And today’s latest conversations on the Arsenal transfer speculation pile include:

  • Two lads from Sampdoria
  • A Russian lad who scored against us last season
  • A French kid nobody had heard of this time last year
  • Liam Neeson’s character from ‘Taken’*

*not actual Liam Neeson. The guy from the movie he played in. Last Action Hero style.

I’d love to give you insight but I just don’t have it on any players we’re linked with. I’m just not that clued up on Italian or Russian football because frankly, it’s full of racists and anyway, the football itself is boring as sin.

I was talking to the wife last night about how I get to this time in the season and particularly in the last few years I just feel a bit, well, ‘footballed out’. This season is no different and right now it all feels a bit of an effort investing myself emotionally in a team in which so much work is needed to be done, the decline has been so steady in recent years, under the stewardship of an owner who really couldn’t give a fish’s tit about us.

I feel drained and so the idea of having watched a whole season of Italian, German, or French football in addition to the English game, just makes me feel even more tired. Literally thinking about football is making me weary right now. I don’t know how people do it and still have a life if I’m honest with you. Between seeing friends, spending time with family, work, having to catch up on Netflix shows, trying to re-learn German, cooking food, etc, I barely have time for just one football team. So to have enough of it that you can watch multiple matches for multiple teams in multiple countries…well…I just want to know where all the Harry Potteresque ‘Time Turner’s are, because I need to get me one to fill it all in.

Perhaps I’m not a ‘real’ fan. Perhaps people would chastise me for thinking in such ways. That any fan who isn’t living, breathing, sleeping and eating The Arsenal, is no real fan at all. Maybe I value things outside of football a little bit too much. But football brings as much pain as it does pleasure and so in recent ears I’ve found myself trying to desensitise myself from it. That’s why I’m often a little more pessimistic than others when it comes to The Arsenal. It’s my defence mechanism against yet more heartache like the cup final last Wednesday.

Maybe I’m not a ‘real’ fan. But do you know what? I really don’t care what people think of me online because 99% of them I’m never going to meet in real life anyway. And the ones I do meet are always sound humans who often feel similarly to me.

I’ll renew my season ticket, of course I will, but right now I just don’t feel like I have the energy to invest in worrying about which unknown player we’re going to invest our 27p on. I just need a bit of time not to think too much about football. So I spend a little less of it on social media, I don’t really look at Sky Sports much, and I reign in my other Arsenal blog reads.

Perhaps somewhat hypocritically I still write this blog. I think it’s mainly because it’s become habitual. I like writing anyway and I have a journey in to London each morning that takes about an hour, so why not keep my brain stimulated by thinking of things to write? It’s better than sticking on a TV show and just vegetating for the journey in to the City. Keeps my brain flowing. It’s the only real time I sit and ‘think’ about Arsenal at this time of the year, which is why I don’t do very much on Twitter, and haven’t really done lately. Football takes a bit more of a backseat and given I’ve been going through some tough times at work too, it’s become somewhat of a distraction, but not something that I want to overtake my life.

It’s an opportunity for me to jot down whatever’s on my mind and sometimes that flows and sometimes is a pile of old toot.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it from me for another day, maybe back tomorrow with something vaguely more interesting for you to read.

Laters people.