Stoking up resentment

PETER Crouch’s entertaining book, How to be a Footballer, is no mere compendium of goals scored on muddy midweek pitches under floodlight. Instead, he concentrates on the side of the game that fans rarely glimpse - the dressing-rooms, the players’ lifestyles and private habits. One anecdote, worth quoting at length, concerns an incident at Stoke FC in 2013, when a prank rapidly spiralled into tit-for-tat revenge.

It began when player Matty Etherington’s new leather jacket was flushed down the training-ground toilets. Suspecting team-mate Jon Walters of stealing the jacket, he put mouldy old fish-bits in Walters’ shoes and car. It could have ended there, but no. Walters retaliated by wrapping a severed pig’s head, obtained from a local butchers’, in Etherington’s jeans inside his locker. Etherington transferred the object to Glenn Whelan’s locker but accidentally chose Kenwyne Jones’s.

“Before you know it,” writes Crouch, “Kenwyne has lost the plot and is putting a brick through Glenn Whelan’s car window, and Glenn is threatening to go round Kenwyne’s house, which we all knew was a bad idea, because Kenwyne was a well-built individual.

“It became quite a big thing in the dressing-room, unsurprisingly,” he concludes, with possible understatement.

Witch way now for Trump?

YESTERDAY, for the umpteenth time, a belligerent Donald Trump tweeted that Robert Mueller’s special investigation into Russian interference in US politics is a witch-hunt. Well, he’s entitled to his opinion, of course. And anyway, who could possibly object to the term? The answer: witches.

John Henderson directs us to a Daily Beast report, which reveals that to America’s witch community, Trump’s constant invocation of a witch hunt is “deeply problematic and, frankly, a bit hurtful.” Many witches are “mad”, one spokesman says. Witchcraft author Kitty Randall, recalling the days of actual witch-hunts, says: “To have him compare his situation to the worst period in our history is just infuriating.”

That’s Trump lost the witches’ vote, then.

Cheaper option

FED up with that thorny demolition problem that threatens to drag on for weeks? Then simply rope in some local kids and give them a few bottles of Monster energy drink. The Alloa Advertiser’s Facebook page reports on the ongoing work to level the structures at the old Longannet power station. One reader responds thus: “Sauchie kids kick the **** out of walls or fences anyone’s silly enough to put up, so I’m sure they could demolish Longannet over a long weekend. All it would cost is a few crates of Monster.”

Getting your fingers burnt

READER Eric Hudson emails the Diary.

“After weeks of successful resistance,” he begins, “I have at last given in to remind you of the old (and supposedly true) story of the minister who was asked to stand in at a crematorium service for a colleague who had taken unwell.

“The stand-in had no input to the choice of hymns, as everything had been arranged.

“So at the Crematorium all he had to do was announce the hymns that had been discussed. The first one was ‘Colours of day dawn into the mind’. All went well until they reached the chorus: ‘So light up the fire and let the flame burn’... Ouch!”