#12. Mark Thomas Presents The People’s Manifesto

Mark Thomas Presents the People’s Manifesto by Mark Thomas

Mark Thomas, for those who don’t know him, is a comedian and political activist who has spent the last 10 to 15 years highlighting important political issues in a light-hearted manner. He’s really had it for greedy MPs in that time (long before the expenses scandal broke), has forced changes in the law (for example Gordon Brown changed the laws on inheritance tax after Mark Thomas revealed Nicholas Soames was avoiding paying tax on expensive items of art and furniture by claiming they were available for public viewing and thus exempt from tax, but hiding from the public the fact that they were entitled to view them) and has upset some big corporations along the way, including Nestle and Coca-Cola. Thomas has it in for a former employer of mine (BAE Systems, formerly British Aerospace) too so it’s perhaps unsurprising that I am a big fan of his work.

This book is a list of the most popular policies that were put forth at each of the gigs on his “It’s The Stupid Economy Tour”. At each venue the audience were invited to suggest new policies to dig the UK out of the shit it was clearly in with the banking crisis and a seemingly weak government (and equally weak opposition). The policies were discussed during the show with the audience voting for their favourite of the night. The People’s Manifesto is a collection of those policies, each accompanied by a few comments from Mark Thomas and as always with his work each is meticulously researched with references to his sources provided at the back of the book.

The People’s Manifesto represents the nation’s view of the main problems faced during 2009 and how they could be solved. Some of them have a very political bent – making party manifestos legally binding, constituents should be allowed to choose an MPs second job to make sure it broadens their horizons more effectively and so on – while others are more whimsical – models should be chosen at random from the electoral register, for example – and others continue Mark Thomas’ (and his audiences’) desire to stick it to The Man such as a proposal that the Daily Mail should be forced to print “This is a fictionalised account of the news and any resemblance to the truth is entirely coincidental” on their front page and include “The paper that supported Hitler” on their masthead.

It’s not a long book, the 40 policies probably take under an hour to read through, but it is thought-provoking and gives an excellent insight into what Mark Thomas is all about. He stands up for the little man against the mega-corporations, battles against corrupt and dishonest MPs (which is just about all of them) and slowly but surely tries to set the world to right. The fact that he is amusing while doing all of this is an added bonus. This is most definitely worth a read whether you are new to Thomas’ brand of political activism or a fan of his previous work. Go on, go out and get a copy – now!

#11. As Seen On TV

As Seen On TV by Chris Kerr

Oh dear! That’s about the best I can say for this novel I’m afraid. Ah, no, actually I can do better. The cover looks pretty cool in a pop art sort of a way, that’s a plus. And it was cheap – my copy was about 50p in the Borders liquidation sale. I think that’s all the plus points out the way now though.

So what’s wrong with this one? Where should I start? The font used throughout is annoying, not comic cans annoying admittedly but it’s kinda like Courier or some sort of font along those lines which just makes it look like a sixth-former has printed it out on their home printer. Why is it typeset like that? It just looks really amateurish, more like a script or manuscript than an actual completed novel. OK, the main character is a Hollywood screenwriter so perhaps the font is an homage to that. I wouldn’t have done it that way though. Then there’s the concept:  the aforementioned screenwriter telling his story through endless analogies with TV shows such as the A-Team, Knight Rider, Star Trek and so on. The names of TV programmes are crowbarred into the narrative in such a way that it is almost guaranteed to infuriate you after only a few pages. Kirk, our screenwriting hero, has a sister with chronic kidney failure and has decided to commit assisted suicide with the help of a cult. This means his sister is in Jeopardy – gameshow title crowbarred in for no real reason other than to emphasise the fact that the book is TV-themed. Someone acting heroically may be King of the Hill, when Kirk hails a cab one warm Miami evening it’s described as “In the Heat of the Night I hail a yellow Taxi cab down…”, OK, enough already. I get it. There are lots of television programmes in the world and you can use many of them in sentences but that does nothing my get on my tits after a while, and a short while at that. It adds nothing to the story other than a sense that the author probably wrote out a list of TV shows and then worked elements of the novel around them so he could get them in, regardless of their relevance. I’ve touched on the storyline already – Kirk tries to save his dying sister – and I am still at a loss as to explain how this extends to over 250 pages when it’s a flimsy little plot. Strip away the crap and you have nothing more than a short story.

Don’t waste your time with this one, it’ll infuriate far more than satisfy.

There is a quote on the back cover that says: “Kerr is a fine writer. Readers should pay close attention to him.” I don’t know who Patrick McCabe (to whom the quote is attributed) is and I’m not sure I agree with him. If Chris Kerr is a fine writer he’s not showcasing it very well here. I agree that readers should look out for him though, and avoid any more of his work like the plague. One of the reviews on Amazon says that the author is sick of living in a squat in Huddersfield. That was back in 2005. I’ll be amazed if this book sold enough to get him out of said squat.

#10. How to Make a Tornado

How to Make a Tornado edited by Mick O’Hare

How to Make a Tornado is the most recent of the New Scientist books on the market and as with previous volumes is a reprint of certain sections of past editions of the magazine, hence it has an editor rather than a single author. Previous New Scientist books had been a collection of puzzling questions asked by readers of the magazine along with the best answers supplied by other readers. How to Make a Tornado deviates from this tried and trusted format and instead documents the “strange and wonderful things that happen when scientists break free.” The reader is regaled with outlandish tales from science labs and mad inventors across the world. A musical bra to celebrate Mozart’s bicentenary; how a failure to convert imperial units to metric caused NASA to lose a $125 million space probe; how to measure the weight of a person’s soul; why reptiles sometimes alternate which of their two penises to use (yes, they really do have two!) – it’s all in here along with a variety of other entertaining snippets of scientific research.

This book isn’t a high-brow read and would probably make ideal toilet reading as it is made up of a large number of distinct, self-contained extracts from the New Scientist archives each aimed at enlightening and entertaining so you can pick the book up, read a few bits and then put it down again without losing track of where you are. It’s designed to be read in a piecemeal fashion. You don’t need a science education or background to understand it either; it’s largely been written for the layman.

Pick up a copy cheap as it’s not really worth the £7.99 cover price (but then few books are these days), read it once and pass it on as I can’t see you reading it again. The only reason you may want to keep it (and one of the reasons I am keeping my copy, the other main reason being I see books as something to treasure and hate to see books that have been defaced or ill-treated) is so you can bring up some of the more astonishing facts to amuse/amaze friends with. British Rail’s plans for a nuclear-powered flying saucer anyone?

#9. 24/7: Living It Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas

24/7: Living It Up and Doubling Down in the New Las Vegas by Andres Martinez

What is it with gambling books and the need to have either a long title or subtitle?

Yes, another book on gambling I’m afraid, but at least this one isn’t about poker. In fact poker barely gets a mention in it. Instead it’s one man’s account of a month spent in Las Vegas gambling away the $50,000 advance he received from his publisher. The basic premise is simple: 1 month spread across 10 casino-hotels with 50 grand in your pocket picking up as many stories, as much of the flavour of the place and a glimpse of as many characters as possible before either the time or money runs out. As the author is a former journalist and clearly has some contacts (or knows people who know people) he is able to get deeper into the city and some of its stories than perhaps you or I could. What he has crafted is an insight into the city as a whole with professional gamblers, local university professors, casino hosts, cab drivers, church ministers etc all providing their viewpoint on one of the fastest growing cities in the US.

Unfortunately for books such as this that growth rate means a limited shelf life. This text is only 10 years old but is already significantly out of date. Several of the casinos covered have been demolished and others lauded as new supercasinos are almost old hat now as the Strip undergoes a massive urban regeneration scheme with each new property bigger, more elaborate and more expensive than the last. The Bellagio is the newest kid on the block when this book was published and while it remain an elegant gem since it opened Steve Wynn has gone on to bigger and better things with the eponymous Wynn hotel, the Venetian has opened (complete with replica canals and gondolas), the new Aladdin has been replaced by a Planet Hollywood resort and at least two other mega hotels are being built. Las Vegas is no longer the New Las Vegas of the book’s subtitle.

I’ve been to Las Vegas on three occasions spending a total of a month there myself, perhaps this is why this book appealed to me so much. The tales from the casino floor and the author’s battles with the blackjack tables and craps pits are all too familiar except when I went through them I didn’t have the luxury of a $50k bankroll. Baccarat has never been my thing – it’s exceptionally stuffy for such a noddy game, and played for much higher stakes than I can afford – but Martinez gets stuck in there too. As he bounces from casino to casino I can picture almost exactly where he is and what he’s doing but that could be my sense of familiarity and fondness for Las Vegas as opposed to the descriptive manner of the text. But it’s the stories from off the casino floor that I found most interesting. Church ministers who act as bathroom attendants in strip joints; addicted gamblers lamenting the lack of regular local banking facilities that means they have to cash their pay cheques in a casino; the professional gambler who has lost over $8 million betting on sports events; the locals who have raised families in and around this adult version of Disneyland. It’s all here and it all adds much-needed colour to what would otherwise be a pretty boring account of a guy who doesn’t know much about gambling attempting to hit it big with is advance.

It’s an interesting read but only really from a nostalgic point of view. It reminded me of the good times I had had out there and without that experience of how crazy the city can be I don’t think I’d have connected that well with the writing. Las Vegas is a place that truly has to be seen to be believed and anyone who picks up this book as an introduction to Vegas is only going to see what the city was like 10 years ago – quite different to how it is today.

#8. Secrets of Sit’n’gos: Winning Strategies for Single-Table Poker Tournaments

Secrets of Sit’n’gos: Winning Strategies for Single-Table Poker Tournaments by Phil Shaw

What is it with poker books and their need to have stupidly long titles?

Yes, another book on that wonderful game of Texas hold’em and just as with the Earn $30,000 a Month book, this is all about sit’n’go (SnG) single-table poker tournaments and how to beat them. It’s not a new book, it’s one I have read before, but as I am playing SnGs quite a lot now (around a dozen a day on average) to build up a poker bankroll I figured now would be a good time to pull this volume off the shelf and see if there were any more tips I could pick up from it.

This book focuses a great deal on Independent Chip Modelling (ICM), a process by which one can estimate one’s true cash equity in a tournament based on the number of chips held by each remaining player. Suppose a poker tournament starts with 10 players each paying $100 in return for 1500 chips. The top three players will be paid out with $500 for first place, $300 for second and $200 for third, standard SnG payouts. At the start of the tournament, assuming all players are of equal skill level (which is a poor assumption but one that has to be made in ICM unfortunately), each player has the same amount of equity ($100) since everyone has an equal chance of finishing in each of the prize positions. Now suppose two players go all-in first hand and one is eliminated. There are now nine players each with a starting stack of 1500 chips and one with 3000. The player with the big stack is now more likely to win than the other players simply because he has more chips, twice as many as he started with, but he doesn’t have double the equity he started with. ICM calculations show his equity has increased to around $184 while all remaining players have an equity now of around $102. As the equity doesn’t increase linearly with stack size this affects the hands you should be playing at certain points in the game and in certain positions. Much of this book is about which hands can be played profitably from an ICM viewpoint.

ICM is just a model though, and as such requires a number of assumptions to be made to simplify things to the point where they can be modelled. As I mentioned earlier, relative player skill levels aren’t factored in and this is a big deal. If you’re playing against a weak opponent who doesn’t know anything about ICM you might find yourself making certain moves that ICM says should be profitable but if the other guy doesn’t know what he’s doing then he may play his hands in an unexpected manner and blow all ICM assumptions out the water. One of the main inputs into the model is the range of hands your opponent is playing so you can then decide what is the best way to play your hand. If you don’t know reasonably accurately how your opponent plays poker then you’re going to make an error estimating his hand range and as with so many models, it is only as accurate as the input data. Garbage in, garbage out as they say. So Phil Shaw has based pretty much his whole book around a model that is fundamentally flawed in so many cases. Why? Because it’s the best model there is out there. You need to know how your opponent plays almost as well as you know your own game but among the high stakes pros this may well be the case and it’s them who will benefit most from ICM. For the rest of us dabbling at lower stakes it’s not that important.

While ICM just isn’t that important at low stakes (and limited to say the least at larger stakes), the book does have more going for it than just ICM. I have picked up a few pointers on my short-handed game, especially around the bubble (when there is just one more player to be eliminated before all remaining players are guaranteed to finish in the money) and also when down to the final three, helping me push on and go for the win rather than just settling for the third place money that is already secured by that point. With that in mind it was worth re-reading I suppose.

Now I should try and give the poker books a rest really shouldn’t I? You didn’t come here to read poker strategy. Not that I know what you came here expecting but they are my books and I’ll read what I like!  🙂

#7. The Gambler

The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Ten days ago I was reading Jeremy Clarkson and now it’s Dostoyevsky – how many other reading lists would contain works by both these authors?

For a couple of years at least, The Gambler has been my Bad Wolf with various quotes and excerpts from this novel appearing at odd times throughout books and magazines I have read. In many ways it’s hardly surprising as it’s the easy route for any author of gambling-related material to take if they wish to appear well-read. Writing a book on gambling and want to appear clever? Throw in some Dostoyevsky. However, I don’t believe that Anthony Holden was quoting Dostoyevsky in Big Deal just to appear clever or well-read. Indeed Holden mentions he read The Gambler while he was in Las Vegas and it was this that drove me to make it the next book I was to read. I had reached breaking point and would read the whole book rather than just the odd quote that other authors thought suited their needs.

Given his background and education, it’s easy to imagine Holden being familiar with several of Dostoyevsky’s works. I, on the other hand, knew very little of them. Except this one. I knew The Gambler was about roulette, or rather that the principle form of gambling that takes place in the story is roulette – it’s not a book about the game of roulette per se. I knew it was set in Germany too. And those two facts are two more than I know about anything else Fyodor Dostoyevsky has ever written. Crime and Punishment – no idea what it’s about. OK, the title may be a clue but a book with that title could just as easily contain a list of which crimes are worthy of custodial sentences and what the suggested minimum term is. The Idiot – that could be about lot of people! So it was with a certain innocence and unfamiliarity that I approached this novel.

The back cover blurb suggests that one of the story’s main strengths is the depth of the characters. I admit to feeling trepidation upon discovering this, fearing that I would be faced with page of page of inner thoughts from the main protagonists and be left with little story in what is a surprisingly slim volume. Fortunately, my fears were unfounded as the story moves along at a decent old pace and the characters are revealed to the reader piece by piece to keep the intrigue going. I have to admit though, despite being a translation from the original Russian into English a decent working knowledge of French and German helps. Some of the French was beyond my pre-GCSE level understanding I must say but even that didn’t really spoil my enjoyment of the book, or my understanding of what was happening. However, with the story being set in both an unfamiliar location (a German spa) and period (around the 1860s I guess)  I struggled to relate to the events being described at some points. I didn’t feel I was in the casino with Alexey Ivanovitch as he moved from room to room, table to table. Times have changed I guess and I am instead familiar with the modern casinos of London and Las Vegas. Anyway, roulette’s not really my game.

There were a few issue of national stereotypes that I wasn’t too sure about either. Did German casinos in the late nineteenth century really have lots of Poles in, offering to help the gamblers stake their money? Was this just a Russian opinion of the Poles or was this a common view? Ditto the French who come in for a fair degree of abuse throughout The Gambler. I guess I basically don’t understand how various European nations saw one another during this period so find it hard to really get too deeply involved with any of the characters. Similarly the cross-section of society that is protrayed is one that I don’t really get – the upper classes, military families with servants and a ‘household’ comprising nannies, tutors and what have you. Sure, I knew they existed and to some extent still do today but I don’t have personal experience to fall back on so I found myself wondering why the ‘hero’ couldn’t just go off and do his own thing and why he was in service to the General.

Maybe I’m just not Dostoyevsky’s target audience. Perhaps this particular book of his has just aged rather badly. I don’t really know, but I am glad I can finally put all these quotes from The Gambler in context and in doing so put this Bad Wolf to rest.

#6. Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player

Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player by Anthony Holden

Another poker book to follow on from my previous read but this time not a poker manual but an account of one man’s love affair with poker and his exploits during a year out as a professional poker player. And not just any man either as Anthony Holden is apparently a respected author and former journalist for The Times whose works include a biography of Prince Charles, several books on Shakespeare and a history of the Oscars. He’s an Oxford graduate and comes across as a bit of a posh ‘un at times, not least when he peppers his prose with latin phrases (of which vita nuova seems a particular favourite).

While reading this book I had two overwhelming thoughts: how dated the poker scene Holden describes seems compared to the current state of the game and how appalling his bankroll management was.

The book was written in the late 1980s and details a poker game played largely on the road with a band of professional players flitting from location to location in search of the next big game. Word of mouth seems to have been a major factor in arranging games, especially tournaments and knowing about the next big game seemed to largely depend on who you knew. But then the scene was much smaller then than now with only a hundred or so players entering even the biggest events. There were few, if any, year-round poker rooms even in Las Vegas. Poker was a seasonal game that moved around the world spending a week or two in any one place before jetting off for pastures new with a few dozen degenerate gamblers on its tail. Of course, this is all before the internet took off and brought us not only the online poker explosion but a simpler way of finding out about the big events in advance. Now tournaments that were contested by a couple of hundred people are played out with several thousand entrants and online players can play more hands in a month than the pros of 20 years ago could play in several years.

Online poker has also brought with it a much wider range of stakes and with it a much better understanding of bankroll management. I played poker before the online game was born but it was just five card draw as a kid and it wasn’t that exciting. Then came Late Night Poker on Channel 4 bringing Texas hold’em to the UK television audience at around the same time as the game was blossoming on the internet, coincidentally. Live poker, played in a brick and mortar casino, requires a table, some chips, chairs, cards and so on. The house provides these in return for a fraction of each pot known as the rake. If the rake is too large a percentage of the pot then players just won’t play at that casino so the rake is kept to around 5% of the pot but in order to make sure the casino covers their costs and makes their bit of profit on top this means the lowest stakes games they can host are still prohibitively expensive for most new players testing the waters. Not so online poker where a new table requires little more than a small chunk of server bandwidth so poker sites can offer games down to the very lowest of stakes, even freebie games where the new players can get a feeling for the game without parting with a penny. It’s designed to be like crack though: the first hit is free and from then on you’re hooked and after your next fix. Only with poker you have a chance to win money, so it’s not that like crack really. Anyway, where all this was heading was bankroll management. With the advent of online poker one can now take a small amount of capital and get a good deal of poker from it, building it up steadily through small stakes games without the worry of going bust if you have a bad run of cards or luck. There are games for all bankrolls which doesn’t seem to have been the case when Antony Holden tried his luck for a year. He started with $20,000 and would enter tournaments costing a couple of grand, even when it wasn’t his preferred variant of the game. That’s a big no-no when your poker bankroll is your working capital and losing a chunk of it represents a significant limit on your earning potential. These days, with a bankroll such as Holden’s, he would be advised to enter tourneys costing no more than a couple of hundred to enter. In the book he sits down to play games at all sorts of stakes that just don’t fit his bankroll but smaller games just weren’t there at the time he was playing so he didn’t have the luxury of playing within his means most of the time. The same is true for the vast majority of players on the circuit too; they were always borrowing funds here and there to get a stake for a game that looked juicy but which they couldn’t ultimately afford to enter. As I say, things are so much different now that online poker is around to offer a huge number of games at all stakes to suit all pockets.

It’s because of how dated Holden’s account of the poker scene now seems to the internet generation who can scarcely believe that just 20 years ago the game has advanced so much that he has written a follow-up volume called Bigger Deal, which I don’t yet own (it’s on my Amazon wishlist but I thought I’d see if I liked this one first – I did, it was an interesting read) and don’t know that much about but it’ll be interesting to compare and contrast the poker scene in that book with the equivalent in this one.

#5. Earn $30,000 Per Month Playing Online Poker: A Step-by-Step Guide to Single Table Tournaments

Earn $30,000 Per Month Playing Online Poker: A Step-by-Step Guide to Single Table Tournaments by Ryan Wiseman

This book probably has the longest title of all books I will read this year and may also have the most misleading too. Promising $30,000 per month from online poker is a brave move, some may say foolhardy. It is certainly true that reading this book won’t automatically open the door to a world of riches but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not a decent book.

Before I get into my thoughts on the book I should briefly explain why I was reading it as it’s not really in tune with my previous reads. I have been playing online poker on and off (mostly off) for over five years now and I love the game. Mostly. When I am taking a kicking at the tables then I hate it and curse the day I ever found it but generally speaking I adore poker. I love to play it, I love to read about it and I enjoy discussing the finer points of the game. I have a pretty big collection of poker books including pretty much all the major volumes on hold’em along with several texts on more left-field subjects such as the art of bluffing and the mental side of poker. When I re-read a book it is more likely to be a poker book than any other type as I look to regularly brush up on certain aspects of hold’em play. But when it comes to actually playing my results are best described as mixed.

Over the years though I have demonstrated an irritating inability to stick to one form of the game, learn the nuances of playing it and earn a bit of pocket money from it. I would hit a bad spell, spit my dummy out and try something else. I used to make a reasonable profit from limit poker before getting into no-limit tournaments. I was seduced away from the limit tables by all the talk of no-limit in the poker media, got it into my stupid little head that the game I was playing is for girls and that real men play no-limit poker. I initially did well in these tourneys before suffering some awful runs of luck combined with over-confident and poor play. So I ran for cover and returned to the limit cash tables only to find my game was shot to pieces. No-limit play had badly affected my limit game so I am back on the no-limit tournament trail at present.  

I hope things are slightly different from before as I have identified no-limit sit-n-go (SnG) tournaments (also known as single table tournaments) as good bankroll builders and something I should be able to beat on a regular basis, at the lower stakes at least, to bring in a bit of supplementary income. I think the missus has picked up on it too as she made a point of reading out the title of this book very deliberately when she bought me it for my birthday. I want to show I can stick to a plan of progressing through the stakes of these SnGs and while I don’t want to reach the obsessive levels of play it takes to earn a living from them I would like to be able to bring in some extra cash from them and not have a hissy fit when the results go against me. So with that plan in mind I picked this book up of my pile of books to be read and waded in.

It’s a slim volume at around 120 pages so the basics such as the setup of the game and the structure of a hand are skipped meaning this is not a book for beginners who have never played before. It’s aimed at players who are trying to improve their SnG game really.The opening section of the book describes a number of software tools that are available to help improve your results, either by tracking your play and that of your opponents allowing you to get a read on their style of play or by enabling you to identify weaknesses in your own game. Unfortunately, depsite the fact the book is only a couple of years old much of this information is out of date as new versions of many of these software tools have been released since the book was published. And that is one of the biggest risks of writing a book about online poker – as soon as you talk about software or hardware in any detail you limit the shelf life of your book, but if you avoid these subjects you may end up with nothing to say that hasn’t aleady been said by someone else in their book. Once you get beyond the out-of-date section on software tools you’re into the meat of the book – a quick run through how to beat SnGs from the $10 level all the way up to $500. Not that I expect many readers of this book to reach stakes that high, at least not because of what they learned from this book. Don’t get me wrong, it contains some good advice but you don’t reach the level of playing $500 tournaments from reading a single book. It takes a hell of a lot of dedication, building up experience through hours of play every day as well as something that no book can teach: natural talent. I’m sorry to say it but to some degree good poker players are born rather than bred.

There are some useful tips one can pick up from a book such as this but it shouldn’t be the only book you read on the subject if you plan to make any serious money from the game. Don’t be suckered in by the title and regard this as one of many volumes you will need to read if you wish to dominate SnGs. It’s a worthy addition to any poker library but is my no means the bible for SnGs.

#4. Awaydays

Awaydays by Kevin Sampson

I knew of Kevin Sampson from a couple of his books I bought several years back (Powder and Outlaws) and the title of this novel rang a bell too. Of course, they made it into a film not that long back didn’t they? Cashing in on the football hooligan culture, following in the footsteps of films such as The Football Factory, that one starring Frodo Baggins as a West Ham thug (Green Street, thank you Google) and pretty much any Danny Dyer film. Not that he’s typecast in any way, oh no. Anyway, I saw this on the shelves of Borders when they were having their massive clearance sale and at 80p it had to be worth a go. I remember enjoying Powder but that was many years back, ditto Outlaw. I am older and maybe even wiser now, would I enjoy a book about hoolies?

I honestly don’t know whether I enjoyed it or not. The covers of the book have glowing quotes on them from the Guardian, Maxim and the NME. I missed the “wit and humour at every turn” for sure. Throughout the 180-odd pages I just found myself wishing I knew more about the geography of the north west, especially the area around Tranmere and Birkenhead. Then the book may connect with me more but as it is I found myself stood off from the action rather than feeling like I was right in there with the main characters. I am a touch too young to have experienced the football violence at it’s height. Being raised in Cleethorpes adds to the removal from it too I feel. Yes, the town got torn up a bit in the early 80s by some visiting Leeds fans and I often saw markers left by the local ‘crew’, the Cleethorpes Beach Patrol, but I’m not aware of Grimsby Town having anything like The Pack, the Tranmere crew of this debut novel. And because of that I find it hard to empathise with Paul Carty et al. Sampson doesn’t feel the need to explain too much of the violence that takes place in the name of supporting your local team and I can understand why; the novel is aimed at a generation for whom this sort of thuggery is part of the game.

When I started going to the football the home stands, especially the Pontoon, would aim all sorts of verbal insults at the away fans – especially when we played Yorkshire teams, but I never saw it go beyond that. Even four or five years ago when we played Barnsley at home, the local police closed most of the pubs and were on the streets in force to break up any scuffles. Except there weren’t any. I didn’t see any shop windows smashed in or anyone bleeding in the gutter with a pint glass sticking out of their face. I didn’t see any of this because it doesn’t happen these days. I went to Millwall the season after they had trashed Bermondsey during the play-off with Birmingham (I think) and it was laughable. The police almost lined the streets from the station to the ground. When you got anywhere near the ground you had to get through line after line of staggered police officers who were there to break up the violent clashes. But of course they never came, primarily because the Millwall fans hardly came out. I heard that to go to Millwall as a home fan that season you needed to get through police checks and whether that is true or not doesn’t matter. The hooligan generation have grown up and packed it all in. You can go to Wolves – home of the Subway Army famed for chucking white goods such as fridges on away fans as they emerge from a tunnel under the road near the ground – when they are top of the league, beat them 1-0 and have one of your mates exclaim to his missus “We just beat a bag of shite!” rather too loudly on his mobile and still not see any real trouble. Not that that stopped me walking just that little bit faster to the station, of course. Football these days isn’t about Stone Island thuggery, it’s largely about the prawn sandwich brigade. Unless you support a rubbish team, then it’s about the half a dozen hardcore fans that can actually still be arsed to go to games.

Awaydays was written in 1998 and even then I would say Kevin Sampson was harking back to a bygone era. It was filmed in 2009, some four years after Green Street and The Football Factory, missing the boat almost entirely. I find it hard to connect with the events in the book and because of that it won’t be high up my ‘re-read’ list. Still, at 80p I was right that it was worth a go.

#3. For Crying Out Loud! – The World According To Clarkson vol 3

For Crying Out Loud! – The World According To Clarkson vol 3 by Jeremy Clarkson

Let’s get the rest of the abuse out the way early shall we? Yes, it’s another book by Jeremy Clarkson and it’s more of the same. It’s his newspaper column reprinted in book form and so is money for old rope really. I’m only jealous, I wish I could get paid several times for the same piece of work.

Clarkson continues his tirade against politicians, technology (especially mobile phones), Americans and anyone who cares about the environment. In doing so he marks himself out as being exactly what he is really: a middle-aged dad who is opinionated because he is being paid to be. I don’t know why people hate him because he’s harmless. It’s just words in a book, a newspaper or on TV and I can’t believe that anyone with even half a brain takes Jeremy Clarkson seriously. Just look at his TV programme, Top Gear. They’ll race a Bugatti Veyron against a train or light aircraft from Surrey to the south of France and come the end of this exciting contest there will be just seconds between the competitors. I’m sorry but the word you’re looking for here is ‘bullshit’. Or TV editing, if you prefer.

Just as you can’t take these Top Gear films as scientific evidence that a car is faster than a plane you can’t trust a word that comes out of Clarkson’s mouth. Then again I don’t read his books to find out what the gospel according to Clarkson is, I read them to occupy myself and to pass the time. Yes, there are many other ways I can achieve the same goals but at this time this was the chosen method. He’s a grumpy old man and I can appreciate that as am capable of grumping myself from time to time. I’m quite proud of how grumpy I can get but I am also all to aware that it’s utterly pointless. As soon as I sense anyone getting grumpy I immediately disregard what they are saying and this book is no exception. If Clarkson had a serious message to get across he wouldn’t attempt to do it in a shouty manner, but as that’s the tone of pretty much each and every column reproduced in this volume I assume he has nothing worth saying but I can appreciate the grumpy tone in which it is written.

Anyway, that’s all the Jeremy Clarkson books out the way. Maybe I’ll move on to something more high-brow next. Maybe.