2048

The wind was colder than my soul. The night was darker. Both blocked my path, but I pushed forward under the starless sky.

To either side of me, disused buildings loomed like shadows. The howling and snapping of unknown forces gave them life. I was alone, but felt surrounded. I had walked a lifetime and, suddenly, I arrived.

On the horizon loomed an immense figure, standing astride a black, oozing snake of water, softly glowing in spectral blue. The Transporter Bridge, Teesside. I was home.


I'm glad they didn't tear it down, but they should have bulldozered everything else around it. Instead, Middlehaven now boasted an old college building, built to look modern-artish and now a ridiculous parody of itself: broken, graffitied and crumbling into a self-fulfilling abstractness. On the other side of the river, over the rusted walkway, a massive office builing stood decrepit and forlorn. It had once been the police headquarters, when there still was a force. However forlorn that may have been, it was not as pitiful as the once supposedly grandiose stadium which loomed above it. For here, battered and bruised with its Mechano strutts jutting skywards like broken ribs, lies the corpse of the Riverside Stadium.

The football club had died before, but not like this. In '86 it had been revivable by pure hard work, guts and honesty: qualities it later forgot, and remembered too late. With star players came glory, debt and liability. With debt and liability came relegation, disinterest and disassociation. Even the old warriors of '86 - their champion redrafted - could not restore the pride which had once been paramount to the meaning of meagre success. New, young warriors were schooled and fought hard but they could not bring the glamour, nor the followers, back to the battlefield.

The club lived, weak and frail, for years. It cut its cloth and lived within its means. It even had a brief return to the mercenary killing fields of the elite, before being pushed back down once more. Still it fought, despite hopelessness and despair, but it could not prepare for its newest foe.

When the foreign riches - unavailable to our loyal, local king - were suddenly removed from even the elite, the life-support was turned off. Money, the life-blood of the modern game, evaporated overnight as Sheiks and Tzars and Executive Committees unilaterally chose to seek greater fortunes, from farther afield.

War. Oil. Power. These were the same old new frontiers, brought sharply in to focus by bombs, assinations and the great political coup. A ruined Olympics, a blown up team plane, a manager killed by fanatics: even sport succumbed to terror. And then it stopped. The investors stopped investing. The media stopped funding. The supporters stopped attending. Even those who had tried to budget and plan and build a future were wiped out in the proverbial blink of an eye.

Not only sport was affected: councils cut deeper, governments taxed harder, people suffered more. The war had to be funded. All non-essential fundage was removed. Western populations depolarised: from the cut-off outreaches to the functionality of the cities. Birmingham might be bleak and unforgiving, but it has many pumps to man, and we all must be used. I chose a bigger place, and it used me up good.

I am of no more use now. I am spent. So I have carried on walking. I am old. I am frail. I have nothing. I am nothing. But at least I'm home. I've made it, and that gives me joy, albeit only a little: the only joy I have felt in the decades since the fall.

I have made it home, to the place I was born. To return to it. For only one real purpose: to die. As I lay down on the barren banks I know that, finally, I am home.

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2048

The wind was colder than my soul. The night was darker. Both blocked my path, but I pushed forward under the starless sky.

To either side of me, disused buildings loomed like shadows. The howling and snapping of unknown forces gave them life. I was alone, but felt surrounded. I had walked a lifetime and, suddenly, I arrived.

On the horizon loomed an immense figure, standing astride a black, oozing snake of water, softly glowing in spectral blue. The Transporter Bridge, Teesside. I was home.


I'm glad they didn't tear it down, but they should have bulldozered everything else around it. Instead, Middlehaven now boasted an old college building, built to look modern-artish and now a ridiculous parody of itself: broken, graffitied and crumbling into a self-fulfilling abstractness. On the other side of the river, over the rusted walkway, a massive office builing stood decrepit and forlorn. It had once been the police headquarters, when there still was a force. However forlorn that may have been, it was not as pitiful as the once supposedly grandiose stadium which loomed above it. For here, battered and bruised with its Mechano strutts jutting skywards like broken ribs, lies the corpse of the Riverside Stadium.

The football club had died before, but not like this. In '86 it had been revivable by pure hard work, guts and honesty: qualities it later forgot, and remembered too late. With star players came glory, debt and liability. With debt and liability came relegation, disinterest and disassociation. Even the old warriors of '86 - their champion redrafted - could not restore the pride which had once been paramount to the meaning of meagre success. New, young warriors were schooled and fought hard but they could not bring the glamour, nor the followers, back to the battlefield.

The club lived, weak and frail, for years. It cut its cloth and lived within its means. It even had a brief return to the mercenary killing fields of the elite, before being pushed back down once more. Still it fought, despite hopelessness and despair, but it could not prepare for its newest foe.

When the foreign riches - unavailable to our loyal, local king - were suddenly removed from even the elite, the life-support was turned off. Money, the life-blood of the modern game, evaporated overnight as Sheiks and Tzars and Executive Committees unilaterally chose to seek greater fortunes, from farther afield.

War. Oil. Power. These were the same old new frontiers, brought sharply in to focus by bombs, assinations and the great political coup. A ruined Olympics, a blown up team plane, a manager killed by fanatics: even sport succumbed to terror. And then it stopped. The investors stopped investing. The media stopped funding. The supporters stopped attending. Even those who had tried to budget and plan and build a future were wiped out in the proverbial blink of an eye.

Not only sport was affected: councils cut deeper, governments taxed harder, people suffered more. The war had to be funded. All non-essential fundage was removed. Western populations depolarised: from the cut-off outreaches to the functionality of the cities. Birmingham might be bleak and unforgiving, but it has many pumps to man, and we all must be used. I chose a bigger place, and it used me up good.

I am of no more use now. I am spent. So I have carried on walking. I am old. I am frail. I have nothing. I am nothing. But at least I'm home. I've made it, and that gives me joy, albeit only a little: the only joy I have felt in the decades since the fall.

I have made it home, to the place I was born. To return to it. For only one real purpose: to die. As I lay down on the barren banks I know that, finally, I am home.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Obituaries: Fictional Bob, 2011-2061

Fictional Bob was first conceived in the spring of 2011, the bastard child of a radical Blogger and his all-consuming ego. As the Blogger and his ego were closely related, it is little wonder that the character was born a little warped.

Instead of webbed feet and wildly-roving eye-balls, Fictional Bob was simply born with a few mis-shapen facts, and it was these which ultimately made him so successful.

It is difficult, nowadays, to walk in to an office block without seeing a hundred blank-eyed Fictional Bobs staring soullessly into their computer terminals, never at you. Never daring to view the world outside of their own little Hell, too scared that they too may find themselves shot down.

For the long-running story of Fictional Bob was as tragic as it was funny. While critics and loyal die-hard fans alike loved his quaint scruples, he never had it easy. Oppressed, psycho-analysed, discriminated against and sacked on no fewer than four hundred and seven occasions in his 50 year run, Fictional Bob was put through the wringer. And, in perhaps the greatest tragedy of all, his often humorous and always bile-filled musings became an opiate to the masses, not a cure.

The bosses won, Fictional Bob failed, but he made a few people smirk and snigger along the way. He said up yours to his conformity and his fans lauded him for it, while benignly accepting their own. Bob's plight didn't inspire action, it inspired unfulfilled fantasies of freedom from the modern slavery of Corporatism. It served as a warning, not a call to arms. People loved Bob, but they didn't want to be him.

Daniel Donovan, the radical Blogger creditted with and ultimately consumed by Fictional Bob's creation, was once quoted as saying, in typically outrageous fashion: "I'm not that radical or outrageous actually, I just have an opinion". Perhaps, on reflection, that shows just how out-there he was.

Everyone nowadays knows that for society to exist at all, everyone must share the same values, beliefs and, most of all, general appearance. The plastickier the better.

Fictional Bob rose to popularity amongst the darker fringes of popular culture. After debuting on The Alternative View blog, he was quickly moved to a regular role on Donovan's more whimsical offering The Creative View, and the partnership thrived. Later that year, Bob got his own site, although this was seen by many as merely a cynical rebranding of The Creative View in order to exploit the monetization potential of its most enduring star. Fictional Bob himself was unavailable for comment.

From that point, even as Bob's street-cred soared, the Blogger himself was falling apart. He was increasingly caught up in the scandal of "who" Fictional Bob "is" and what "he" wants. The duality and interchangeability of writer and character seemed to drive him to distraction. The media, driven to fill their relentless 72-hour a day coverage (via the red button! tra la la la la) seized on a comment which soon became Donovan's infamous tag-line: "I am not Fictional Bob".

"He's a composite character, based in part on my own experiences and based in part on my observations of others," Donovan explained in a rare public appearance, shortly before his death last week. He went on to say: "Now fuck off, ya bastards".

His death itself is a mystery. Old, lonely and bitter, he is thought to have tripped over his own short-sightedness. "He never saw it coming," his sole surviving well-wisher (and rumoured love of his life) remarked, as she tipped the ashes away at a funeral service for one. Well, one apart from the hordes of cameramen, reporters and dolly-bird presenters.

Fictional Bob lives on in the blogs and cartoons and billboards and films. Many will say that Daniel Donovan lives on in these too. He would not have been one of these people.

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Flower consoles discarded tinnie

"Don't worry," says the flower to the crushed Scrumpy Jack can. "It will be alright."

"How can it be alright?" Scrumpy replies. "I've been used up, emptied out and thrown away. I'm just a crumpled up shell of what I once was - drunk and discarded. It's over for me."

Looking down on the embittered litter, Flower reaches out to offer consolation and hope.

"You're not the only one who feels that way," she soothes.

"No?"

"No. Perhaps the man who did this to you feels the same. Everyone does sometimes. At least, for a time you were a friend to him - you have done nothing wrong. You may feel crushed now but you were important to someone once. Remember that......."

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