York City Are Magic

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I am doing more Can I Have My Ball Back? shows in 2025. You can see if I am coming near you and buy tickets here. A few more gigs may be added. I really want to do a Birmingham date for example, so fingers crossed. But remember I have done a lot of gigs already, so don’t do what three people did on Facebook and ask why I am not coming to Sheffield. Because I did it already you idiots. Why didn’t you come?

It  felt strange adding the dates to my website. We're just over two months  from 2025, but it seems absolutely impossible that that's next year.  2025 is a date in the future where we will have hoverboards, flying cars  and most importantly realistic human sex robots that look like Gemma  Chan, which everyone has agreed that it's not cheating if you have sex  with them. Yet none of those things have happened.

Also it's  only about two years since we were wrongly celebrating the new  millennium as we saw in the year 2000. We can't be a quarter of the way  through the century already. I mean I am really looking forward to  seeing what life is like in 2100 but I didn't expect us to be plummeting  towards it so quickly.

I think the decline of cheque books  has made it harder for us to really appreciate the passing of the years.  When do you ever write down what year it is now? NEVER. Don't argue  with me. Also it's really ruined jokes around the format "I am still  writing the wrong year on my" x.

On the plus side, I've now come up with this cryptic crossword clue, which would be tougher if we weren't talking about cheques.

They won't accept my hand-written way of paying for goods, we heard. It's confirmed (6,3)

On  the poster for We're All Going To Die! the gravestone predicts my  demise in some unreadable date in the 2020s. So not long to go whichever  way you spin it.

I had a day off today for the first time in a  while, but that just meant extra hard work as I battled to get the  house into more order than it's been in.  We've been here a month now  and of course we still have a lot of stuff in boxes and my office space  in particular looks like a bomb has hit it, but it feels like we've  lived here forever. I went back to the old house today to do more  Robinson Cruesoeing and to dump some polystyrene in the bin. With most  of our stuff gone from the place and no kids shouting in the kitchen it  doesn't feel like home. I wasn't sure if an empty house would be harder  or easier to sell - people are free to imagine their own stuff in each  space and there aren't toys and crud all over the floor, but it also  feels dead and cold and empty. Plus there's a ghost of a horse and a  baby in there (maybe I did see the horse on that stone clear where I saw  a baby riding a horse). No one has been round to see it since the  spring in any case. If you see me on I'm A Celebrity next year then  you'll know it's because this gamble to move before selling has not paid  off!

The right family will come eventually, but hopefully in 2025 and not in 2100.

Aside  from financial disaster though, this has been the right decision for  the family and when I don't think about it properly I am very happy!

I forgot to mention the very funny interview with Fred Macualay that came out on Wednesday. Listen here.

Video clip here

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York City fans have had to endure a lot over the last many seasons- I won't bore you with all the details as I plan to bore you with something else, but suffice to say that the team avoided relegation by the outer layer of skin on our teeth (and teeth don't even have skin) last season and nearly landed back in the almost inescapable National League North that they'd languished in for much too long.

At least you knew what you were getting. Pretty much constant disappointment of the deepest kind, punctuated by the occasional vain hope, followed by deeper disappointment and the discovery that disappointment can burrow much further than you imagined.

I was glad to idly support a team that took real guts to get behind. All you glory seekers who support teams from places you've not even been to, because they had a chance of winning the First Division in 1978 don't know what football is about. It's about supporting the team nearest to your birth place and then having to endure the pain of them being shit, but you don't really care that much because you don't like football that much and hardly go and see them. That is what football is about and all true fans know it.

What? Did your team only come second in the Premier League and you had to watch the match in a beautiful stadium with clean toilets. We have to stand in a shed while a drunk man sits next to our kids and pukes up on his own shoes, so you have to go home. And then your team throw away a one goal lead.

So this season is a bit of a shocker for me, because York seem to be actually good and I am having to contemplate the possibility that they might actually win the league and get the one automatic promotion place. Not since they were the first team to ever get more than 100 points in the football league have I experienced anything like it.

When York get promoted it's by fluking their way into the last play-off spot and then referees failing to spot that the goal they scored to win the final was offside, not by being consistently good.

What you can rely on with York is that they will hold a one goal lead for the whole match before conceding two goals in injury time. Hope followed by disappointment and the opposite of the Herring Manoeuvre, where you only try at a sport right at the end, lulling your opponents into a false sense of security and not wasting your energy when most games are won by the final point.

Today I was out shopping with the kids but was checking on the game and occasionally listening to the commentary on my phone. We were playing the team my brother supports, Halifax Town, who scored early against the run of play, weathered a couple of attacks and then in the second half dominated the game. York were back to normal. In many ways I was relieved.

But as we approached the house, laden down with two heavy pumpkins and some skellingtons (we'd been to Sainsburys for Halloween stuff and I'd also done some murders) injury time had started and it was surely over.

Only if you haven't heard of the Herring Manoeuvre.

Because in the 91st minute York equalised and then five minutes later scored the winner. What could Halifax do? Nothing. Because if you score a winner in the last minute there is no time for a response. Herring. Manoeuvre.

Glad we finally have a manager that understands sport.

Forest Green drew, the losers (well drawers), so York returned to the top of the league. I am hoping a terrible pandemic now grips the world, meaning all lower league football is called off and the current league positions are the final ones. Fingers crossed.

Sure, I am a York fan, so I know the script. This is the hope that they give us. Disappointment is inevitable and doubtless we will manage to engineer a situation where we end up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but for now, still in the place of hope I am confused and bedazzled.

Losing a goal lead in injury time is the kind of thing York do. But then Halifax are more York than York. But at last my brother chose to support them because that's where he was born. I  should really be supporting Pocklington FC, but my head was swayed by the bright lights of the big city. God tried to warn me off by setting fire to the Minster, but screw God. I am a Minsterman until I die.  So for about five more years.

We could be in the Premiership by then. Or in whatever division is four below the National League. Place your bets.

And if you don’t know why this blog has that title, enjoy this