I went to London and am on my way back to my house from London station. When I was in London I saw the sights and went to some shops and ate some nice food. When I was on Columbia Road looking at shops that sold things for my house, I saw Danny Wallace. He had strange eyebrows. Also, when we went to Harrods I saw their Christmas teddy bear and a pair of philandering adulterers.
I had a lovely time in London.
From,
Michael. xx
Obviously my writing skills have improved enough during the course of this train journey to allow me to tell you the story of my encounter with a pair of premiership footballers who are well known both for their abilities on the field, the obscene amount of money that they get paid to stand in front of around 43,000 people complaining that their payment is not defence enough against the possibility of injury and intrusion into their private lives of the braying mob of paparazzi who would pursue them the length and breadth of the country waiting for them to look a bit drunk or smack a dog across the face with a delicatessen menu.
When I saw these bastions of civilised society strolling around the plush surroundings of Harrods department store in London’s upmarket Knightsbridge (I didn’t buy anything- you think I’m made of money?), my eyes were not drawn by their surprising height but more by the group of suited ‘minders’ whose primary role it was to stop people looking in the baskets of the two highly-paid gentlemen strolling the sprawling corridors of this lavish department store. A secondary role of their’s is clearly to carry said baskets. That’s the way forward. Hard men to carry a little basket of your expensive shopping.
Straight after seeing them walk away with their Secret Service-esque personal shoppers I did what any sensible person would do. I tweeted about?it.
“Just saw John Terry & Ashley Cole in Harrods. Could write an Opus of the things I should have said to them but didn’t.”
Almost immediately the line came through from Hecklerspray HQ.
“Do it.”
I’d be remiss in my duty as one of Hecklerspray’s newest contributors if I didn’t follow orders and come up with at least a few hilarious things that I should have said to these tabloid targets. Naturally I would never say these things in real life, primarily because their ‘personal shoppers’ looked like they could punch a hole in the fabric of space-time and if they can do that to a scientific construct then just imagine the damage they could do to my face.
If I approached them, ostensibly to get them to sign a couple of autographs I could have gone for the classic “footballers are idiots” angle. “John! Ashley! Could you sign this, please?! Seriously; just an ‘X’ would be fine. Perhaps Ashley might have managed to drag a pen across the paper, spelling out the word ‘sue’.
Why not dress up like a powerful political figure and approach them with the promise of large wads of cash to paid in one solid instalment, airlifted to their lavish homes by five chinook helicopters. Surely the lure of having a “big flying house”, as Cole once (didn’t) put it, arriving at your house would be enough for any child-brained footballer to give up enough personal secrets for me to make a tidy sum by selling it to some foetid tabloid with less eye for a good story than Jeffrey Archer’s publisher. That could have worked but unfortunately I didn’t have my trusty tea-towel and rubber-band combo on me at the time.
Then there was the masterstroke. The one that really hit me square between the legs like an unwarranted groping from Marlon King (a man who is not quite as rapey as Mike Tyson but is also infinitely less talented in his chosen field); why didn’t I ask them about what they’re good at? Their talent! Their undoubted ability with balls? Their unshaking desire to be at the very top of their game in one of the greatest football leagues on earth? No. Of course not. For god’s sake, I write for Hecklerspray.
I wish I had taken my girlfriend by the hand and taken her forward to Cole & Terry and asked them for advice. I’m quite self-destructive and have been looking to cheat on my girlfriend for some time now. The only thing is that my self-destructive, almost masochistic nature means that I’m itching to get caught. Now, if there’s two men who are better to teach me the best way to get caught cheating by a partner, it’s got to be Mr Terry & Mr Cole. Unfortunately I don’t have any close friends with supermodel girlfriends but let’s face it. I just want to get caught.*
Of course I didn’t. I just stood there looking at them, trying to pass it off as if I’d barely noticed them. Trying to stop my tongue lolling out with sheer flabberghasted joy at seeing two well-paid men walk through a shop that was expressly designed for well-paid people to walk about guffawing at the the Asda-price alternatives that they’d looked up on their diamond-encrusted iPhones. In truth it’s little wonder that I didn’t say anything to them at the time; I was too busy keeping myself from attempting (no doubt unsuccessfully) to kick their faces off.
*That’s expressly not true. Just to stop the adoring emails that you’ll undoubtedly be sending me.
Stella says
Footballers are gibbering slack-jawed cretins, but those who pay to see them chase a ball for an hour and a half, buy their merchandise or whatever they advertise are dim-witted palaeolithic apes.