Dreams of a Girl in New England: A Review of 'Meat' by Erin Reardon

As I look to get most of what I've done available at this blog, it's time to look at one of my favourite poets of recent years, Erin Reardon.

This is a review I published at Parasitic a few years back, about here book 'Meat'. I'm sure you can still buy it if you ask nicely.

Remember you can buy my book, 'Stumbles and Half Slips', from HERE.


“I’m not a spinner of saccharine sticky love poems” asserts Erin Reardon, in this chapbook collection of poetry. That’s not entirely true. There is definitely love poetry here, and it’s occasionally sticky. The stickiness is, however not caused by anything sugary sweet and innocent.

Various bodily fluids trickle across the pages of ‘Meat’. The fluids one associates with sex, violence, heartbreak and over-indulgence. There is a coarseness in the poems that’s actually delightful, Reardon relishing dirty details like the girl in infant school showing her septic scabs to the boys. Reardon is very definitely a girl though, coarse not so she can be one of the boys but rather to shock them from time to time.

This is very female poetry, but there are no tales of sugar and spice and all things nice. Rather, there are gin addled hangover mornings where the narrator is “vomiting the last/Of [her] rancid soul”, using the diet pills for “too many toots” not to fit into a wedding dress in time. The self-loathing is of a different stamp to the kind in Sunday magazines.

There is much more here than just girls behaving badly bodily function though, and to dismiss these erudite and musical poems as simply Beat inspired lifestyle shock smears would be to severely underestimate the depth, subtlety and shade that the work possesses.

The speaker of the poems can be predatory, hunting the male in as deadly a fashion as the girl in the Scott Walker song, but this is no ‘Sex & the City’ vapid status fuck search, but rather a need as desperate as any crackhead’s with an underlying vulnerability that does not so much feminise the hunt as humanise it. Reardon shines a spotlight on the unpretty hunger in all our souls for love or its approximation, and the inevitable disappointment and regret that ensues.

As she writes in ‘Autumnal Equinox’ they will always let you down. “He’ll lure you in with flowers…pretend he’s got a pussy too/Push your buttons of fidelity/’Til you’re squealing at the moon”, the supposed devotion driving the girl mad. ‘Acquiescence’, with its refrain of “What kind of man are you?” explores similar territory, it’s lines “when she reaches out to cradle you/And you bite her on the tit” reflecting the place we all end up in eventually, the place where the wires don’t cross properly anymore and the sparks are damp fizzles. The place where everything is mere functionality, the fulfilling of procedure described in ‘Gangrene Prophylactic’: “I will squat/On your erection/Just so you can hear me say/I need you.”

Obsession and addiction are recurring themes. Addiction not just to chemicals natural and synthesised, but also to hope and optimism, often embodied in a sick fascination with the boys who disappoint the speaker time and again as she reaches for the bottle, pill jar or syringe that can help to bleed their “medical caress from memory”. Addiction to the hope they bring, “She hated her skin/Until/It found his.” (Eating Matches) But they always leave her let down and seeking solace.

The kind of solace often found by religious faith, and Reardon’s Roman Catholic education casts an obsessive shadow of worship and abasement over many of the poems. Questions to mothers and fathers, both earthly and divine, are stamped out, the lies of their “communion wafer tongues” refuted and their roles challenged. The humiliation inherent in such abasement/worship is explored too, and the theme of a Virgin ruined by Christ Reborn recurs throughout. As she says in ‘Glory Be’, “if I can’t trust the word of Christ reborn…Who can I trust?”

At times, there is almost a twisted desire to be humiliated, Reardon’s narrator seemingly reaching the conclusion that there’s only one thing worse than having someone humiliate you and that’s having no one humiliate you. “We was born to be abused” she despairingly decides in ‘Born Into It’.

But it would be to mislead the reader to imply that this was a blood and cum, menstrual heart fuck bitch drama circus. There is much hope and beauty here too. The hope found in the eyes of the doomed boys and the steps of the dancing girls that dream above the vomit puddles and the broken glass.

This beauty can be found in ‘Black Coffee’ with its “blessed blue jay shrieks/Among the trees, a new bud lingering…Tranquil as we knew how”, or in ‘Centred’ with its “heart/As heavy as a boulder/Haunted by…love”. Throughout, a wistful regret at all the trauma and wasted days hangs on the shoulder of the narrator, best summed up in the closing poem ‘The Best Days’ with its Eleanor Rigby references and closing lines “my best days/I’m still waiting/For them/To begin” which provides a fittingly melancholy ending to a skilfully written and craftily sensitive chapbook, the sadness seasoning the coarse, vocal “Boston-Irish” clamour with a sweet beauty and dark longing.

This meat is pink and cooked to perfection, its “sulfur taste” definitely one to be savoured. Get thyself to a butcher’s.

Originally published at:
http://parasitic101.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/dreams-of-a-girl-in-new-england-a-review-of-%E2%80%98meat%E2%80%99-by-erin-reardon/

Zack Wilson is the author of  'Stumbles and Half Slips', available from Amazon HERE.

Lescar: Sheffield Star Interview

My second collection of fiction is called 'Lescar', and was published by Blackheath Books of Wales a few years back.

You can buy it here. You can buy my current novel, 'Stumbles and Half Slips', from here.

I'll be blogging a bit about 'Lescar' later on here, but it was a series of stories set in a real pub in Sheffield, on Sharrowvale Road, near Hunter's Bar. It's a real pub and it's still there, but it was changed enormously in recent years. All of the characters are fictional though some names may be familiar...

You can find out a bit more about the book and its inspiration in this interview with Martin Dawes of the Sheffield Star...

 Lescar's new chapter


Published on Wednesday 31 December 2008 09:35

TO the Lescar Hotel at Hunters Bar to interview author Zack Wilson about his new 'chapbook' of stories set in the boozer.

Now this 17th century term is not one you hear much these days, but think bigger than a booklet, smaller than a book.

We arrange to meet in the Lescar itself. Zack, a former English teacher at Westfield School, hasn't been in there for getting on for three years, ever since he went on the wagon.

The book is set in what Zack insists is a fictional Lescar in 2004 so the fact that his Lescar has a landlord called Duncan McAllister and the real Lescar had one called Duncan MacFarlane, or the pub had a barmaid called Emma and the book one named Emily is purely coincidental.

It's perhaps best not to inquire if there really was a Jewish Dave or a Bob Brown, about whom it was rumoured... no, we shan't go on.

The one character Zack says is not a composite is Mayhem, a man devoted to the music of Status Quo.

"It's very definitely fiction but like all fiction every writer takes what they see and weaves into it their own experience. There are several things which really happened... but the details and context have been changed, usually for the sake of style," he says over a lime and soda.

The stories are written in a crisp, vivid style which often reads like reportage. There was a visit from the Blades Business Crew but, says Zack, he wasn't there at the time.

His stories started on the web, where much of his writing now is. He gave up teaching to work for the city council's youth offenders' service (another literary gold mine) but is now full time as the Premier League reporter for a football internet website.

It's not clear what the new management of the Lescar will make of the book. He's not told them but wonders whether they'd like to sell it on the bar.

The Diary asks why he needed to name the pub at all and not just make one up.

"I am drawn to fiction set in recognisable locations, as in James Joyce's Dublin or Irvine Welsh's Edinburgh. There is a recognisable context for what goes on," he says. Besides, the Lescar was then his local and had a heady mix of respectability and riff-raff. It was what you would call bohemian, a place where you could find people with recreational substances.

Those days have long gone, of course. We are intrigued to find the 2009 Lescar has a wine club.

The stories don't sound like they were written by a man who sat alone in the corner.

"I used to stand here at the bar. I hardly ever sat down," he says.

This collection of stories is the first volume. Another is planned for the spring and, sitting on the backburner at the moment, is one on the Lescar's women.

After all these years of self-imposed exile that will have to be done from memory. And any resemblance between fact and fiction will be purely coincidental.

Originally published at:
http://www.thestar.co.uk/lifestyle/features/lescar-s-new-chapter-1-264969  

Zack Wilson is the author of 'Stumbles and Half Slips', available from Epic Rites Press and Amazon.com.

Code13 Archive: Mark Aston, Part One, June 2011

As some of you will know by now, Code13rugbyleague, a website I worked for covering the great game of rugby league, has closed at the end of the 2012 season.

I'm very proud of what the website achieved, and so I'll be reproducing here some of the interviews I conducted with some of rugby league's personalities.

First, and it's somewhat topical considering that his team won the Championship Grand Final this year, is Sheffield Eagles coach Mark Aston.

I spoke to Mark in the summer of 2011 following his appointment as coach of the Ireland rugby league team, a post he continues to fill alongside his duties at the Eagles.
 

Sheffield Eagles coach Mark Aston was appointed as the new coach of the Ireland rugby League team last week. Code13‘s Zack Wilson caught up with the effervescent Eagles chief this week at Bramall Lane for a chat about Ireland as well RL in Sheffield, Yorkshire’s only rugby league ‘expansion’ city.

In today’s Part One, Mark talks about the challenges of his new role with the Irish. Read Part Two on Friday for his thoughts on the Eagles’ campaign so far…

Congratulations on the appointment Mark. What’s first on the agenda for the job?

I’m on my travels this weekend to Dublin to look around the place. They’ve got a final going on, the Inter-Province final, so I’m going to have a look at the standard of that and see what’s around there.

On Sunday morning I’m actually going to do a bit of a session with the Ireland ‘A’ squad – the Wolfhounds – and have a look at some of those guys.That’s the squad drawn from the domestic league and things like that. So I want to have a look at what it is and where it is and get my own ideas of the standard and, I guess, the task in hand.

What is the appeal of the job? What drew you to the post?

It’s the challenge. Looking at it, it’s like where I was ten years ago with Sheffield Eagles. That’s how I look at it. We had nothing and at least Ireland have got a squad of quality players in there. They dipped last year and they weren’t happy with the standards and performances, but they weren’t happy on a number of other things as well. I aim to resolve those and build a professional environment there and challenge them to be the best they can be.

What do you see as your main tasks?

Structures are a big thing that need looking at, as does coaching over there. I’m not going to be there every week coaching week in and week out, so we need to make sure that we get the structures in place. We need to look at the identification of the Irish squad. I’ve just spoken with Scott Grix, to see about getting a coffee with him and finding out some of the issues they’ve had over the last couple of years. And also making sure that he’s on board, because he was the skipper last year.

It’s not a quick fix, it’s something to build to.

Talking about that, there’s been some high-profile defections from the Ireland squad recently, such as Ben Harrison and Chris Bridge. Have you got a plan for counteracting this kind of draining of talent?

We’ve got to find the next generation. That’s the challenge. What I’m amazed about with Ireland is that they’ve go the senior squad, but underneath the senior squad they’ve got an amateur squad, and I think there’s something missing there like an academy to put in place.

Have any new players expressed an interest in playing for Ireland after your appointment?
I’ve got one here at Sheffield – Vinny Finegan. He’s Irish and he’s put his hand up and said he wants to be part of it. One of the things I’ve always spoken about is getting the youth. Are those players who put up their hands and were part of the 2008 World Cup going to be part of the 2013 World Cup? If they are, then we’ve got four games this year and they’ll have to be putting their hands up for those as well.

You’ll be taking on England, Australia and Fiji at the next World Cup. That must be an exciting for challenge for you?

Fantastic! How good is that for three games? If you want to be on the big stage, then they’re three nations you want to be playing. I’m really looking forward to it, and the guys should be too, but I want them to be preparing now and I want them to feel that when they come into the environment it’s a professional, respectful and disciplined environment.

If we get that right, then look at the players Ireland have got. The Grix brothers, you’ve got people like Pat Richards. There’s others around – Tyrone McCarthy and Tim Bergin. I want the kids who are going to be around for the next few years.

What Ireland is is a passionate nation. That’s what we want in the camp, that passion and pride. Has the sport been going for a few years? Yes, but is it established to the extent it should be? No, and we certainly aim to do that in the next few years. If I can be part of that then I’ll be extremely proud. I just see so many similarities between where Ireland are at now and where I was at Sheffield ten years ago.

I’m sure there are some quality players who are underneath the radar as well. They probably fill the form in and just put England down without thinking whether they’ve got any Irish ancestry. There’s only so many people can play for England, and at the end of the day  we want to give opportunity to players.One of my first jobs is to speak to all the heads of youth and find out who actually who is available and capable of playing for Ireland.

Are there are any of Irish RL’s past greats who will be helping out at all? I’m thinking particularly of Brian Carney or Barrie McDermott, though there are many others.

It’s a clean deck at the moment. There’s me in post, and I’ve got to have a look at who I want to be involved. I know who I want to fetch as my assistant -there’s no dount about that. Whether he can commit to that is something that we have to try and resolve over the next week or so. If he can’t, then it’s Plan B I suppose.

What do I see for Brian and Barrie Mac and Terry O’Connor? I had a meeting with Barrie last week about it, and he’s still very supportive of the Ireland team. He wants a new environment. He wants a professional and disciplined environment. That’s what I want. So I can see all three of them having some sort of ambassadorial role, or just being about the place. Obviously they won’t be involved in a coaching role, but they’ve got massive commitments already.

What is your strategy for getting more first generation Irish born and raised players into your group?

Of course we have to do that. I’ve been looking at the list of players they’ve had over the last few years, and who do I want to keep and who interests me and who do I think is going to be around until the 2013 World Cup. We’ve already got people like Tim Bergin (born in County Laoise) in the environment, so I’m looking to see who else is around.

What really does interest me is the academy over there, where a couple of weeks ago some of the Super League clubs went over and the players that had come through the Provinces there, in the academies, they got them together. And I believe that St Helens took a couple on trial, Hull FC took one and I believe Wigan have taken another one. Those people interest me. What does that potentially give my squad? Pride and passion. Maybe they couldn’t quite make it in rugby union, but could they in rugby league? I guarantee you that there will be some skilful and very decent rugby league players there.

Are you eyeing up any rugby union converts at all?

There’s a lot of people in the rugby union system over there. They come through the school environment and go into the academies. But the Ireland RU only keep the cream of the cream. So what happens to the rest? I think those players are highly skilled and they’ll have good habits, good systems and that. Can we transfer their skills into rugby league? I’m sure we can. It’s got to be a lot easier changing from rugby union to league than vice versa. So they do interest me.

I want to build a programme of work over there where we can get an elite training programme, where some of those kids might come over to England for work placements. They might go to Sheffield Eagles, they might go to Wigan, they might go and have a week or a month at a professional club and see what it’s about and smell the Super League environment and see what it’s like to train with the first team and see the intensity. That’s one of the challenges of the job: to see if we can turn some of these rugby union people into rugby league players, and even international players. If we can get one or two of them, then you get three or four, then you can start talking about profile and raising the awareness of Rugby League  Ireland.

If we can get that then people will buy into the concept of what we’re trying to do. We need to drive the pride and the passion into rugby league in Ireland and say: “We want Irish people playing rugby league for Ireland.”

Look at what Leinster has done in rugby union. They used to be run by one man and a dog and they used to just get a couple of hundred people watching. Now they’re up to tens of thousands in the crowd week in and week out. People get behind a winning team. That’s what we’ve got to deliver.

That’s why I want to get over there and have a look. Show me what Ireland has got and what I can work with. I want to make Ireland proud of their international rugby league team. The talent is out there, we’ve got to convince them that rugby league is a great game.

Article originally appeared at:
http://www.code13rugbyleague.com/2011/06/01/exclusive-interview-mark-aston-looks-to-build-new-base-for-ireland-rl/

Sport's More Evil Aspects: Violence

This is an old short story of mine, dealing with an episode of football violence. It is fairly mild by the standards of the 1980s, but incidents like this used to occur more often than the media would like you to have thought when I was a regular at matches...

 I once went to Pride Park when Derby were playing Everton. We were still in the premiership then so it was probably 2000 or so. I used to still occasionally wear a replica shirt to the match then, anyway.

Around this time I got friendly with a bunch of lads from Matlock, who were friends of a lad I worked with in Sheffield at Yorkshire Electricity, in the Disputed Reads Section. He was called Paul and was sound, quiet lad, never acted without thinking first. We worked for a character called Phil, who we nicknamed ‘Pop’ because he was fat and bald. He claimed to have been a trainee at Lincoln City and played semi-pro for Long Eaton Town or someone, fairly near the bottom of the pyramid. Actually, he organised a 5-a-side office team and entered us in a league. We did quite well and came second in our division, and Phil missed a penalty which was the last kick of our ‘season’ that would’ve sent us up, and no one could take the piss out of him for it because he would get upset. Phil used to sweat a lot when he played because he was overweight. He had good touch and could pass well, but his head used to shine with all the sweat. Simon, our keeper, used to say that he worried Phil would have a heart attack, what with all his shouting as well. If that had happened I think we would have laughed.

After one game in this league, Phil tried to organise a big night out. At my suggestion we went to The Varsity on West Street, they had a thing going on Thursday nights where if you paid a quid to get in then all your drinks were just a quid for the rest of the night. Phil had made it out to be a massive night out but when I got to The Varsity it was only me and another lad who showed up apart from Phil. After the pub we went to Kingdom where an awful ‘70’s tribute act called ‘The Gutter Band’ played. They were shit. There was loads of nurses in Kingdom and one tried to impress us by saying that she could make us come by massaging our prostates and she was really good at it because she was a nurse. I said, “You might buy me a drink first.” Phil called her a fat bastard and blamed me. I heard once that years ago when he was a coach in kids’ football he’d kicked a kid really hard on the arse for tackling him.

Anyway, these lads from Matlock I got friendly with, some of them were a bit handy, or thought they were. They knew some very handy types anyway. There were also two lads who were Paul’s mates called Nigel and Chris, who weren’t handy at all. It was these two I was friends with, and a harder lad called Graeme, all the others I really just knew to nod at. Nigel was slow and a bit simple really, but loyal and kind, he used to get a lot of grief for his name. Chris was sharp and bright, if a bit of a straight peg. He was a real ladies’ man though. He always got some action, or seemed to, fuck knows how. They were good drinking mates anyway, and knew enough about football for a decent chat.

We’d gone into the Merry Widows after the Everton game. We’d had a couple in the Waterfall immediately post-match, and then moved next door into the Widows. This was a game Derby had lost 4-3, coming back from 3-1 and 4-2 down. It was probably Branko Strupar’s finest hour for us, he scored with a classy header and a fantastic 35 yard volley that was probably the finest goal I’ve ever seen at Pride Park. But we still lost and it was another step towards relegation.

When we got into the Widows I was really feeling the drink. I’d had a few pints before the game and now I was drinking Strongbow. I liked the way it was easy to drink after pints of gassy lager, mixing well with whatever you’d been drinking before and producing a kind of appropriate headstrong buzz. We sat down in a corner by a fireplace. Either the layout of the Widows has changed since then or my memory’s playing tricks because the last time I was in there, for the Cardiff game this season just gone, it looked completely different and all the geographical indicators, like the bar and the toilet door, were in different places. Maybe it’s because the Cardiff game was in August or September, a sunny day like, and this Everton game was February time or something and it was dark by the time we got to the Widows.

I have a recollection of an embarrassing conversation with 2 coked-into-numbness DLF lads, friends of Graeme’s, but that might’ve been another time, I was really silly and drunk and asking what Wednesday were like these days. One of them was definitely there later on too, though, a ginger haired lad whose tight white skin was discoloured by dissipation beneath nasty blue eyes. He always seemed in a bad mood, and when I commented on this one time with Chris, he laughed and agreed. I wondered whether it was just me he didn’t like, but Chris told me he was like it with everybody, which was a relief. He was always really nasty, this ginger lad, if you were talking about the game he never said, “We should’ve played 4-4-2, not 3-5-2,” it was always something like, “Why didn’t we fucking play fucking 4-4-2, that stupid cunt Gregory, fucking 4 fucking 4 fucking 2! It never fucking fails!” Anyway, after this game he was with us for a bit in the Waterfall and the Widows too, but then he’d moved away to snarl with other men in expensive jumpers and baseball caps.

So me, Chris and Nigel sat down by the fire and were enjoying a rambling chat about a load of shit. I noticed that there were 2 or 3 kids playing about in the pub, about 10 years old or so, they kept going up to a fat woman with curly black hair who was behind the bar and getting crisps and coke off her without having to pay . She was the landlord’s wife and she had round staring eyes that were black and angry. I can’t remember what her husband looked like, he was indistinguishable from the generic shavenheads he was serving and chatting with in one corner of the bar. He only emerged into the wider environment to collect dirty glasses and ashtrays that needed emptying.

Beyond the immediate bar area, I remember the pub being strangely unlit. Only flashing lights from fruit machines and the lamps over the bar provided any light. It was hard to see people’s faces, and everyone looked very white, their faces contrasting grotesquely with the darkness. The pub had an intimate feel, friendly but exclusive, an insulation against the cold blue shadows beyond the windows.

Then there was uproar at the door. We turned round, Nigel and Chris and me. I sensed our bewilderment, I couldn’t see whether it showed on our faces. A large man with gelled hair appeared in the doorway of the pub. I can’t remember if it was the street entrance of the pub, or just an exit from the pub’s other bar. He was wearing a casual jacket and jeans, white trainers.

“Cum on den Daaahhrby!” he shouted, making the appropriate flapping hand movements.
Someone did go on. The landlord of the pub vaulted the bar impressively. I saw someone else’s hand grab a bottle of Beck’s that was still capped. The landlord punched the scouser and he went down, some other guys from the bar jumped in and kicked him. I saw the Beck’s bottle, still with its cap intact, break over the scouser’s head. Beer foamed and then trickled. Someone lifted him up and a little crowd fell through the door and into the streets.

Me and Chris and Nigel sat still, maintaining exactly the same poses and facial expressions we’d had at the beginning of the incident. I shrugged and the other two looked at their pint glasses. “Another one?” I asked, or something similar. I went to the bar to get a round in.

The landlord’s wife was standing by a fruit machine with her arms around a little girl who was crying. I heard the girl ask, “Did Daddy hurt that man, Mummy?” The woman smoothed the girl’s hair and carried on cuddling her.

“Is she alright?” I asked with a smile.

“Yes! No thanks to people like you though!” She was really aggressive and mardy.

I thought that was a little unfair.

[end]

Remember that you can buy my debut novel, 'Stumbles and Half Slips', published by Epic Rites Press of Canada, from Amazon.com.

Savouring Succulent Lamb: Review of 'Downfall' by Phil Mac Giolla Bhain

Rangers FC are an abominable institution who deserved everything they got. Your response to that statement is a good gauge of how much you will enjoy this gripping, entertaining and informative piece of sports journalism from Phil Mac Giolla Bhain.

Mac Giolla Bhain is a Scottish-born Irishman who was educated in the West of Scotland. For those that do not know, Scotland's West is home to a peculiar religious divide which also afflicts the north east of Ireland. The division between Scottish Protestant and Irish Catholic continues to express itself, often over several generations, by football, with Rangers being the team of the Orange tendency and Celtic that of the Green. A particular kind of ethnic sectarianism has blighted many aspects of Scottish society, from Church of Scotland ministers writing overtly racist tracts against the presence of the Irish in Scotland in 1926, to the common question of "What school did you go to?" asked by a prospective employer.

It is in reference to this background that 'Downfall' must be understood. This is not a simple tale of a sports club going bust. The story of the so-called 'Famine Song', detailed in the book, also informs further understanding of both the mindset at Rangers and the author's own motivations for writing the book.

This book deals directly with the issue of Rangers going into liquidation, and how it was dealt with by Scottish media and society. The author's assessment often makes uncomfortable reading, especially for those of a Rangers persuasion.

The text consists of re-published articles from the author's own website, which was first with a number of scoops when it came to the saga unfolding at Rangers' Ibrox home. Organised into sections which deal with Finance, Media, Fans and the Scottish Football Association, the book provides a complete detailing of the story of how the most powerful club in Scottish football, one of the most influential institutions in Scottish society, fell dramatically from its perch.

This approach sometimes hampers the narrative flow of the story, with the ordering of the various articles often requiring a measure of mental rewind. On balance though, this approach does work well, allowing the themes of the whole episode to emerge more clearly.

The basic reason why Rangers got themselves into such a financial mess that they no longer technically exist, at least in their original form, is convoluted. It revolves around giving players two contracts, one which the game's governing body and HMRC knew about, the other that they did not. Without going into too many specifics here, it was a major, huge tax dodge.

Added to that was the excessive spending carried out by former chairman Sir David Murray. This spending made Rangers Scotland's premier club, but never brought them the European success that they so craved. Mac Giolla Bhain's assertion that much of this spending was driven by a deep need to match the single European Cup success of city rivals Celtic is an interesting one, in which one sense that there might well be some mileage.

Another theme is the hubris of the Ibrox club, first under the chairmanship of Sir David Murray, and then under the control of Craig Whyte. Many involved with Rangers simply seemed to see things like tax bills as something that the little clubs paid. Rangers could do what they liked, how they liked; as Scotland's Establishment Club they were simply too big to fail, a bit like a bank.

The fact that they did fail, and then the plan by the game's governing bodies to shoehorn them back into the Scottish Premier League and the the Scottish First Division, rather than forcing them to start at the bottom of the league, is testament, as the author states, to fans of other clubs.

The book goes into some detail about how ordinary fans of those other clubs, sick to the back teeth of Rangers and their behaviour, organised protests so that every club chairman in Scotland was in doubt about what would happen if Rangers were allowed to get away with it, yet again.

What is particularly entertaining is when the author lets himself off the leash of journalistic neutrality, a stance he is fastidious about in much of the book, and indulges his clear dislike for Rangers and everything that it stands for.

Many people, inside and outside Scotland and Ireland, will have their own views on Rangers. In the experience of this reviewer and many other people, it often seems that there is not much they stand for beyond an overriding hatred of anything remotely Irish and Catholic. Songs about 'wading in Fenian blood' which also commemorate members of the British Union of Fascists like the odious Billy Fullerton testify adequately to this mindset.

The mindset at the club is one of entitlement, exemplified by the way in which the game's governing body in Scotland often features figures like Campbell Ogilivie, also simultaneously a Rangers director. Anyone who is not for the predominant position of the club is clearly against them, and not just against them but probably has an agenda. It is a mentality that sees fans play the man rather than the ball when it comes to breaking bad news about their club. Mac Giolla Bhain makes great play of his Irish ethnicity, and it was this ethnicity which prevented many at Ibrox from listening when he first started digging into the facts of the story.

The fact that this mindset seeps into Scotland's media, to the extent where most of the press corps seem to be 'Rangers men with typewriters', is something that 'Downfall' deals with admirably. Mac Giolla Bhain details how Scottish sports hacks fed on 'Succulent Lamb' from the Ibrox table. Rangers were Scotland's establishment club, in every way. From the 20th century policy of signing no Catholics, to Sir David Murray's use of his establishment contacts and the club's status to spin never ending lines of credit, Mac Giolla Bhain documents in clear detail the hubris of a club which thought it was invulnerable.

Mac Giolla Bhain's analysis of why no massed fans' group emerged to protest about the way things were being done at Ibrox is also interesting. His opinion is that the blue hordes are basically supine in their deference to authority and bovine in the way that that authority can herd them where it chooses.

The fans chose to believe the stories told by an aggressive Ibrox PR department about men such as Craig Whyte, and they were helped in it by a Scottish media pack who were so in the pocket of the Ibrox hierarchy that no serious investigation at all was conducted by any of them into any of the claims made by the club. This is the story that Mac Giolla Bhain tells, and it will be interesting to see if any alternative narratives from the blue side of Glasgow make it into print to contradict him, especially when it comes to his assertions that there is a widespread acceptance and encouragement of a culture of institutional sectarianism in the Scottish mainstream media.

Scottish football is not the only sporting arena where this kind of journalism flourishes. Other sports clearly have a culture of accept anything we are told, make friends with players and management and never write anything negative. English football's media coverage is better, but certain personalities still wield ridiculous levels of control over what can be written and by whom. The 'Succulent Lamb' savoured by Scottish football journalists has its equivalents elsewhere.

That is perhaps the key strength of 'Downfall'. It lifts the rock in terms of media practise in Scotland and will hopefully provide the inspiration for other working journalists to take more serious interest in what goes on in their sports. It also shows the value of new media such as blogs in holding the powerful to account, when more established media is more concerned about potential sales rather than digging out uncomfortable truths.

Zack Wilson is the author of novel 'Stumbles and Half Slips', published by Epic Rites Press, available from Amazon.com.

Ray's Days 1: Zip

Ray Doyle is the narrator of my debut novel, 'Stumbles and Half Slips'. In a new series of short pieces, I'll be giving him some new tales to tell, mainly about being at work. Along the way, you may well pick up some new details about his life...

I knew that the job was going to go to shit when the zip broke on the jacket that they'd given me. This only happened a week or so after I'd started, and I somehow knew then that it was not going to last.

Not that the job was anything special. Anything special at all, actually. It was meant to be security, but all we were doing in fact was car park attending. We were all working for an independent scrap metal merchant, who seemed to think he was a bigger businessman than he actually was. This was somewhere on the edge of the East Midlands, where it becomes the west, Burton I think.

There were two of us, and what we had to do, in a series of bizarrely organised shifts, was to stand at the gates to the company 'car park'. We had two deckchairs to sit on, which didn't really strike me as giving off the right impression. I hadn't asked about this, but Sean, the other bloke, did. The boss - some fella who's name I forget right now, this was back in 1993, 94 possibly, a long time back, but I do remember his jacket and trousers never seemed to come from the same suit -he just said that it was something he was working on.

The deck chairs didn't really bother me. Things like that never really do. It felt quite good to be sitting in a deck chair by what passed for a car park. It was actually one of those areas of what look like waste ground, turned into a temporary car park. The surface consisted of several different shades and kinds of gravel, washed with a thin grey sludge of rain, tiny pebbles and what could have been ashes. Puddles of varying depths, breadths and colours of water dotted the expanse like the spots on a damp dalmatian.

The weather did bother me though. This was autumn, about October, and the weather was not kind. I had a very nice jacket though.

What we had to do was basically stop every vehicle who came to the gate in the fence and take some details. All we did was ask their name and what they wanted. Then we'd tell where to park in the great space of the car park, which was never full, and often entirely empty. It was big enough to play five-a-side football in, but we never had enough people for a game.

Once we had taken the details we would completely forget them. There was no procedure for writing anything down, and no reception desk to take the details too, from our outpost by the gate. Instead, the visitors would just  drive over to the space we'd indicated and park there. Then walk over the dirt and water to the small, single storey brick building that contained the two offices. The actual scrap yard was about two hundred metres away, down the road. When visitors wanted that, we would point at it for them.

But it was the jacket that made the job for me. It was one of those top quality hiking jackets, something that was still relatively rare back then. It was like the parka I'd worn at primary school, only cool looking, with layers and zips that made me impregnable to the cold. I loved that jacket. There was no company logo on it either.

Which was why I'd actually cried when the zip broke. It just seemed so typical. This was not long after my step-father had tried to kill me in a drunken rage, and then cried like a child the next day as he said sorry over the phone.

I was staying with a friend in his flat. I had few things to call my own. This coat, although on loan, was one of them. Something that defined me in this short period. But the zip broke when night when I was taking it off. I told the boss the next day but he said that there was nothing he could do.

Sitting at the deck chairs with Sean was still okay though. But later that in the day the boss returned and told us he didn't need us any more. He took the coats off us and we had to walk home. Sean told me that the agency that had got him the work was crap, and I agreed. I didn't know what agency he was with.

I still think of that coat though. It was the best I'd ever owned, until the zip broke.

To find out more about Ray Doyle and his life as a van driver, buy 'Stumbles and Half Slips' from Epic Rites Press.

Sport: More Art Than You Realise

One thing that struck me about the recent Olympic Games was how it grabbed people who professed not to like sport.

Someone else pointed out in a newspaper article that sport has all the drama, narrative and passion of great art. The pattern seems to have been repeated across the summer, with Andy Murray winning tennis tournaments and our cycling team, backed with Sky's cash, showing other sports how you work collectively to achieve great things for the common good.

The idea that you do not like sport in this country often seems to be predicated upon the idea that 'people like me don't like sport'. What people seem to mean by that is that they don't like football.

But from roller derby to archery, more people in the UK seemed to have realised that most sport actually has nothing whatsoever to do with football and its extreme self-regard.

Sport, in fact, reflects human life. It allows us to construct narratives, to identify with causes beyond out daily lives, to feel part of a community with common aims and to share in the glory of achievement.

It allows us to empathise with struggle and sacrifice, as well as feel that there is some kind of higher purpose. Sport provides flawed heroes and appealing villains.

However much Ayn Rand's hatred of kindness and love of selfishness infects society, sport promises something more. Almost every great sporting story involves some measure of human companionship and solidarity.

It also allows us to experience empathy for losers, to share their pain, in a black/white binary moral universe very similar to that used by Hollywood. The big pictures it paints gives it an audience that most artists would struggle to even conceive.

Those who decry sport and write it off as barbarism probably just had very little aptitude for it as youngsters. Not being naturally good at something does tend to put people off. These people probably make cheese or do morris dancing or buy antiques in their spare time, things every bit as absurd in a modern society as voluntarily running 26.2 miles.

George Orwell may have termed sport as 'war without the shooting', and perhaps he was right in some senses. But surely if we can turn warfare into something symbolic and metaphorical that is a sign of civilisation?

I'll be exploring the links between sport and literature further on this blog in the future, with some interviews and articles dealing with authors who have consciously used sport in order to provide a wider framework for other concepts and ideas.

In the meantime, here's some art about football...