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Norfolk Jim (Post Turin)

Alex Saynor

Saturday, October 4th, 2014

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 Norfolk Jim arrived home at 4am
concerned about the stewarding.
‘The club should have a look at this’
he commented, ‘it’s no good
loading seats onto season tickets,
it’s a recipe for carnage.’
A freight train had stopped at Manningtree;
Is this a metaphor for anything?
Could our european dreams
freefall like our fans in Turin,
so carelessly picked up, cast about
and lobbed across the seating?

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 Or will they steadily brake
behind a freight train in Manningtree
leaving Jim with nothing but journeys
to Liverpool (via Bristol)
for the rest of the season?

3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 For Jim, there’s a third, more memorable option.
Financially bereft, in the quicksand of ‘bad debt’-
like the chairman of Portsmouth- Jim will reflect
from his caravan, in a state of wanton
bedragglement, on that night in Hamburg:

4 Leave a comment on verse 4 0 Fans were thrown around like celery
but Jim had gone cold turkey
on the notion of social responsibility
he held in Turin. Now the chips were
coming in, soon we all had double vision:
‘Let’s go flipping mental’ cried Jim
as he climbed upon the catering facilities
and hit the ground in a single movement,
threw a beach ball over the railings
to the ‘anti-madridistas.’

© Alex Saynor 2014

Notes

This is a companion piece to the poem ‘Norfolk Jim’ concerning a great Fulham fan called Jim who lives in Norfolk. He is renowned for an uncanny ability to find unfeasibly low-cost travel deals. For example, this season he managed to get a £5 return ticket to Birmingham by bus, but had to spend an overwhelmingly large portion of the day in transit. His reflections on the Turin ticketing fiasco are lifted from the Fulham messageboard which once existed on the club’s official site.

He is a mild mannered guy who will barely touch alcohol, never mind argue with an opposing fan. Even at a high point in Fulham’s history, attempts at exuberance were comical and always innocuous; at one point David Hamilton was suspended on a crane above the fans and couldn’t get down- typically Fulhamish.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/norfolk-jim-post-turin/