David Moyes

So, David Moyes is sacked after a mere 10 months in charge of Manchester United. 

I’ve been listening to BBC Radio Five Live all morning and most people seem to support the decision.  Manchester United supporters have, in the main, been scathing about the fact that their team is unlikely to finish in the top four, as is it’s divine right.  The football has been boring – it’s not the way we play.  And the tactics?  Well!

Even worse has been ‘The Big Club’ card.  Moyes might have been okay for a little club like Everton, went the mantra, but he was out of his depth at the biggest club in the world.  I don’t know how more patronising some people could have been.

Apart from the spiky broadcaster Terry Christian, there was little criticism of the Glaser family whose debt fuelled purchase of the club has seen £800m spirited away to meet interest payments.

United’s decline is entirely down to David Moyes.  He had to go?

This outsider suggests he did fail but not in the ways described by some.

Since the new owners came in, Manchester United are no longer big spenders and their outlay is similar to that of Stoke City.  In this final season Sir Alex Ferguson created a near miracle winning the league with an ageing and declining team. And a team that had not enjoyed much in the way of spending on it.

Moyes had a shopping list of players last summer but the new CEO Ed Woodward failed to sign any of them, apart from Fellaini for a grossly inflated £27m.

The signs of decline, noticeable under Sir Alex, were writ large under Moyes and it was obvious long before today that he would not be manager for the long term.

In the most crass way possible, ‘sources close to the club’ started briefing journalists that Moyes was to be axed and these rumours were not emphatically denied by the owners.  (In politics, ‘sources close to the minister’ are usually ministers themselves, so draw your own conclusions as to who these sources were.)

And now he’s gone and the airwaves are clogged up with chatter and prattle.

Moyes was a cheap option, as he had proved at Everton over a very long period of time but they didn’t give him long enough to see if he could do it at Old Trafford.

This was a sacking about money and the fear of having less of it by owners who run the club as a cash cow.

I cannot see the new manager being handed a fortune to revamp the squad but even if he was what would it prove?  It certainly wouldn’t guarantee anything, that’s for sure.

So many of the fans seem not to look beyond what happens on the pitch.  That’s normal at most clubs.  But what happens in the boardroom does directly impact on everything that happens at the club.

And what’s happening with the board at Manchester United is why things are going wrong on the pitch.

I can understand, from personal experience, why it’s easier to just watch the football and ignore everything that goes on off the pitch but if you do that you have to accept you have less right to criticise what happens on it.

Suicide isn't painless

There have been times in my life when I have thought, ‘Is it worth it?’

I have always managed to convince myself that, on balance, it is worth it.

I have had fleeting thoughts, no more than that, of ending it all but more often visions of just walking off into the sunset to do something, nothing, else.

The latter, being the more sensible choice, is no kind of choice at all because I soon realise the practical consequences of not having anywhere to live or anything to eat or wear.

That confirms to me that I am not desperate or sick enough to walk away from life in general and my life in particular.

Others are not so lucky.

Sadly, I have known a good few people who have ended their own lives.  Having given it some thought, there is a frighteningly large number of people I have known, or have come across, who have felt there was no alternative but to end it all.

People I went to school with, the children of the people I went to school with (in one instance, the same family), people I worked with and a few others too.  And in all bar one instance they seemed to be those with the most to live for and the last people you’d expect to kill themselves.

These things have stuck with me.

Life has a lot wrong with it and there have been long and frequent periods of mine where I have wondered what it was all about.  But something always told me that there was something worth hanging on for but I’ll accept there were times when it got close.  Despair was not total, though.

I am not an expert on suicide but my guess is that there are numerous reasons why someone would take their lives.

Mental illness is surely one.  The grey dog of depression, along with all manner of other debilitating conditions, takes away rationality.  As the illness is not taken seriously by society, little is done for those with low to middling mental health issues and only slightly more for those with crippling conditions.

And the society in which we live is another.  We still live in the stone age when it comes to sexuality and bigotry remains institutionalised.  It is still seen as something important when someone ‘comes out’, which I find incredible.  (I remember a friend’s son announced he was gay and a well-meaning person said, ‘I’ll bet you were disappointed to find that out!’)

And there are those which we will never know.

A friend of mine, many years ago, threw himself in the River Thames and drowned.  A brilliantly talented musician, very good looking and not a care in the world.  Two out of three, anyway.

We don’t need platitudes and statements of regret from the people who run our country, we need solutions and answers.

No one should feel that their life was worthless and meaningless enough to end it all.  Often I feel mine is both but there is enough hanging on for, isn’t there?

Investment in mental health services, general accessible 24 hour counselling available for nothing paid for by the taxpayer are both essentials if we think life is about more than just money.

Sadly, our society still remains rooted in the quagmire of Thatcherism where greed is good and sod everyone else as long as you are okay and the current Conservative government, enabled and assisted by the principle-free Liberal Democrats, makes things worse by the day.

One person who takes their own life is too many but sadly the powers-that-be talk sympathetically, but rely on society forgetting about it shortly afterwards.

The killing depressive?

Another day, another fatal shooting incident in America, this time with a soldier suffering from anxiety and depression.

The local mayor was on BBC Radio Five Live expressing his understandable shock and distress at this terrible tragedy, adding that he did not know what you could do to avoid these things happening in future.

Well, I’ve got an idea, hardly a new one: sensible gun controls!  But in the land of the free, it’s everyone’s inalienable right to possess something that can kill you.

President Obama’s sigh-ridden response said as much but he can’t just come out with it.

Also disturbing to me was the reference, without qualification, that the alleged killer was suffering from anxiety and depression.

The suggestion, quite plain to my sensitive ears, was that mental illness was the reason this man killed people before turning the gun on himself.

Lazy, lazy reporting.

I would say we have come a long way in this country in trying to unstigmatise (is there such a word?) mental illness.

A good number of famous people, like Alastair Campbell, Stephen Fry and Marcus Trescothick have stepped forward to reveal their personal lives.  And the effect has been positive on all of us non celebrities who have ploughed on regardless in a world that doesn’t recognise mental illness and mostly doesn’t care.

I hope today’s latest horrific and tragic murder is reported more sensitively than the BBC have so far managed today.

To me, their reporting was put together by a thoughtless editor and producer who ran the item without thinking it through.

Whatever happened, I found it profoundly depressing (literally) to listen to.

Would this man have killed without his mental illness?  Was it the illness that caused him to kill? Or was it the causes of his illness that caused him to kill? 

It’s never as simple as it seems, unless you work for the BBC.

It's next month, already!

My ‘retirement’ from the Civil Service is now next month, rather than at some vague specified date deep into the future.

Having been with the same employer for over 39 years, this is undoubtedly somewhat daunting.

For instance, I have to carry on working in some way, shape or form.  My pension is nothing to scoff at but it won’t be enough for me to continue to lead my current modest lifestyle.

So am I ready to retire?

Not in the perceived way of doing these things where I have always envisioned retirement as being a greying, bespectacled man in cardigan, slacks and slippers sipping tea from a cup and saucer, sat in an armchair.

I’ve never seen me doing this, mind you, because I never really planned in my mind for a time I wouldn’t be doing this.

There are certainly some priorities.

The first one, and this will become more pressing as time goes by, is getting a job.

I have a fair idea of the application process although the interview may be a little trickier given that I have spent much of my life being the interviewer.

I will need to find something that’s bearably interesting too, as well as being able to offer me more time off than I get now.  The last thing I want is to be working the same number of hours in order to earn the same money (or less).

In an ideal world, I would like to carry on exactly as I do now, albeit without the work bit.  More golf, walking, cycling, reading and writing.  Hopefully a good lottery win – a few hundred grand is all I ask for – can more than make up the difference!

Whatever happens, it’s beginning to hit me now.

I’m almost out of the door now and, frankly, I cannot wait.