Musing' From The Shitter

Musings From The Shitter: Volume Twenty Five A Load of Blokes Running Around Pretending It Matters—and It Does Right, so here we are: another football season over. And not in some glorious, champagne-soaked, Instagrammable way. No last-minute winner, no emotional huddle, no tearful speeches or cameras following us around like it’s Welcome to Wrexham . No. It ended like most things do in real life: anticlimactically, and probably with someone complaining about parking. No one stormed off. No one cried. We just… sort of stopped. You’d expect, or at least hope , that the end of a season might bring some kind of emotional payoff—triumph, heartbreak, closure, something to justify all the effort and hamstring pain. But instead, you find yourself sat in your car after the final match (which may or may not have even been an actual match—ours got cancelled), peeling off your shin pads like a war veteran and realising: “Oh. That’s it then.” Silence. Damp kit. Slight groin pain. Existent...

Musings From The Shitter: Volume Twenty Four The Invisible Game: How Football Teaches Us About Being Human Here’s the thing about teams: They aren’t really about winning—not in the sense that most people think. Sure, there’s a scoreboard, and at the end of 90 minutes, someone’s going to stand tall, basking in victory, and someone’s going to drag their boots off the pitch, muttering something half-formed about “next week.” But if you look closer, deeper—if you peel away the kits, the tactics, and the crowd noises—you see something else entirely. Something absurdly simple. What you see is people . People, in all their fractured, flawed, ridiculous humanity, trying to show up for each other. Football, at its core, is a game. You chase a ball, you try to score. If you’re lucky, it hits the back of the net and people cheer. But if you let it, the game shifts. It mutates into something more than just a physical contest. It becomes a mirror, one that reflects not just who we are, but who ...

Musings From The Shitter: Volume Twenty Three Theres no story, just this. Some nights it hits like a warm hand on your shoulder…gentle, familiar, and completely unexpected. Not a revelation. Not a mental health “breakthrough.” Just...calm. The kind that creeps in sideways, in between two sips of something warm or bitter, when no one’s asking anything of you and nothing hurts, and the present moment somehow...against all odds…doesn’t feel like a place you’re trying to escape from. Let me explain. I’m 45. I have a wife who loves me enough to worry. Two daughters who love me in ways I’m still learning how to receive. And a brain that, for most of my adult life, has been hell-bent on convincing me that I’m either: a) not doing enough, b) not doing it right, or c) already too late. And most nights, I manage that noise with motion: pacing, fiddling, stepping from couch to kitchen to shed and back again...chasing the illusion of doing something, when really, I’m just trying to ...

Musings From The Shitter: Volume Twenty Two On the Sidelines: Cheering, Pressure, and the Quiet Art of Support On any given Saturday, there is a group of people standing on a sideline. Sometimes that “group” is just one person. A lone figure, arms crossed or raised in cheer, voice carrying across the field. Sometimes it’s a pack — parents, friends, extended family — all there to support their player. Their pride. The display varies. There’s the cheering: loud, wild, full of reckless abandon. Then there’s the critique, shouted in frustration, masked as motivation. And sometimes, it all blurs together in a cacophony of well-meaning noise and poorly disguised embarrassment. We’ve seen it before. We hear it in headlines and whispered conversations at kids’ games — parents going too far. Shouting too loudly. Expecting too much. There's often no code left sacred. No line that can't be crossed in the name of "support." But still, it’s not all bad. Because in bet...

Musings From The Shitter Volume Twenty One 24 Hours (Give or Take): Notes Toward an Understanding of the Untranslatable Language of Saturdays There’s a peculiar warping of reality that happens inside a Saturday — and I don’t mean that in a cosmic, existential sense, but more in the way time becomes like warm chewing gum on concrete: stretchy, unpredictable, prone to collapsing inwards or snapping back and slapping you in the face. You enter it thinking it’s just another day — same dog, same coffee, same small decisions about socks — and by Sunday night, when the fog has rolled into your brain and your legs feel like strings hanging from a marionette no longer being manipulated by any discernible hand, you look back and think: Wait… did that all actually happen? The answer is usually: yes. Sort of. But not in the way your memory wants to file it — not in neat chronological folders labeled “event” or “important” or “lesson learned.” Saturday resists structure. It’s less a day and mor...

Musings From The Shitter: Volume Twenty Lynx, Laminate, and the Fairest Player There’s a certain smell to school prize givings. Not a bad smell, exactly…more like a composite atmosphere, a curated blend of over-varnished wood floors plus the faint, throat-catching edge of whatever Lynx body spray is trending with 13-year-olds whose relationship to moderation is still in development, all undercut by the inescapable base note of adult unease. You can smell it. The awkwardness. The restlessness. The existential question…unspoken but humming like a low-frequency speaker test…of why exactly are we here ? Because prize givings are, in some ways, elaborate performances of value. Of symbolic order. Of hierarchy dressed in community colours. They attempt to summarise a whole season…or year, or whatever unit of youthful effort the school is measuring…into one night’s worth of laminated certificates, misfiring microphones, and rhythmic clapping that can either feel wildly disproportionate o...