped the suffocating world of my grandparent’s house. He had lots of stories of adventure from those days but when he talked about his childhood, it was only to pinpoint the misery.

My Mother was the same. She grew up in the post World War Two ration years, when a  banana was as rare as a summer’s day over 25c. She talked mainly about privations. How we could enjoy fruit all year round, have ice cream on Sunday and experiment with exotic foods like rice or garlic.

One thing they did agree on was that their parent’s childhoods were tougher. My grandparents were born in the years before electricity had made its way into Irish homes. Going to the toilet involved a trek out into the back yard, regardless of the weather with only a candle to guard you from the ghosts of the night.

I now have a child of my own, soon to turn fourteen and starting her own journey into the murky world of puberty and teenage life. She is sitting her first set of formal exams at the moment and is troubled by anxiety. As I saw her trundle off to school this morning, weighed down by five kilos of schoolbooks, lunch and a laptop, I couldn’t help thinking that I was a lot happier at that age. And that we might be the first generation that had a happier childhood than our kids.

I’m not suggesting that everything was perfect in the Irish rural town that I grew up. When I was fourteen in 1979, the war in Northern Ireland was raging 5km up the road from my house. Thatcher had just been elected prime minister in Britain and the world economy, and Ireland was in the toilet.

But we had colour TV and a VHS player. We had football clubs, tennis in the summer, games and youth clubs after school. We walked or cycled everywhere. But the biggest thing is that we didn’t feel the need to be constantly present.

We had no phone at home when I was a teenager, so the only way of contacting me was to go to the trouble of calling down to my house and few people bothered to do that. From the point you got home from school to leaving for school the next day, you were cocooned at home with no connection to the outside world.

If I contrast this to my daughter, she lives in a world dominated by the internet. Her schooling is all done on a laptop, all the TV she watches comes from a streaming service and while we restrict the amount of time she can access her phone, she maximises the time she is allowed to look at it. We recently spent a week in Australia and we talked her into leaving her phone at home. When we returned, she turned it on and realised she had 1,100 Whatsapp messages.

Most of them were pictures of cats or memes about Taylor Swift, but I have no doubt that some the dangerous rubbish that lurks on the internet was also there.

But even if it wasn’t, she still leads a childhood that looks inwards, to screens at school and at home and at her phone as much as we allow. It might be nostalgia playing tricks with me, but I’m sure when I was her age, my life was mainly looking outwards. In daylight hours, if I wasn’t at school, my default was to be out of the house, stretching the boundaries of the town I grew up in and in particular, finding every spare piece of grass or concrete to play football on.

My daughter now walks around with all the information in the world in a small device in her pocket. But I can’t help thinking that this is incredibly sad. The world seems trapped in her pocket, whereas for me, it was out there at the far reaches of the horizon, waiting to be discovered.

No doubt she will discover this message in time. She can of course read it on that small devise in her pocket. She may challenge me and excuse me of being a grumpy old man, shaking my stick at the nearest mobile phone tower. As Paul Simon said, every generation throws its hero up the pop charts. She may well be finding that hero, just in a different way to me. I hope she is and can tell her children her children about the fun days of 2025.

Ice Cold in Queensland

Back in the dark days of December, 2006 I was working late at night in Dublin when the phone rang. It was an old friend and colleague that I had worked with in Singapore six years previously. I met him whenever I passed through that city on my regular visits to the Southern Hemisphere and he knew how much I loved the Antipodes. We exchanged Christmas best wishes and then he asked if I would be interested in a job in Melbourne.

At the time, my life was in a rut. I was 41 and single, stuck in traffic most days on the way to work, with the wind screen wipers waving at me like a mocking troll reminding me of how miserable my life was.

I said I’d consider the offer over Christmas. At the time, I worked in a job that had access to American subprime data, which meant I could see the storm coming and that Ireland was in the eye of it.

I had been to Australia and New Zealand many times in the preceding years and had always enjoyed the laid-back lifestyle. So, in truth, it was an easy decision. It was a chance to start again and start another chapter in this kitchen sink drama that is my life.

Living somewhere and spending time on holiday there are very different things, of course. It rains in the Southern Hemisphere too and you still have to get up and go to work in what are often stressful or boring days oiling the wheels of capitalism.

But generally, I would say that it was the correct decision.  I was born with the gift of a curious mind and a need to search for the light the shines beyond those woods, so that I can see what makes it shine.

I met my charming wife who brought my beautiful daughter into the world, so my life certainly got the kick start it needed.

When I arrived in Australia, it filled my bucket of wonder. I discovered AFL, Tim Tams, Carlton Bitter and Chicken Parma. However, having lived there for seven years, the feeling of being on holiday had long faded. Living in the sun is one of the main attractions of a life in Oz.  But when that sun would fry an egg and burn all your bodily extremities to a crisp, then it’s not too attractive.

Since we moved to New Zealand in 2015, I’ve visited Australia regularly. Either to Melbourne to watch my beloved Carlton get smashed at footy, or to Sydney to spend Christmas with my sister.

Longer holidays have been spent in Europe or Fiji. It’s taken us ten years to realise that a perfect holiday destination sits just across the ditch in Australia.

We have rectified that this week with a trip to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. The sun is shining, the beers are cold and Chicken Parmas are as tasty as I remember. I’ve been to Queensland twice before. The first time was in 1997 when I first visited Australia and spent the week in the teeth of a cyclone. That was an epic trip that will live long in my memory.

My second trip was to Brisbane to sit an English language test as part of my Australian residency application. Readers of this blog may be surprised to hear that I passed. I then travelled up the coast to visit my in-laws who were staying on the Sunshine Coast. I hired a car at the airport. This is usually a soulless experience as you get handed the keys to a bland saloon. They obviously think differently in Queensland as I drove off in a purple Holden Commodore with an engine that wouldn’t have been out of place in a formula one car.

Both trips left me with the impression that Queenslanders are different to other Australians. Brasher, more self-confident  and wary of outsiders.

I had forgotten all this in my ten years in New Zealand. Kiwis are polite, self-effacing and easy going. That had lulled me into a false sense of security.

On my first day here, I was dispatched to the Off License to procure a bag of ice, for that evening’s Gin and Tonic extravaganza. I searched the store for ice to no avail and with  the new found confidence I have discovered from turning sixty and generally not giving a toss, I approached the guy behind the counter.

“Do you sell ice?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s in that massive fuckin’ fridge outside that you passed on your way in.”

“Right” I said. “Can I pay now and then pick it up on the way out?”

He looked at me as though I’d farted.

“That’s what most people do”, he said with a withering look.

For some reason, I felt the need to ask another question, as though the transaction required another enquiry.

“Is it fresh or salt ice?” I asked. I was on holiday with my wife’s family and they would have never let me forget the time I brought home salt ice for their evening libations.

His eyes narrowed and he placed his palms firmly on the counter.

“Fresh ice is the only fuckin ice I’ve ever heard of”.

I was taken aback and searched my mind for a zinging retort. But none came.

“I live in New Zealand”, I ventured. “And there you can buy fresh ice or salt ice. “

“That must be why they are shit at cricket” he said as he handed me my beer.

I was stumped; I had no reply to that staggering connection of ice and cricket.

I stopped in the doorway on my way out and turned to him.

“I wouldn’t say you are the biggest prick in the world. But you had better hope that the guy who is the biggest prick doesn’t die soon”.

I didn’t say that last piece. I’m sixty but still not confident enough to say what’s going through my mind.

Free Palestine

I was four months into secondary school when I sat my first exam. That was back in December 1977.

Our English teacher came up with a task that was revolutionary for its time. We were invited to write an essay on anything we liked. I felt emboldened, as though the shackles of primary school had been cast off and I was heading into a life of free thought and independence. That was shortly disabused, as it later became clear that that the vague instructions were due to a Christmas Party induced hangover and not the first light of liberation.

 I took pen to paper and decided to write about what I had seen on the news in the previous nights. I don’t remember the exact events, but Israel had done something bad to the Palestinians and as a twelve-year-old I was filled with righteous anger. I wrote my first opinion piece, laying down what I thought were cogent arguments weighing up the morality of the situation and handed it in with the flourish and excitement of a Washington Times journalist who had just penned the first article about Watergate.

I got my essay back the next day, dappled in red pen and exclamation marks. In the corner was a mark of 55% and I quickly determined that he had corrected spelling and grammar only and had deducted five marks for each error. I don’t think I could correctly spell Palestinian now without the electronic assistance of spell checker. I had nine errors and had barely scraped above a pass mark. If I had written the essay in the style of a ladybird bird book aimed at four-year-olds, I would have scored top marks.

I got no credit, good or bad, for my writing style or argument. The only feedback was a note in red pen at the end that said, “You’re a bit hard on the Israelis”.

I thought about this recently because it struck me that I was brave enough to speak up when I was twelve but feel nervous to do so now. I guess part of this is related to age. We naturally become more cautious as we get older when protecting your family becomes paramount. I think there is also an element of exhaustion. At sixty, there is very little new under the sun and while the situation in Gaza is horrible, it has been horrible for most of my life. Nothing was done to fix the problems in 1977, so it’s hard to build up an expectation that pressure and public opinion will change things now.

The other thing is social media and the connected world we now live in. That essay I wrote when I was twelve was only seen by me and my English teacher. And unless he was an undercover agent for Mossad, it is unlikely that I would have ended up on a watchlist.

This blog, on the other hand will probably attract as many actual human readers as my 1977 essay but will live forever in digital form in a data centre. It will then be harvested by AI tools and parsed and sliced and fed through algorithms. I’m not a conspiracy theorists (not that anyone ever admits to being one) but it wouldn’t take much effort to figure out that this is a pro-Palestine post and to then link it to my identity.

If Mossad or the Americans are listening, I might as well tell them what I think.

I was born twenty years after the end of World War Two. The war still dominated popular culture in the 1970s from Lawrence Olivia narrated documentaries to comic books like Commando and Battle and TV shows like Colditz. I was fascinated by the subject and particularly the Holocaust. I couldn’t understand how a country that spawned Beethoven and Einstein could descend into depravity in the lifetime of my parents. I had immense sympathy for the Jewish population and felt that the barbarity of the Holocaust would ensure that it would never happen again.

History, of course, has a nasty habit of repeating itself and I know enough now about the origins of World War Two to realise that the desire for genocide didn’t appear out of thin air.

It is of course ironic that is the abused that has now become the abuser. What Israel is doing in Gaza is barbaric and genocidal. They have taken the sympathy that we felt for their treatment in World War Two and flung in back in our faces. But what is worse is the lack of pushback they get from foreign governments.

When people wonder why western governments seem to be slipping towards fascism dressed in the sheep’s clothing of populism, they should look at how previous governments have behaved. We like to think that we get the governments we deserve. The truth is that we elect governments to do one thing, and they end up doing something completely different. Nobody in the UK would have voted for austerity in 2010. Nobody in Ireland would have voted for a bank bailout and nobody in the Western World would have voted for military and political support for Israel. It is as though election campaigns are between two similar centrist parties who will enact the same policies regardless of what the public want.

Is it any wonder that the west is getting tired of the same old politics from our leaders and look to nutcases like Trump to at least provide some entertainment. They are going to ignore us and focus on strategic interests and national security. Which is code for protecting trade interests and keeping rich people happy. We might as well have a soap opera to watch or a chance to express all the nasty thoughts we dared not previously expressed.

The world is not so different to the way it was in 1977. I hope I’m the same and can keep calling out evil when I see it. Even if I am being a little tough on the Israelis.