No Arsenal news

I don’t think about football every day. After the World Cup, I’ve been in a footballing lull. There’s no Arsenal news other than the daily Cesc-to-Barca stories, and it’s the off-season, so there’s nothing of real interest.

I’m wondering how long it’ll take the Arsenal kiddies to grow up. This current team is merely a place-setter until the double-winning Academy kids have enough experience. Wilshere, JET, Frimgpong, Gibbs, Eastmond, Coquelin are the nucleus for the next great Arsenal team, and when Wenger talks about his “interesting” experiment of getting a group of players who’ve grown up together and play for each other, he’s referring to this lot, and not the current squad. A lot of those players are going off on loan, so it might not be too soon. Two, three years at tough Championship level teams, and they’ll be a bunch of hard, ballsy, technically-proficient players who have a winning attitude and who will lead the Arsenal to victory!

Maybe.

So on the 284th last day on my 20s, I had a talk with my mate about the eccentricities that are encouraged in our profession. We went to a work function last night, and came back with the impression that the older members of our profession are a bit childish and odd. My mate was a bit worried that he’ll end up like that in about twenty years’ time.

I had a think about it, and I think it’s inevitable. We work in a field where there isn’t any real corporate structure, and where you don’t need to conform with an idealised norm in order to fit it. In fact, we work in a field where we’re isolated and where our oddities are tolerated. Without that pressure to conform, and with the stress of bearing all the responsibility on your own shoulders, your sense of normality is bound to buckle a bit. And acting zany and goofy (which was the extent of the speaker’s oddity), isn’t that bad, in the context of what could happen.

Today, I also made a small pink pig out of light-cured acrylic. I’m quite proud of it; it’s all of one piece and it’s got a delicate curly tail that took me ages to make. It’s noice, it’s different, it’s unusual... and it’s probably one of the first signs of my impending eccentricity. Next thing, I’ll be carving jack-o-lanterns out of egg shells, or keeping extracted teeth in a chest in my bedroom (both things that dentists have done in the past).