International Football Fixture

Like your last communication you said so or didn’t write again, your letter was private and

Confidential, half the appeal was that.

From a weekly or monthly envelope, handwritten with more colourful stamps, 

The air of exotic almost the air of intrigue When I was a youth, I had something which is now very much of the past.

Something anyone could have now by all means.

But I know no one or more pertinently heard of anyone who does.

A pen-pal, a penfriend, a very personal contact with another mind with no contact at all.

Well, we have the World Wide Web, do we not, indeed we do…..

Usually, the same kind of age we advertised in magazines, the back of Q or Select,

Music given in common before you picked up your pen.

No danger of writing to a Steam Train nut while you’re an Indie kid.

Well, not unless that was your kind of thing, a trainspotting Smiths’ fan has a certain ring.

Wanted; pen-pal 12 to 14, interested in music, reading and daydreaming.

So, you wrote a letter each week or so telling them what you had been doing that

day, week or month and they wrote back with the same, dissing music you hated,

Suggesting tracks, you loved, if your pen-pal was of the opposite sex, a frisson immediately

A different culture but with no language barrier an education in life itself.

I popped in on friend yesterday, and his son was playing a video football game with two mates,

Though he was alone in a room.

Now I’m not quite so out of touch that I was unaware that this could be done, but one lad was in

Singapore the other in Mumbai.

I asked if they ever chatted about life, “Nah Steve, we just stick to the footy, the guy from Mumbai gets a bit chatty, my brother says he wants to show me his willy” but my dad says to mute him, so I do.

“But you know Steve, it makes me nervous talking to people on a screen, you never know if what you have said is what you have said”

Now that may seem like a childish statement, but it is more profound every day.

In the seventies and eighties no talk of screens or willies or anything untoward, if you didn’t

To a squalid, rather sad game of soccer with two of the players not even there.

Instead of laughing at the meaning of words and comparing routines, but after the game a

worrying pause, awkward see ya’s .

The electronic age, and progress yes but not for human nature, behavior and nature,

Not one and the same.