Next season on Unexpected Delirium

More new content, more podcast, and possibly some other stuff, depending on how offensive it was.

So, another tournament is done and another season is finally over and done with. Time, therefore, to look forward to the new season.

First of all, I did want to take a moment to thank those of you who’ve supported Unexpected Delirium throughout the last thirteen months. Your support has literally kept us going and things are starting to slowly look up.

Towards the end of last season, I started to feel as though I was running the former Twohundredpercent archive well dry. I might, therefore, send out Mungo to paying subscribers next season.

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For those of you under the age of 45 or so, Mungo was a cartoon series that Edward Carter wrote for Twohundredpercent in about 2008 about a terrible footballer who was obliged to be played by his Scottish Premier League club because of a contract they’d foolishly signed eleven years earlier which guaranteed him a place in the starting eleven, up front.

It was originally called Shit Shot Mungo, as a pastiche of the 1970s strip Hot Shot Hamish. Pre-internet-celebrity-international-cartoonist of the millennium fame David Squires also did a few towards the end of its run, so there’s another little treat, providing he doesn’t go all Don Henley on my candy ass.

But they were written a long time ago and Carter does like to push at boundaries. We didn’t get any complaints then or upon re-run and I don’t remember ever thinking that anything in them was off, but this was all a lonnnnnng time ago and times have changed. I’m sure they’ll be okay.

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But otherwise, I’ll be writing an article a day here every day and opening up maybe half or so to everyone. If it’s ‘important’ (and that word is doing some unbelievably heavy lifting, there, but you know what I mean), it’ll be open to all. I dunno, we’ll figure it out between us. Your annual reminder to subscribe (because I never talk about this otherwise) is to start by clicking this link here.

As ever, if you’re on a low income, OOW, anything whatsoever, and would like a paid subscription but cannot afford it, do contact me and I’ll sort it for you. I’ve done this a few times already, and obviously I’ll keep it confidential.

The final few chapters of Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day are also upon us, so thanks to those who’ve stuck with that. I can see who—well, how many—of you there have been. I will probably do something else with it one day, but I’m kinda glad that I did something with it.

As you know, every Saturday during the season I write a traveloguey type of thing on matches of wildly varying quality. Last season I came near to rinsing my locality in Sussex and along the coast in Hampshire and I felt a little wearied by it all by the time everything petered out for me in May, on a roped off park pitch in a village named after a brick.

So next season it’s time to spread my wings a little further afield, to London and maybe beyond. I’m going to aim to do a game a week from the capital and the immediate home counties. More local matches to me might have to creep into my schedule because that’s life, but I’m aiming to make a bit of a look at that part of the world the overarching theme of my season.

It’s a sentimental matter. I was born in London and lived there until I was ten, and moving out to a village in Hertfordshire felt like going from one dimension to another. At that age, moving away from London is a major culture shock; the first nine years of your life form the inescapable building blocks of your character. The city was what I knew. The countryside was where we occasionally visited. It had never occurred to me that anyone actually really lived there.

But then I grew up in the home counties and ended up living there until I was pushing 30, so Hertfordshire, Essex, and Buckinghamshire are all familiar to me, to varying extents. So I mean to get out there too a bit, maybe to a few places I’ve not been to before, or perhaps in an attempt to gain some sort of Proustian rush from the scent of boiled onions on a misty afternoon at somewhere more familiar from my—yes, yes—increasingly distant past.

I know what you’re thinking there. “Slow down a minute there, Agustina bleedin’ Bazterrica, no need to call the Pulitzer people, they’ll call you”, to which I can only respond by saying that as regular readers from last season will already be well aware, it would be a stretch to consider these as being in any way ‘high concept’.

And ultimately, that’s just me. Never knowingly under-explaining.

The podcast is going to take a couple of weeks off. Sam and I have really enjoyed recording it, and while it’s always a tiny bit stilted when you start recording one of these with someone regularly, we think it’s settled into quite a distinctive style and is going in the direction we both want. There's no point in us trying to do serious analysis, we’ve concluded. Not while we can talk about Jordan Pickford’s twelve year-old tweets and kids on trains with terrible allergies.

I will stick a few things up on here over the next couple of weeks, though I may take my foot off the pedal a little before the start of next season. The players themselves aren’t the only ones who’ve been going non-stop since July last year, and they’re not a single parent with two kids at different schools and other work to do, as well!

But enough. I have a spreadsheet of non-league football clubs in London and the home counties to compile. Shit. Said the quiet bit out loud again.