Memories: round and round we go

I once saw a TV play about a series of family Christmases in the same parental home, spread across a couple of decades. I know it was real because I was too young to be tripping when I saw it, but I can't remember its name and it's too vague a memory to be easily googled. The narrative device itself stuck in my mind as an example of the whole time's-arrow-time's-cycle thing, with the family Christmas remaining the same, even as their individual lives moved on.

It's the same way that I recall my life, except that the backdrop to my monologues and plot twists comes from football. Not that football is really the be-all and end-all, whatever I may say in here, but it does give my life a rhythm, as the weekend domestic programme chimes with the midweek Champions League counterpoint. Every April and May there's a crescendo, and every fourth year it carries on building to the grand World Cup happy finish. Truly World Cups are the real Christmas, as previously discussed.

So seeing David Platt's winner against Belgium in 1990 on my widescreen TV a few weeks ago instantly took me back to the tiny telly in the Midlands pub we used to drink in back then. I can almost taste the purple nasties - a snakebite with a dash of blackcurrant, if you're wondering. I think all the cells in my body that thought that was a good idea have since been replaced. Tiny tellies are also a thing of the past, in fact the widescreen itself was bought specifically for the last World Cup.

A week after the Belgium game we were back in the same pub on my birthday, watching England lose to Germany on penalties. By Euro 1996 I'd moved to Bristol, and I remember seeing Croatia v Germany in a pub in the Mendips with a friend, the last time we ever did acid. Germany won despite Davor Suker's trickery and the way the grass kept changing colour and moving around. Gives purple nasty a whole new meaning.

If regular readers think this all sounds a bit familiar, that's because it's a rehash of a similar post from Euro 2012. But then eternal recurrence is kind of the theme here, which makes this recycling a legitimate device with a real philosophical purpose. What purpose? I'm trying to push you into a short but intense existential crisis in a remote mountain hideout, after which you will emerge crying out to the crags and glaciers that you still choose life, even if it means reading my old posts over and over again until the end of time.

Ironically, I think this is the first time I've done that spiel. The first, but probably not the last.