There is a scene in the execrable film Forrest Gump (“Hey, anyone can succeed in the US of A!”) where Tom Hanks’ character, when challenged with something or other asks with the ultimate incredulous inflexion in his voice, “How can this be?”

Four days on from Hull City’s monumental achievement in winning the Play Off Final at Wembley and I can still hear this particular question ringing around my head.

 It just seems so unbelievable.

Many people have written with greater erudition and analysis about what we witnessed at Wembley Stadium on Saturday so all I can say is this.

A year ago exactly I received the phone call that could have signalled the end. Literally. The PCT refused to fund my treatment because, and I quote from a letter I wasn’t meant to see, “Mr. Rathbone’s situation is dire and we (the PCT) cannot justify such an outlay as there may be no worthwhile gain”.

Pen pushers speak for the opposite of David Ginola’s opinion of his Nazi sponsored shampoo, “Because I’m Worth It!”

City had just finished a miserable season by contriving to lose their twelfth home game in the League, to a very ordinary Plymouth outfit a result that was mirrored in the first game of this campaign.

If some one had said I would be walking around Wembley Stadium having witnessed the Tigers reach the Premiership then I would have suggested locking them up for their own good.

But I did it, they did it. We did it. We darn well did it, and when the final whistle went it all poured out.

Some more general observations now.

Having watched Arsenal win the League and the FA Cup (three times) in the flesh, I felt moved to agree with a fan that rang into a BBC phone in, in the wake of Hull City’s Play Off victory.

His thesis was this. If you are an Arsenal, Spurs or indeed most Premiership Clubs fan it’s largely like a consumer choice.

The reasons may be childish i.e. you liked the kit, a particular player or simply because they won something. Mine was down to the ‘Seventies Irish connection, but none the less you get the drift.

There isn’t that primal (thanks Andy) reason that deepens the connection between fan and the local club. It simply isn’t there for the majority of Premiership supporters, hence the deferred feelings of resentment because they deep down recognise that we, especially in Hull have something that they will never have.

And the players realise this. Ian Ashbee said it’s something that’s instilled into them; they represent us, the City when they go out there and this bonds the side together in a special way.

Yesterday summed it up for me. This wonderful City of ours coming together to celebrate as one. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like football; it wasn’t exclusive (as the rugby can be due to the two teams). Everyone could buy into the experience, and being in and around Victoria Square just made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

After all this City has taken, from the Luftwaffe, the Tories, the lazy negative London based media and the biggest peacetime disaster since 1953 we are there together, standing proud of our team and of our unique, quirky but ultimately unbowed people.

For myself the coming together of my fortieth birthday, the miraculous second chance given to me by the Prof and Alan Johnson and City’s promotion confirmed to me what I have always known; I am blessed and one of the luckiest people around.

Reflecting that luck, one of my ex pupils on the Mail wrote a story about my battles with cerebella ataxia, complete with gurning City shirt and scarf photo, got me into the Civic Reception and then wrote about me again to day. Amazing.

This allowed Pete and I to mix with the players and management and what an experience that was! All on my fortieth birthday.

I thought all the emotion had been expended at Wembley until I shook Ashbee’s hand and I told him how much this meant to me. He saw the glasses and the stick, squeezed my hand extra tight and whispered something in my ear. He knows, he really knows.

Football in this context represents what everything surrounding the past year means. It’s a conduit. A symbol. Nothing more, nothing less and deserves to put into that perspective.

 But whatever will happen, or has happened these momentous events will stay with me forever. How lucky am I?

Despite twenty odd years following Arsenal (first game was August 1988 when we stuffed Spurs 4-0 at Wembley in a pre season Tournament) I have always had a great deal of respect for the institution that is Britain’s greatest football Club, namely Manchester United, and last night I found myself becoming quite avid in wanting them to lift the European Cup for the third time, by beating Chelsea.

My Dad took me to Old Trafford in 1987 when we saw them beat Oxford 3-2, but I have to admit I was more interested in the U’s centre forward, one Big Billy Whitehurst, your original hairy arsed, beer swilling centre forward and all round Hull City legend, and it was only when I started reading serious football related literature that I began to understand the history and significance behind Manchester United.

I went up to a few games in the early ‘nineties as my good mate Michael Martin was a hard core United fan and we spent endless hours on the motorway discussing the Busby Babes era, Munich, the 1968 European Cup win, George Best and the Club’s subsequent decline into mediocrity including the humiliation of relegation in 1974.

I remember going to Old Trafford with Arsenal in 1990 and chanting, “Will you ever win the League?” as it seemed such a remote possibility for the Red Devils four years into Fergie’s reign.

Ten Premiership Titles and a further two European Cup triumphs later….

Fergie is simply over the hills and far away as Europe’s greatest Manager, and Ronaldo has delivered consistently brilliant performances and is getting to be the best player ever to have graced the English game, so I was delighted to see them defeat Chelsea and raise that magnificent trophy for the third time in their illustrious history.

 But no matter what there is still something so special, so unique about Arsenal and I am fervently hoping that Wenger can finally nail his arch enemy so that the Gunners can win the Premiership and go on to lift the European Cup some day soon.

“Two Caravans” (2007) by Marina Lewycka

There seems to be a new genre of literature that has sprung up over the last couple of years; “Ethnic Chick Lit”, and whilst I enjoyed enormously Lewycka’s first novel “A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian”, I found this book to be bunged full of stereotypes and crammed with tabliody vignettes which smacked of a lazy approach.

 Yes, we all know what goes on inside battery farms and that Bernard Matthews is a national disgrace.

 Ken Loach and others have tackled the plight of Eastern European immigrant labour with far greater sensitivity, and the humour in this book is at the expense of the very people she claims to empathise with.

“Tractors” worked because Lewycka wrote about characters she knew from observing her Sheffield Ukrainian family, but the people in this novel come straight out of the Daily Mail.

 Feckless drunks from Karkov, Russian cigar smoking heavies plus religious and naive Africans are just some of the one-dimensional migrant workers in this novel which was badly researched and unimaginatively put together.

“When We Were Bad”  (2007) by Charlotte Mendelson

This comes the same ethnic genre. This time Middle Class London Jews are the subjects as, shock horror, the eldest son (go one guess what he does for a living… Got it in one. Barrister) jilts his fiancé for the wife of an Orthodox Rabbi.

Cue hilarity based on the social disgrace. Yawn. A chick Lit novel trying to be clever and failing miserably.

I only read it because it is on the Orange Prize long list and found it a thorough waste of time giving up after a hundred pages, as I really didn’t care what happened to the puerile, simplistic and shallow characters.

But now to books I did like over the last month….

“Best and Edwards” (2006) by Gordon Burn.

If you are looking for a blow by blow account of the football career of the two greatest ever British footballers, if you want the detail of who scored what and when, if you want long passages about the technical ins and outs of the beautiful game then this book is not for you.

Gordon Burn is not a football writer and this is the greatest strength of this fantastic book.

Eamon Dunphy’s masterpiece “Manchester United and Matt Busby: A Strange Kind of Glory” is the benchmark book about this, Britain’s greatest club and it’s soul during the building of the Busby Babes, their heart rendingly tragic destruction at Munich and the sheer will and determination of Busby and Bobby Charlton to lift the European Cup, a feat achieved forty years ago next week.

Burn takes us on a journey into the soul of post war Britain via the short life of Duncan Edwards who encapsulates the short back and sides era, then contrasts this with the emergence of George Best, the first play boy soccer star and his descent into a living hell of alcohol induced misogyny and ultimate self destruction.

George Best was not a very nice bloke, and whilst there was much to admire, there is plenty here to disavow the casual excuser of a woman beating drunk.

This is intelligent social commentary at it’s best, and placed in the context of football this makes it a seriously brilliant piece of work from the author of “Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son” which was a forensic sociological analysis of the Ripper murders, placing them amongst the economic and social upheaval of ‘Seventies Yorkshire.

Which segues in nicely to….

“Hunting Evil: Inside the Ipswich Serial Murders” (2008) by Paul Harrison and Prof David Wilson.

The title looks brash and very tabloid, and I was a bit unsure but I have to say that this reads more like a Sociology textbook in places as the authors get to grips with the causes of inner city poverty and how New Labour can be accused of letting this section of society down by not dealing with the issue of drugs and prostitution in a coherent and non sensationalist way.

The Daily Mail loves nothing better than to hype up both issues, and when they dovetail with murder it is a true tabloid feeding fest.

Until we deal with drugs in an adult manner, free from denunciation and which Party can be seen to be more “tough”, and until the buying of sex and not the selling of it are made illegal then this depressing scenario of abused, exploited and forgotten women (and men), prey to the likes of Fred West, Peter Sutcliffe, Dennis Nielsen will just continue to roll on and on.

 Well done to the authors for covering these issues with sensitivity, and raising the profile of a much-maligned underclass.

When arms dealer and all round techno wizard Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jnr.) is taken hostage in Afghanistan, he must use all his wiles to escape by taking the stolen missile technology that the Bad Guys want him to activate and turn it into an Iron Man suit which he can use to blast the baddies and fly away.

On his return to the God Ol’ US of A Stark sees the error of his blood soaked money making ways and decides to use his gifts for the Greater Good.

Clichéd? Absolutely. Bile inducing sentimentality? By the bucket load. Lame love interest? You betcha. Did I care about any of the above? Totally not.

This is a fantastic action movie with brilliant special effects, lots of explosions and fire and the flying sequences for Iron Man were enhanced by the digital pictures and sound in the Vue Cinema.

I have to say that I was a bit taken aback by the casting of Downey in the superhero role, but it really worked as his natural scowly cynicism added depth to the character of Stark, especially at the start of the film.

I found the casting of the Arabs as Bad Guys predictably depressing, but it was the Ruskis during the Cold War so this is just art reflecting the state of things, but I imagine it doesn’t make life as an Arab American any easier.

The arms trade is a horrible, nasty and necessarily immoral canker on our world and when you realise that £50 billion solves Africa’s problems, the fact that an eye watering £900 BILLION is spent every year on ways for humans to kill each other says it all about capitalism and its twisted priorities.  

At least Tory Defence Minister Alan Clark was brutally honest when John Pilger asked him did he lose any sleep about selling arms to the Suharto Regime, which used Brough made jets to slaughter East Timorese civilians.

He said; “I don't really fill my mind much with what one set of foreigners is doing to another."

Clark went on to have this exchange with Tam Dayell who asked; “How many dead or tortured East Timorese are acceptable to this Tory Government in exchange for a defence contract with Indonesia?"

Clark replied; “I'm not into that. I don't know anything about that."

 Iron Man is a very enjoyable film, not just leave-your-brain-at-the-door action as there are some interesting plot twists along the way, and there is one thing in the film which makes you think it’s going to be oh so predictable, but isn’t.

Hull City’s biggest ever game. We are going to Wembley for the first time in our unremarkable 104 year history and I heard about the whole match via text messages and excited conversation with my neighbours on the train back from London, having been told the disease is FINALLY under control, the drugs, in opposition to the Verve’s considered musical opinion in fact DO work. We don’t know how or why this cocktail of stuff works, but it does and that’s all that matters.

Professor Giovanonni and Right Hon Alan Johnson MP, you little beauties.

I wrote in November 2007 in the wake of more inconsistency;

“Michael Turner, Wayne Brown, Dean Windass, Dave Livermore (when selected) and the commitment of Ian Ashbee are keeping City afloat and eleventh is surely the apogee despite the enormous injection of cash and the construction of a vast management and coaching staff.

It is only a matter of time before City, and Brown are found wanting on a consistent basis.”

 Shows why Phil Brown and Brian Horton are the Tiger’s Management team and, despite thirty three years following City and the game in general, I know next to nothing about football.

When a contract killing in London becomes a botch job, the two Irish hit men are sent to hide out in Bruges. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot it seems, as Ray (Colin Farrell) and his mentor Ken (Brendan Gleeson) have dramatically different views on what constitutes such things as “lying low” and “having a good time”, consequently mayhem ensues, and when the Big Boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes), a major league psychopath decides to go on the rampage things go from bad to worse.

Genre? Black gangster comedy? I am not sure as the subject matter is truly grim involving the accidental slaying of a child, guilt, betrayal and suicide but the gags just keep on coming and not in a staged comedy way. They ebb and flow as an integral part of the plot and some of the dialogue and situations are just laugh out loud funny.

Bathos, I think is the term that sums up much of In Bruges best and I thought that it was a tremendous picture with a strong ensemble cast, but Ralph Fiennes is an absolute show stealer in the final third of the film.

If William Hurt deserved to win the Best Supporting Actor for a History of Violence, then Fiennes must be a shoe in as it is a difficult balance to strike between caricature and impact when you have so little time to develop the character.

Ben Kingsley provides the template in Sexy Beast, and Fiennes delivers the same sort of performance as the mentally unhinged and ruthless gangster. Blistering and energetic but without losing the context or side lining the main cast.  

When Ray gets mixed up with a Belgian film hand, a “midget” (“Did you often feel like topping yourself, you know, what with the height thing an’ all?”) and a stash of drugs the action really begins after a necessarily sedentary opening to the film.

Writer Martin McDonagh must be an Arsenal fan as he has Ray and Ken discussing purgatory thus;

“It’s when you are a bit shit, not that good but not that bad”.

“Like Spurs then?”

“Well, yeah.”

 I enjoyed this film a lot, and it’s the sort of picture that when you ruminate on it a bit more at home, you find it was actually quite existential behind the jokes and shootings.

This is a true story. You can choose whether to believe me or not. You can choose to hear the grinding of axes. I don’t care.

The reason I am relating it is because a senior member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee emailed me to inform me that the Prime Minister, in a (now seemingly routine fit) of rage banged the table and demanded; “You show me the pay slips! I WANT PAY SLIPS!!” when she tackled him about the losers in the 10p tax band fiasco.

Gordon, it seems and despite everything that has happened, is still in denial regarding the damage he has done to the most vulnerable in Society, the people we are meant to defend. What the Labour Party is “for”.

Brenda is an Office Manager at garden equipment wholesalers near Hull and she is a life long Labour voter but describes herself as fairly non-political. Interested in current affairs but not at all nerd like (what are you trying to say here Brenda?).

She manages twelve lads. “My lads” she calls them, as they are largely there because no one else will have them, or can cope with their literacy, numeric and in some cases related social problems such as dealing with work and each other.

“Rough diamonds” off the North Hull estates who wouldn’t understand why this month they are getting less money to take home.

Brenda gets them together to explain why, that it not because they aren’t working hard or that she or the “Big Boss” is cross with them. It’s down to the Government.

There is a bit of swearing and cursing, and Brenda thinks they get the reasons why until she spies Jimmy holding back at the end of the short meeting.

“What’s me Mam gonna say?” says this 19 year old “gentle giant” of a man, and the lip starts to quiver.

“You told me off the other day for smoking, and I when I told me Mam she said I had to do as you say….”

The penny drops with a shattering clatter. This boy is worried his Mam will think he has been badly behaved at work and has lost the money for that reason.

Brenda rings Jimmy’s Mother to reassure her that she, and everybody is pleased with Jimmy.

Get it now do you Gordon? How many Jimmy’s and Joanne’s are out there? How many have a Brenda to look out for them?

 That’s the reality of your robbing of vulnerable frightened and bewildered young men like Jimmy, in order to cut tax for the Middle Classes. Well done.

The Justice System as it stands, has along with everyone else, decided to declare war on kids as exemplified by the Home Secretary’s incendiary speech last week as reported in the Guardian thus;

“Police should be harassing badly behaved youths by openly filming them and hounding them at home to make their lives as uncomfortable as possible,”

All fine and dandy. This stupid and crass intervention will go down a treat amongst the faux Middle Class wanabee Mail and Express readership, but all it really serves to do is further alienate and demonise a section of Society that doesn’t have the access or wherewithal to articulate a response in the media.

True story.

Alex (not his real name) is eighteen and drives a red Astra. He arrives off the A63 in Brough and is pulled over by two cop cars whose Officers inform Alex that he has been caught on CCTV doing a runner form a petrol station and driving erratically. Don’t bother arguing son, we’ve got the evidence. Just cough or we will impound your car right here and now. Oh, and by the way we bet this car is wrongly registered in your Mum’s name to scam the insurance, right?

It all comes out alright in the end as, of course the Old Bill can’t provide the tape.

If that happened to me now as a forty year old fairly confident guy, I’d have been bricking it, so how is a young fella meant to feel?

In addition it’s the sheer bloody mindedness of the Cops involved. Bullying a guy like that. A total disgrace and if an episode of Traffic Cops on BBC1 is typical (impounding a van for spurious reasons and laughing in the guy’s face) then the Police don’t need egging on by the likes of Jacqui Smith thank you very much.

I always thought Smith was a progressive type, and was delighted when Gordon gave her such a senior post, so my dismay was all the more pronounced when I read what she had said.

Just what happens to reasonable people when they get a whiff of power? The lamentable Harriet Harman is another case in point, showing total contempt for those affected by the dreaded 10p tax fiasco when on Question Time recently.

Back to our maligned Yoof.. As if it’s not enough that young ‘uns are forced to attend school full time at the age of four in order to get ready to secure their school’s best possible place in the league tables for public exams aged seven, then there is pressure from advertisers pushing junk food on the one hand, and then the State as Nanny deploring your eating habits and suggesting you must be the victim of abuse if your Mum doesn’t give you broccoli and salad for every meal.

Then for girls, the expectation that you must be obsessed with lads, make up and having an eating disorder all by the age of ten. Otherwise you must be a freak.

In 1985 less than 100,000 under 18’s came into contact with the Criminal Justice system, last year the figure was over 210,000. This despite falling crime rates year on year since 1995.

According the Observer overall Juvenile crime is down 22% over the last ten years, but the number of under 18’s receiving custodial sentences is up a whopping 90% over the same period.

Previous policy saw the vast majority of these youngsters receive a caution, in effect “You’ve made a mistake. Learn form it”.

Not now. Over 50% of youths coming into the system are prosecuted and receive a criminal record.

This means, and this is official, that the Justice System mow deals more, not less punitively with kids than with adults meaning that kids are expected to be better behaved than adults. Why?

Because, as with race issues, Daily Mail Land doesn’t want to understand kids with problems and as a result is frightened of them.

Kids reflect the society and environment that they are brought up in, so while The Daily Wail exaggerates the idea of out of control kids, the Government has to be seen to deal with it and forces the Police into action, often when it’s not needed, to assuage the demands of the Right Wing press.

And lets face it, kids are a soft target as their often petty misdemeanours are committed in public places and easy to process.

The perception is that young people are ever more out of control, but this, as is always the case with crime, is at odds with the reality.

I was a Senior Teacher at a school near Hull and stopping and searching of kids has become all too routine in our area, and my pupils were forever complaining about being stopped for no reason.

I’m not stupid and naïve enough to realise that this was always the case, but the type of kids who it was happening to made you think the pendulum is swinging the wrong way, especially when you have the daft policy that kids can’t walk along certain streets in groups of more than three, thus five members of our Orchestra got stopped and searched walking home from practice, the Police not being able to exercise common sense.

I was by no means a bad kid, but I was thinking about some of the stuff we did and comparing it to a report in the New Statesman which outlined some of the “crimes” for which youngsters had been prosecuted and by those standards we would have been hard core recidivist hooligans.

It was just silly teenage boy behaviour and nothing more.

+ Getting ammo from a blank firing pistol and detonating it on walls with a hammer to scare the bejaysus out of random North Hull residents. Until a certain person hit the bullet at the wrong angle thus ending up with a shrapnel wound that my Mum had to sort out at the Medical Centre where she was a nurse.

+ Making and detonating crude bombs on the Uni fields made from petrol and the contents of a Chemistry Set that we “acquired”. One such test resulted in quite a large blaze needing the attendance of a fire engine.

+ Hanging around Marist Social Club and tormenting elderly bingo players by bombing past on our bikes and banging on the windows, shouting obscenities.

+ Smoking.

+ Encouraging a less assertive boy to rob stuff from the corner shop for us.

+ Twagging and getting pissed on cider. One of us (not me) had a pang of drunken guilt, returned to lessons and puked before passing out in biology.

+ Tormenting the Security Staff at the Uni. 

I’m not proud of some of the idiotic things we did and would have plenty to say if my son pulled such stunts, but we never got caught until an unfortunate incident at school which resulted in near exclusion. I paid the price, took the punishment from my parents and the school and moved on. Now we would have been prosecuted, no doubt about it.

All of us have grown up and never been in trouble with the Police or committed a criminal act.

Yes, there are kids out there who need to be dealt with, but a differentiation needs to be made about people trying the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, and out and out criminality, otherwise we are demonising a whole generation and turning them away from the mainstream.

We had an absolutely outstanding view from the Upper Tier in the East Stand at the Grove, shame then about the game, which was real end of season stuff and a turgid affair settled by a trademark Bentner header….

There has been a lot of moaning, groaning and gnashing of teeth amongst those of a Gooner persuasion, and the last three months have been truly horrendous but let’s look at it in the round.

At the start of this season if someone had offered us a third place finish in the League, a European Cup Quarter Final plus decent progress with the kids in the Carling Cup, we would have bitten their hand off. Lets face it.

The Club is in a major period of transition both on and off the field with turmoil in the Boardroom and big changes in the team as Wenger looks to build his third great side.

As an occasional observer at the Grove and more often on TV I have a few things to toss into the general end of season naval gazing that obviously ensues from a season of such highs, and very disappointing lows.

The game continues to move on at breakneck speed and I am not the only one who thinks that Le Boss would benefit from employing a really top notch First team Coach in order to bring in fresh, possibly more scientific ideas and to take some of the day to day pressure off leaving Wenger free to pursue new players.

Rice obviously does a great job, but sometimes players need to be out of their comfort zones and challenged a bit more on a day to day level.

As regards the squad; it’s too thin, any muppet can see that and I agree with the general sentiment that Wenger should have strengthened the squad in January.

He protested that the talent wasn’t available and yet it’s obvious we needed another centre back. Woodgate was there for the taking and ended up with the Spuds.

Are you telling me that if Arsenal came a calling that a player of his stature would have opted for a Mickey mouse outfit with about as much chance of Champions League football as Hull City?

A trick well and truly missed given some of the pantomime defending that’s gone on recently in front of Almunia.

Which brings me neatly on to the fans desperation to sign a new keeper. Why?

If anyone can point out a goal that was the Spaniard’s fault this season, then fair dos. But I bet no one can.

He is better than Jens Lehman. OK, I admit to thinking that the German is a prize idiot and others will point to his part in the Invincibles team, but come on any sensible person can see that Almunia is quality.

He exudes confidence, is a good shot stopper and because of his awareness the spectacular save is rarely needed which is perhaps why we don’t appreciate him as much, and with the impressive Fabianski I reckon we are well covered in this particular area.

Gallas, whilst a reasonably solid defender is a disaster in the armband, setting a horrendous example and giving the message to the opposition that Arsenal are easily rattled and can’t handle pressure, ergo the Birmingham fiasco when instead of reassuring Clichy in the wake of his mistake that led to the Blues soft penalty winner, the toys came out of the pram which would have emboldened and watching United or Chavski staff enormously.

Eboue. The guy is a disgrace, and as a writer in the Gooner put it; “If Milan are interested then I’ll drive him to the airport myself!”

Petulant indiscipline and a fuse so short that he makes Mark Dennis look like Lineker, plus a poor scoring record means he has to go in the close season. Whilst Diarra is an egocentric toddler who could do with going on Super Nanny, Wenger had a great deal more to work with here ability wise and I was disappointed he didn’t persevere a bit longer.

Fabregas is a total genius, and whilst he went off the boil along with the rest of the team, you have to consider he is still only 20 and consistency comes with experience.

The Flamster wants off if the esteemed Fourth Estate is to be believed, but I think Wenger should do all he can as the guy is a tough competitor, does it in big games and is versatile. A Must Keep player who brings the best out of Hleb and Fabregas, and whilst we are capable of playing some of the best football in the world, solidity and the ability to defend a lead would come in handy.

And it’s that infuriating inability to make sure goals aren’t conceded when in front that has cost Arsenal dearly this season. Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge have been witness to this Achilles Heel, but the piece de resistance came at Anfield in the wake of Walcott’s wonder run and set up for Adebayor to virtually secure a European Cup semi final we switched off and conceded a penalty in the cruellest of circumstances.

Thus Wenger has to seek out a decent centre half and a mid field enforcer to ensure we can kill games when required and be a bit more street savvy when playing against the cloggers from Lancashire in the guise of Wigan, Blackburn and Bolton.

As for goal scoring Adebayor and Bentner, game as they are won’t return twenty goals between them on a consistent basis, let alone on an individual level and van Persie is always crocked so David Villa looks like a good bet on this front.

There are plenty of positives from this season; the emergence of Sagna as a world class right back, the continued progress of Clichy and Walcott and the biggest surprise that is Alex Hleb as a creative tour de force.

 If Wenger is willing to spend some cash, and actually try to win a Cup as a starting point, then next season could be very exciting indeed. 

24% is a worse performance than even John Major managed in 1995, the year that the zeitgeist moved in our favour and it became a done deal that the Tory years would come to an end.

That year Major polled 26% and everyone correctly predicted that he was a dead man walking for the remainder of that Parliament.

I am by no means in denial about just how bad things are for us, but there are crucial things in our favour which give the Labour Party hope that the disaster for the Nation of a Tory Government need not be a depressing inevitability.

Firstly there is no threat to Brown’s leadership. Major was in a constant fire fighting mode and even after he defeated Redwood in the 95 Leadership Election, he was struggling to assert his authority even to the extent that he had to appeal to his party not to “tie my hands” going in to the 1997 General Election.

We can’t change now, and no Labour Leader has ever been assassinated in the way Thatcher and IDS were. So the Tories have taught us at least one thing; once the Party gets the blood lust for Leadership victims it’s almost impossible to sate and feeling of permanent revolution is ever present.

Secondly Brown has a firm majority in Parliament, something Major never really had in his second Parliament, being forced into backstairs deals with the Irish parties and his own back benchers over the most Mickey mouse legislation meaning that he could never be bold.

Gordon must take the initiative and address the concerns of the voters on the cost of living, affordable housing and the economic slowdown reasserting to people that he is control and knows what he is doing. Additionally he should allow Cabinet Ministers to get on with their jobs and refer the media to them when commenting in detail on issues such as transport and planning.

And if he had any inkling of how the electorate are feeling, he should get Alan Johnson in front of the cameras as much as possible.

Finally, and most crucially this result puts the Tories firmly in the spotlight and means their paper thin so-called “policies” will be unpackaged by the media.

In 1995 the vote was actively Pro Labour and the voters were turning to us a real alternative, whereas in 2008 people are rightly angry with the Labour Party and are voting Tory to punish us rather than as a positive endorsement of Cameron.

 Up to now just Not Being Gordon and being all shiny and new has been enough for Cameron but if he stands any chance of winning in the long term he is going to have to show his hand and that’s out opportunity to show how we are the Party for the many, and they are the Party of the privileged few. 

How technology moves on, but only if you have motivated people involved who actually want to help, rather than money grabbing Pharmaceutical Corporation Bastards whose sole interest is to make a profit out of mass miseries such as cancer, diabetes and arthritis that affect a significant number of people.

Cerebella Ataxia (thank God) is never going to be a disease with large numbers of suffers, although how many people my age (especially women) present with the same symptoms and are fobbed off with “stress”, or indeed the last refuge of the medical scoundrels “the change?

Nor is CA “sexy” in a Calendar-For-Breast-Cancer Kylie sort of way. Ouch. But when was the last time you saw people wearing brown ribbons for rectal cancer?

So we are reliant on a) the language to describe what is happening to you in a proportionate and dispassionate way b) a G.P who will listen and refer c) a Consultant Neurologist who will do the same, and if they can’t find an answer will look for someone who can and d) a Main Man to champion the cause and do the research.

Luckily I have a) due to being well educated and let’s face it Middle Class, and c) due to the good fortune to come into contact with a Consultant from another discipline who was disgusted by my treatment at the hands of certain people at Hull Royal and intervened by writing to the Prof off her own bat.

d) speaks for itself as GG does the business yet again.

My last treatment of blood anti body infusions, although a great success, took it’s toll through two sessions where I rejected the excess anti bodies and developed a septic meningitis. Horrendous, and also meant I could not undergo anymore of this particular therapy.

By the end of January I was kind of resigned to thinking that I’d had a bit of relief, and to make the most of it before the disease kicked off again.

But I also thought that GG seemed like a man with a plan. And so it came to pass.

I have undergone the first course of a new therapy, which is an adaptation of treatment for lymphoma.

The Prof, realising that a certain anti body that is present in CA is also there in lymphoma is using a therapy of synthetic anti bodies, and this is the clever bit, that ONLY attacks the mutated cells. Thus the previous iVig, which blasted everything, can be toned down. Hence no side effects, and guess what? It’s cheaper and can be done in a two four hour bi weekly sessions, and then a six-month follow up. Result.

The registrar related to me that they got a guy, severely disabled virtually overnight, got the stuff in him and he is looking at going back to work.

Unfortunately I have significant brain damage to scupper that type of plan, and in addition they really don’t know why this works or for how long.

 But each day as it comes and you never can tell. If not teaching then who knows?