Sweet Dreams Are Not Made of This

Writing doesn't always go where you think it will

New year, new me? No, not quite. Yes, this is supposed to be the time of year for a new lease of life, and maybe it still is, but I’ve wanted to get back to writing for a while now, So, I guess this is may way of doing it.

I still write the odd piece, of course but since returning to football full time almost exactly four years ago, the opportunity and time to became less frequent. And when I did, more often it was laser focused on goalkeeping. Now that I’ve had some down time and try to find my feet again until the full time call comes again, I’ve discovered I miss writing about non-football stuff the most.

It was whilst I was searching for something completely different on Twitter that I got the urge to do this for myself. I came across some old tweets from my time writing for Sabotage Times around 8 or 9 years ago and saw some of the articles I’d written. Sadly, the links to the now defunct site are dead, which is quite the shame because I don’t have my own copy of those articles now. Which feels like a bit of blessing at the same time. After going through some of my tweets from nearly a decade ago, something I highly recommend you do not do the same with your own, I feared my writing might be of the same quality as them. By that I mean of a low grade.

Now I think about it, the naivety and innocence of some of the exchanges are quite refreshing when you consider what that site has become. We’re all so savvy and aware of what we say that it’s taken away from something that was, in its time, an absolute goldmine of good people and community. The weariness is now tangible at the “content” it spews out. Less of a town square and more of the notice board that stands in its darkest corner where dogs piss up against.

Look at me getting all emotional and teary eyed *eye-roll emoji*.

These past few months have made me question whether I need to do something different or reinvent myself somehow. But for now it’s less new, me and more of a revisit to my former self.

I’ve always found Christmas and New Year more of a time for reflection to be honest. A time for looking backwards rather than celebrating the festive season. I always give the excuse that it’s just a habit born from two decades of Boxing Day fixtures curtailing my joy but that’s just a convenient alibi. I’ve felt that way for for as long as I can remember and it’s the weird recurring dream I had every year into my late teens saw to that.

“Weird?” you say? Yes, weird. Slightly less weird than me scribbling “I AM KEVIN KEEGAN” on my headboard around the same time I started having this dream, but weird all the same. I must have been 5, maybe 6, at the time it first happened.

The gist of the dream was that along with my dad and sister, we had to swim across the sea to a glacial island that reminded me of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude in the Christopher Reeve version of the film. I say glacial, it was never a cold place in my dream. And the place itself never held any trepidation whilst we were swimming there. The anxiety rose on the journey home though, when the feeling grew that for some reason, through fatigue or choppy waters, we might not make it back to my mother, who was waiting for us back at home.

(Yes, I have recalled this to the therapist on each of the three courses of therapy I have been through over the past 15 years and they all came too the same conclusion)

As the years went on, the dream became entrenched in my Christmas/New Year as much as a bag of nuts and a tangerine in my stocking. The nuts always came with a nutcracker that was more a danger to myself than the shell of any nut. I remember the shell of a Brazil nut being impossible to break into without a hammer. And even then, you wants to eat a half-squashed Brazil nut with tint bits of shell in it? Quite.

So, with each year, the build up and anticipation of the dream that would inevitably coming to me in my sleep would overshadow what should have been a time I looked forward to. Instead,

I often reminisce about how batshit crazy kids programmes in the late 70’s/early 80’s were, especially one called Chocky (Honestly, look it up on YouTube) and everything around the dream definitely had the dark underbelly the writers had given them. It’s little wonder we’re all on meds.

Anyway, there you go. The start of this. Whatever this is. Not the words I’d planned to get going but that’s exactly what I want it to be.