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BLIND, STUPID AND DESPERATE
 
99/00: Reports:

FA Carling Premiership, 6/5/00
Middlesbrough
versus
Watford
 
Virtual reality
By Matt Rowson

Waking up with a hangover is rubbish. Hundreds of thousands of us do it every week, it's still rubbish. Especially on a workday. Nothing is quite as painful as that alarm clock, nothing as merciless. And you still don't wake up when you stand up, that's the giveaway.

The journey to work is crap as well. However much variety you try to introduce by taking different routes there are always traffic jams, sitting listening to inane pap on the radio, stopstartstopstartstopstart. Sometimes you just want your head to explode.

And you get to work. Everything's the same. The people, the temperamental PC, the stuffy office. The smug Manchester United-supporting manager who insists on slipping "Graham Failure" into every second sentence because he knows you can't react, much as you'd like to gouge his eyes out with a spoon.

Work happens. Then you go home via Sainsburys and see all the same people, all stuck in the same routine, all buying the same stuff that they buy every week. Parking in the same space. Plod, plod, plod.

You get home. You make the same meal that you always make when you get back from Sainsburys and watch the same TV programmes. You end up going to bed at 1.30, however little you have to do. And so it continues.

Millions and millions of people do this. Not exactly this, but their own routine, their own path of least resistance. Doing what we've always done, doing what takes least thinking about. Doing what's expected. It's as if the whole of human civilisation is searching for some kind of miserable equilibrium. Only the occasional perturbations avert this.

It's shit, it's awful. If that equilibrium is reached, then all colour is drained from everything. Manchester United are the only football team. Everyone supports them, even though they never play anybody. "Changing Rooms" is the only show on TV, a 24-hour live feed on four channels.

Local radio is clogged up with rubbish, stupid adverts (hold on...). Every CD is made by Phil Collins, and it's illegal not to buy them. Everybody has to wear the same clothes...and tie their ties and shoelaces the same way. Everyone votes for the same party that their parents did, and there's still Anthea Turner.

Is this what life's all about? Is this what we want our children to grow up in? Like hell.

Watford are relegated. In last place. With a record low of points.

On May 6th, we are going to have one hell of a party.