Friday 21 March 2014

63 Year Old Accused of Violent Disorder...And They Called My Book Far Fetched!

Full Story from The Lancashire Evening Telegraph HERE

Football fans accused of violent disorder after mass brawl in Burnley Miners Club


Burnley Miners Club
The 23 accused men include seven over the age of fifty and 

"63-year-old Timothy Wilkinson, of xxxxxxxxxxx, Burnley"



I wrote about over-aged hooligans in my book, Violent Disorder, a book which tried to bring a certain level of social comment to the football hooliporn genre and which received mixed reviews as a result. I should have just written a book with loads of fighting in it.

Here's a rather cynical view of the phenomenon of overaged football hooligans expressed by one of the Bully Brothers, the book's protagonists. 
The older men, veterans of the glory years of quite terrifying football violence in the seventies and eighties, appear unable to give up this sporadic, random, urban, tribal violence, which leads to feelings which they describe as "better than sex". 

You know Jimbo?
I do.
He’s just been at it.
He’s sixty? He was sixty at Bournemouth. They had a party for him.
I know. Good, innit?

I overheard this conversation.
Sixty.
To this day, I would not have believed that sixty year olds fought at football matches, but HobNob isn’t far off, only a decade and a bit away, and I looked at him, in his black shirt and full head of chestnut brown hair, trotting across the canal bridge, like a man half his age. 
The sixty of my youth isn’t the sixty of this generation, the health service performing miracles in keeping people alive. 
No more war, healthy eating, and health conscious wives with plenty of culinary ideas other than fish and chips. The end of cigarettes, changing genetic profiles, society’s veneration of everything young and that incredible sense of the pointlessness of the modern world.
Sixty.
The more you looked at the issue of aged football hooligans, there was a certain amount of logic in it.
It was just a number.
One after fifty nine and one before sixty one.
Some Sikh geezer ran the London Marathon, and he was a hundred and two.
I know an eighty year old who runs ten kilometres a day.


Thirty years ago, sixty meant you were virtually dead, your shifts in a rice pudding factory a millstone around your neck. Weekends spent imprisoned in an armchair, your armchair, a seat to be avoided by everyone for more reasons than one; exhausted, watching a dead television with dead celebrities, dead themes, dead ideas, dead adverts, dead chat and dead game shows, drinking Double Diamond straight from the can, eating fish and chips (extinct fish, potatoes saturated in dead fat) straight from the football pages of The Sun. 


Missus slaving, cooking and cleaning, transfixed by a reverie of  Marigold fantasies involving her hunky next door neighbour. 
Eventually, Mr Sixty would nurture a streaky combover and his nostril gaps would swell like a pike’s gills and his cheesy teeth would loosen: Tarnished eyes amidst sunken sockets. A scent sticking to him, a diaphanous presence the consistency of muslin in his faggy armchair on his faggy carpet with his faggy TV, and by the time he was sixty five and retired, he would be six feet under after a massive coronary and his missus of thirty years, before her month of grief was over, would be enjoying her next door neighbour’s attentions, her fantasies realised because her rice pudding slave husband was dead at sixty, she fancied her neighbour something rotten, and luckily for her, those feelings were reciprocated.

Today, the sixty-year-old was off his armchair.
Having a good runabout in Nottingham Town Centre with his mates, his Hackett Cap and blouson, his hundred quid jeans, his Gazelles. Keeping fit, keeping active. A healthy regime for the modern age.


Gym in the week.
10k on the treadmill.
Five-a-side with the lads.
Salads and plenty of extra virgin olive oil.
No cigarettes.
No drinking at lunchtime.
No drinking in the week.
Kick fuck out of some know-nothing Coventry arsehole on a Saturday afternoon with the chaps.

No more armchairs any more.
All the heroes are on the streets.








2 comments:

  1. This is what I have to say about Violent Disorder - read it and loved it, which may surprise you since I am not a fan of football. Yes, there are #football hooligans running a mock but there is a depth to the story, fuelled by emotion which Mark Barry has created with his honest, gritty urban writing style.
    This is a book which should be read for nostalgia and for the experience of reading a darn good book. When was the last time you read a really excellent piece of fiction?
    Worth the $1.30 or £1.00 asking price,if you ask me! n x

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  2. Violent Disorder calls it as it sees it - a great book, not just for men, either. If you love sports, you'll love Mr. Barry's prequel, Ultra Violence. And, age is just a number.

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