The old cliché that time speeds up as you get older seems increasingly true, as does the suggestion that you remain about 16 in your head all your life. Still, I think over the next few decades I’ll grow quite nicely into an old man.  I certainly look forward to getting more and more curmudgeonly as I get older.

I’m told your 30s are your best years, and I’ve certainly got a lot to look forward to – personally and professionally. But I think the big 3-0 is going to take some getting used to…luckily I had the foresight to book today off work to enjoy the day and settle into my next decade!

Anyway, amid all the Cheryl Cole/Ashley Cole/Tiger Woods/John Terry muck-raking and tabloid scandal, here’s what, in an ideal world, would be the final word on the matter, from The Outspoken Omphaloskeptic:

“It’s not actually about the ‘celebrities’ involved but about our collective need to create empty celebrity vessels that we can constantly redraw according to our whims. Apparently it’s big fun when can ‘discover’ that they aren’t the archetypes of virtue, perfection and good-living we pretended to think they were. It’s the metaphorical equivalent to my dogs rolling in fox shit. We just can’t get enough of the stench.”

From the post Sympathy For The Hotdog. In the comments section, but the whole thing is worth reading though (apart from yours truly sticking his nose in).

I guess the easiest answer would be my own team, Liverpool. Yet another year of promise and expectation has been dashed. They have put in good performances (against Manchester United, Everton), but have put in far more bad ones (too many to mention).

But that would be too easy an explanation. There is still so much to potentially enjoy about this season. There are three teams still realistically in contention to win the thing. At least four sides are battling for the last Champions League spot. Relegation is not a foregone conclusion for anyone, yet. This season, every single game has had the potential to be competitive. On their day, any team can beat any other. Burnley beat Manchester United, Portsmouth beat Liverpool. This is surely progress, and sign of a season to savour, at least from a neutral’s perspective?

Then why my apathy?

I think it’s down to the scheduling of the modern game. It’s not a new argument, but I think it is still a valid one.

No longer do all games kick off at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon. Last week, only a minority did, while several games were played on Sunday. Match of the Day is no longer the complete record of the league’s progress that week. It’s merely a snapshot. With games strewn across the week, it’s hard to get a true feeling of the chase developing, especially with a multitude of games in hand to take into account.

In a broader sense, modern football is pretty disorienting now. 6pm? Thursday? Well, that must be Europa League time. 5.30? Sunday? FA Cup, of course! There may now be a game to watch every day of the week, but that, for me, dilutes the impact of football.

The many international breaks we have seems to stall the momentum further. It can seem like the season is restarting every six to eight weeks. The story of the season is continually being put on ‘pause’.

Well, enough of my moaning (for now). Do you find the modern schedule baffling? Do you yearn for everyone playing at 3pm on a Saturday? Or do you love being able to watch game after game, day-after day?

It’s still pretty cold. The daily commute was still long and infuriating. Work is still the same-old, same-old, at best. But, with that bright, piercing blue sky, things seem just that little bit more positive. Setbacks, stresses and strains are eased just that little bit by the daylight streaming in, fighting against the omnipresent striplighting.

If only for a day, Spring seems to be on its way. The days are getting longer, and the clear skies suggest we might be able to enjoy those longer days soon.

Spring, as we all know, is the season of new beginnings, of births and rebirths. Spring brings warmth and light to encourage new efforts.

It’s funny how nature and culture offer us so many opportunities for new starts. The calendar prompts resolutions each new year. Every birthday can foster thoughts of making the next year worthwhile. There are new seasons in sport and in art. Lent, starting today of course, focuses the mind on new efforts.

It sometimes seems easy to drift along, let time pass and not strive to be a happier, better person. It can seem impossible to escape the rut we’re in.

Yet, a day like today can wake us up to the potential of the future, can remind us to think about the important stuff we want from life, and to try and go get it. There’s a whole life of new starts and new beginnings for us all.

Thank you for indulging the navel-gazing. Sorry if that was a little new-age-y, certainly not my intention. But you should see how lovely today is here. I wish I wasn’t in the office…and I’m already not sure it was wise to give up chocolate and crisps for Lent. What have you given up, if anything? Or what new starts have you got in mind? And what on Earth am I doing with these italics? What’s that all about?

Normal service will resume here shortly, so expect plenty of rambling and nonsense here soon…

And a big welcome to anyone who has ventured over from BaseballGB for a peek. Good to see you (er, virtually)!

So, to bring you up to speed on my Hemingway adventure, on the advice of this parish’s Steven Harris, I picked up the complete short stories late last year in one of those beautiful Everyman hardback volumes, using my Borders vouchers just before the place went belly-up. Then, for Christmas, as part of an array of writing-inspired gifts, my wonderful Significant Other gave me Ernest Hemingway on writing, a brilliant little book compiling many of Hemingway’s thoughts on writing and the life of the writer. So…I’ve been keeping up.

Last week I popped into one of those strange discount bookshops, that sometimes have some incredible bargains and other times have nothing but hopeless junk. This time, I got lucky. I picked up the slim The Old Man and the Sea, the story that won Hemingway a Nobel Prize for Literature.

My verdict? Well, I loved it. It is one of those stories that will stay with me a long time, hopefully forever.

And I used the word ’story’ rather than ’book’ quite deliberately.

Here we have a real tale, a fable even. Here we have an old man, a young boy, a fish and little else. Everything is honed down and necessary, like a good story should be. In its 100 or so pages there is no room for flowery prose, or padding. And while it is set in contemporary times, the 1950s, it feels like the kind of story passed from generation to generation, as old as the act of fishing itself.

The one concession to the modern-day is baseball. Oh yes, there’s another reason why I loved reading this, apart from Hemingway’s prose and its brevity (I do love a good short book to rip through). The Old Man’s mind often wanders to baseball, and in particular the great Joe DiMaggio, wondering how the Yankees’ great centre fielder would deal with the Old Man’s situation, being the son of a fisherman himself.

So, concise, timeless and it namechecks baseball. It’s as if this was written for me. Don’t you just love getting that feeling from a book?

I haven’t read a whole lot around the book yet, but it is clear that this is a book that divides opinion. There seems to have been a fair bit of criticism in terms of its symbolism, and if it veers too far from the writer’s famed realism.

I’ll just let the man himself reply:

“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. … I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things”.

Or maybe it is just a phase. I do always read. A lot. But the medium isn’t always the same. Sometimes I just have to read a newspaper every day. Other times I realise I get most of my news online (although it’s not the same), or find my brain rotting from reading the free newspapers handed out in London and decide enough is enough.

Other times I’m all over magazines and, for want of a better word, journals. There is some fantastic magazine design out there – Wire magazine, in particular, and the late, lamented Plan B. There’s also some genuinely great writing hiding away in your old periodicals. The New Yorker is always a wonderful, informative and luxurious read. The New York Review of Books is similarly brain-nourishing. But it’s not all about mags from the Big Apple – how about When Saturday Comes and World Soccer, for pretty much peerless football coverage? Or Private Eye, still great after all these years?

But then, after a while, I realise that as immediate and bite-sized and shiny as magazines are, it is a good book that I really crave. A book that demands to be read, to be devoured. The sort of book that leaves you with a sense of loss when it’s over, because you just can’t read it anymore, that the story of those characters (real or imagined) has now finished.

And in an age of iPhones, iPads and all that jazz, and working in a role that falls directly under the banner of, ahem, ‘new media’, it’s interesting to me that all of this ‘old media’ still brings so much joy. These print formats are still vital to me. There is nothing quite like the feel, touch, smell, experience of books, magazines and newspapers.

Don’t get me wrong, I love computers and would be lost without the internet. But nothing will replace flicking through a newspaper in a pub, or a magazine in the garden on a sunny day, or an old book, curled up indoors on a winter’s night. Long may these simple pleasures last.

Image from Jasoon via Flickr

But what option should I choose?

The past couple of seasons I’ve gone with the bog-standard MLB.TV option, and it’s been fine for me. I’m not a heavy user of this particular drug, and if the picture gets a little grainy at times I don’t mind. With the dreadful speakers on my laptop to match I can just squint and pretend I’m watching it on a cool old portable TV in a log cabin in 1976. Seems more authentic that way. I just need to be sitting in a wifebeater sucking on a cheap beer, howling at the screen. Or something. Well, it has been known.

But then again, I’ve always been a sucker for shiny advertising and clever payment options, where is only *just that little bit more* to upgrade. So, what do I get for my extra dough? Choice of home or away broadcast. Nice, but not essential. DVR controls to pause and rewind live. Now we’re talking. That could be good for when I drift off, or miss that key play as I reach for the pretzels. Multi-game view. I’d probably use it now and again, just to get a different feel for the game. Not essential though.

Well, thanks for talking me through that, dear reader. It sounds like the basic package will be just fine. Unless I feel a little flush and light-headed when I order. Feel free to convince me otherwise.

The price? According to my online currency converter findings, it’s £62 for cheap MLB.TV, and £74 for shiny, flashy MLB.TV. See what I mean about *just that little bit more*? Hmm. Damn them and their fine pricing policy.

I think it’s a little bit more than last year, and I’m no financial whiz, but maybe the exchange rate doesn’t help. Say, if you can predict the financial future let me know when I should buy. I’m not looking to fleece the worldwide markets. I just want my baseball a little cheaper so I can spend that money on, I dunno, takeaway curry, or something nice for the flat, you know?

In Tuesday night’s Carling Cup semi-final, first leg, Tevez gestured to Neville, after scoring his first goal. Neville wittily responded by raising his middle finger. In a radio interview Tevez explained:

“My celebration was directed at Gary Neville. He acted like a complete sock-sucker [boot-licker] when he said I wasn’t worth £25m, just to suck up to the manager. I don’t know what the hell that idiot is talking about me for. I never said anything about him.”

Well, I think Tevez will have won himself a fair few new fans for sticking it to Gary Neville, not one of the most popular players in the UK. He may well have some unexpected fans in the red half of Merseyside, who have been known to call Gary Neville far worse things than a ’sock-sucker’.

While this is a case of ‘handbags at dawn’, it is good to see a little bit of proper antagonism between the two sides. It certainly sets things up for a lively return leg at Old Trafford next week.

In the meantime, let’s hope ’sock sucker’ enters common use. It’s handy as it sounds like something else that is quite a bit ruder. Just like when they dubbed a TV version of Beverly Hills Cop, so that ‘motherf***er’ became ‘melon farmer’. Great stuff.