Football’s most cultured team? Why, it can only be Oxford United . . .
EVERYDAY life is just a series of passwords, isn’t it? And what’s the main purpose of these passwords? That’s right. They exist to be forgotten. Yes, I suppose they perform some valuable function when it comes to protecting our privacy and particulars, but that’s only if you can remember the ruddy things in the first instance.
What was it Elvis used to sing again? I forgot to remember to forget? Now, that may have been a brooding, heart-felt lament to a lost love from the King of rock’n’roll – or at least a melancholy reflection on the Rafael Scheidt years at Celtic – but when it comes to perplexing passwords, it’s easy to forget to remember what you were trying not to forget because you were trying so hard to remember it that you forgot what it was you were trying to remember. Got it? Oh forget it.
Many is the time, for instance, this scribe has been hunched at the laptop, my hands gently gliding over the keys like Richard Clayderman lightly fingering his crotchets as I dither on a commitment to typing in an elaborately worded password that features so many jumbled numbers and random capital letters, it’s memorable only for the fact it’s so unmemorable.
The Bletchley Park codebreakers would’ve nonchalantly cracked Enigma and reeled off The Herald’s cryptic crossword by the time I’d successfully negotiated my way through the computer’s stringent security cordons.
Slumped at the office desk, my face displaying the same kind of strained rictus you’d adopt if, for some reason, you were trying to clasp a 50 pence piece between your buttocks, it was clear to all and sundry that I was trying to remember my login details so as to begin the daily grind.
With chin resting on one hand in pondering pose, yours truly can often resemble Auguste Rodin’s chiselled creation The Thinker. A nude man in sombre meditation, battling with a powerful internal struggle? The likeness is uncanny. Well, it was until the head of human resources told me to put some clothes on.
Funnily enough, Rodin popped up in a question on quick-fire intelligence-fest University Challenge recently which got me mulling over the query: which football team is the most cultured?
With the exception of the Aston Villa side of the 1990s, who wore shirts sponsored by a yoghurt company (worst line in a column this year), I have decided that it still remains the Oxford United squad of the mid-1980s.
Manchester United and Southampton, who contest the EFL Cup final this weekend, may have all
Peter Rhoades-Brown sounded like someone on University Challenge, relentlessly buzzing in with an assured academic abandon