Saturday 5th March 1988

We have got no settee and we've only got one chair so I'm sitting on a sofa cushion with another for a back rest. Went to chesterfield mum got a pair of boots and a pair of shoes and I got some peanuts and a little jotter!! we saw millions of policemen and women. I know why because there was a football match one. Sheffield Wednesday lost to Notts Forest 0-1,

CONTENT TO WORK WITH! 

Shitty content but content nonetheless.

Let's break this down:

We had no settee (for foreign types, that's one of our many words for couch/sofa). I think (I could scan ahead to the next entry in my diary but where's the fun in that?) this is where we went from a giant beige suite that we'd had since I think before I was born, to a fancy new pink one which lasted so well that I had the armchairs from it in my flat in Nottingham in 2006. I also remember it being a bit of an adventure briefly having no furniture, kind of like camping in the front room.

But seriously, no one was looking at that bit and wanting much exposition, let's talk Chesterfield shall we? Mum got some boots and some shoes. 

I can't remember if I've talked about me and shopping on this blog before, adult Neil I mean. Well I think this is the kind of thing that was maybe the genesis of my problematic shoe buying habit. I had the option on Saturdays of going to the football with my dad (not always, but sometimes) but he was a referee so my introduction to kickball was a baying crowd shouting rude words at my dad whilst I burnt my tongue on cups of Bovril. I remember at one point eating way too many hot sausage rolls with my friend Matt whilst our dads were linesmen and getting very very ill. All in, I think I had probably the wrong first impressions of football. 

My other option was to go shopping with my mum, and whilst some peanuts and a little jotter doesn't seem like much right now, at the time I was overjoyed enough to write 2 exclamation marks after it. 

So yeah, I like shopping and I don't like football. Those things have helped me with ladies over the years and have caused me to end up with about 30 pairs of trainers. 

And let's touch on the last 2 points. Look how smug the 10 year old me was for working out why there were so many polices in town... and I am going to get some anger from the fact I said Notts Forest, I know (now) it's Nottingham Forest. Sorry. By the way, the Wednesday - Forest match was not the reason for the police, (we were in Chesterfield, I imagine it was a Chesterfield match.) that there is what could be called a semi sequitur.

Oh and it was fashionable in the late eighties to end a sentence with a comma.