ARCHIVE: The Lost Tapes
When your marriage is on the rocks due to football. Worse follows as she shacks up with a Urinals fan. Are you bitter about it. The UNKNOWN WANDERER wasn’t when he recounted the tale of... The Lost Tapes.
Two years ago I had a blinding flash of inspiration “Divorce the fat bastard”. So I did. The house and it’s contents wasn’t a problem, the Whites were tearing up the football league and everything in the world was rosy.
Then came the nasty Premier League and she moved a Man Urinal fan into my house. I went to see my solicitor who said I’d need a list of personal contents. I told her exactly what I wanted from the relationship. She looked at me puzzled from behind her desk and paused before asking “How do you spell Subbuteo?”. I wanted the Earth to swallow me up with embarrassment.
The day had come for me to go and collect my personal belongings and effects. The nosy bastard neighbours curtains twitched like Roy Keane’s nose when it’s near Peter Schmeichel’s arse. I got out of the car and walked nervously up the path. I knocked on the door, the dog that I had trained to bark at the words Man United”, was doing cartwheels and trying to shag my leg. What a warm welcome I thought, until the bastard bit my hand.
He was sat there in my old chair with my old pint pot, watching my T.V. He was wearing a shitty black Urinals shirt. “So you’re a United fan then”, I spat out contemptuously.
“Yeah, I’ve got all the shirts”.
“Smashing”.
“If your looking for the box,” she said, the words sliding out of her slimy lips, “it’s upstairs...in our Love Den’’. I held back the bile and gamely climbed the stairs.
The stairs brought back memories especially the good ones, like the night we beat Liverpool and Everton, the promotion against Preston, the same stairs that I cleared in one leap on that same sunny Friday afternoon when my mates called for me on the way to Hull City. The same stairs I crawled back up 14 hours later, high on emotion and pissed on bitter.
I came down with the large blue box of personal effects, namely my extensive and precious Subbuteo collection, nurtured since I was but a babe in arms. I went back into the front room...
“Sign this” she said I opened the box to check on the contents, and gasped in amazement as I found all my Bolton videos in there.
“You said someone had stolen them”,
“I just couldn’t stand you watching them anymore you boring Bolton bastard!”
As I opened the front gate, her smelly Urinal boyfriend stopped me and said “I’ve got a confession to make”,
“What? You weren’t shagging her whilst I lived here were you?”
“No… I’ve broken your Steaua Bucharest forward”,
“You rotten fucking bastard!” I replied. I resisted the urge to kick it off just like my hero Matthew Simmonds, and put the box on the back seat of the car. I told her I thought the house suited her much better with the Red Light over the door. I pulled out of the street with a big smile and definitely much the better off, with my box full of Bolton videos and my Subbuteo set. Ain’t divorce just brilliant?
First appeared in Issue 6 of White Love in late spring 1996.