January 27 – April 9, 2023

February 4 – April 8, 2023

Where were you on the night of April 3rd 1996? Jim doesn’t remember, which is all very suspicious.

Marcus, Jim, Vish and Pete look back at arguably THE most legendary Premier League clash ever, which simply had it all. A terrible 90s pitch. Brilliant attacking football. And the Premier League title on the line. We find out all about it, discover what Marcus gets up to in the pub and stumble across Kevin Keegan’s real truth. Seriously, this one HAS to be listened to right to the very end!

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My thirty-fourth year was meant to be a winner. I would drink less, I would eat better, I would write my book proposal, I would walk ten miles every day, I would go to the theater, I would get a job, I would read more books and watch more movies. I would, in short, live up to my potential. All my life I’ve seen out of the corner of my eye the other me, the one who rises early, sleeps well, spends responsibly, works hard, shines with a humble yet unmistakable brilliance, and never lets anybody down, the bitch. Well, no longer.

Thirty-three! Otherwise known as the Jesus year: thirty-three being the very age Jesus Christ got his show on the road. If it was good enough for the Son of God, surely it was good enough for me. Being simply human I didn’t expect a dove from heaven—just a little self-actualization, a shimmer of success, a whiff of recognition. Nothing big. In retrospect, it might have been better to dwell on the how of Jesus reaching his potential (i.e., death) and not so much the when. But I didn’t, and it wouldn’t have made a difference: almost precisely a month after reaching this momentous age, I was throwing up a yellow substance I didn’t like the look of into every available receptacle. Scripture is silent on whether this ever happened to Jesus, but since he participated in humanity in all its fullness, maybe it did.

***

My domestic situations have always had this problem: I buy things for the other me, who has great taste, but then I don’t know what to do with them, because they’re not my things, they’re hers. Other me—McClay A, let’s call her Alice—likes delicate coffee serving sets that would turn the humdrum act of sipping coffee in the morning into a small, beautiful ritual; real me habitually buys cheap iced coffee before going to sleep, placing it on the nightstand for the morning. What happens to the coffee service? Who knows. I look at it and am as charmed as ever. I’d buy it again, I’m sure.

Third spot was in their grasp, but Spurs let it slip! To ten-man Everton. And then got a man sent off themselves. Oh dear.

Marcus and Luke react to a shaky start to the post-Antonio Conte era and just another day at the office for Michael Roberto Carlos Keane.

Elsewhere, there’s a Fabio Paratici update after he valiantly (and temporarily) falls on his sword while Leicester barely wait until Brendan Rodgers has left the carpark before speed dialling Graham Potter. Plus, what sort of social occasion would force Roy Hodgson’s assistant Ray Lewington into a pair of trousers? Stay tuned.

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As the movie Air premieres, we explore the rise of the ultimate cult sneaker

Our verdict on the new Super Mario Bros. movie

March 7 – April 8, 2023

March 2 – April 8, 2023

Around the time I realized I didn’t want to be married anymore, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. I’d known it was there, behind King’s Cross railway station, for at least a decade. I had read her protofeminist tract from 1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, at university, and I knew Saint Pancras Churchyard was where Wollstonecraft’s daughter, also Mary, had taken the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when they were falling in love. When I thought about the place, I thought of death and sex and possibility. I first visited at thirty-four, newly separated, on a cold gray day with a lover, daffodils rising around the squat cubic pillar. “MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN,” the stone reads. “Author of A Vindication of the rights of Woman. Born 27th April, 1759. Died 10th September, 1797.” I didn’t tell him why I wanted to go there; I had a sense that Wollstonecraft would understand, and I often felt so lost that I didn’t want to talk to real people, people I wanted to love me rather than pity me, people I didn’t want to scare. I was often scared. I was frequently surprised by my emotions, by the things I suddenly needed to do or say that surged up out of nowhere.

Unexpected events had brought me graveside: when I was thirty-two, my fifty-seven-year-old mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t genetic; no one knew why she got it. We would, the doctors said, have three to nine more years with her. Everything wobbled. This knowledge raised questions against every part of my life: Was this worth it? And this? And this? I was heading for children in the suburbs with the husband I’d met at nineteen, but that life, the one that so many people want, I doubted was right for me. I was trying to find my way as a writer, but I was jumping from genre to genre, not working out what I most wanted to say, and not taking myself seriously enough to discover it, even. Who do you tell when you start to feel these things? Everything seemed immovable. Everything seemed impossible. And yet I knew I had to change my life.

There were a string of discussions with my husband, threading from morning argument to online chat to text to phone to therapy session to dinner, where we floated ideas about open marriage and relationship breaks and moving countries and changing careers and dirty weekends. But we couldn’t agree on what was important, and I began to peel my life away from his. We decided that we could see other people. We were as honest and kind and open as we could manage as we did this, which sometimes wasn’t much. The spring I began visiting Wollstonecraft’s grave, he moved out, dismantling our bed by taking the mattress and leaving me with the frame. I took off my wedding ring—a gold band with half a line of “Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath etched on the inside—and for weeks afterward, my thumb would involuntarily reach across my palm for the warm bright circle that had gone. I didn’t throw the ring into the long grass, like women do in the movies, but a feeling began bubbling up nevertheless, from my stomach to my throat: it could fling my arms out. I was free.

At first, I took my freedom as a seventeen-year-old might: hard and fast and negronied and wild. I was thirty-four and I wanted so much out of this new phase of my life: intense sexual attraction; soulmate-feeling love that would force my life into new shapes; work that felt joyous like play but meaningful like religion; friendships with women that were fusional and sisterly; talk with anyone and everyone about what was worth living for; books that felt like mountains to climb; attempts at writing fiction and poetry and memoir. I wanted to create a life I would be proud of, that I could stand behind. I didn’t want to be ten years down the wrong path before I discovered once more that it was wrong. While I was a girl, waiting for my life to begin, my mother gave me books: The Mill on the Floss when I was ill; Ballet Shoes when I demanded dance lessons; A Little Princess when I felt overlooked. How could I find the books I needed now? I had so many questions: Could you be a feminist and be in love? Did the search for independence mean I would never be at home with anyone, anywhere? Was domesticity a trap? What was worth living for if you lost faith in the traditional goals of a woman’s life? What was worth living for at all—what degree of unhappiness, lostness, chaos was bearable? Could I even do this without my mother beside me? Or approach any of these questions if she was already fading from my life? And if I wanted to write about all this, how could I do it? What forms would I need? What genre could I be most truthful in? How would this not be seen as a problem of privilege, a childish demand for definition, narcissistic self-involvement, when the world was burning? Wouldn’t I be better off giving away all I have and putting down my books, my movies, my headphones, and my pen? When would I get sick of myself?