June 12 – August 28, 2022

There is something off about August. This part of the summer season brings about an atmospheric unease. The long light stops feeling languorous and starts to seem like it’s just a way of putting off the night. There is no position of the earth in relation to the sun that comes as a relief. Insomnia arrives in August; bedsheets become heavy under humidity. No good habits are possible in August, much less good decisions. All I do is think about my outfits and my commute, constantly trying to choose between my sweatiness and my vanity. People are not themselves. I go see the party girls and find them wistful. I meet up with the melancholics and find them wanting to stay out all night.

In August I cannot think, so I cannot work. This is not not-working in a restful or decadent way. This is not-working as certain doom. And I can’t not-work in peace either: if I leave in July I consider myself traveling but if I leave in August I am just leaving. The best I can hope for, in the absence of a purpose like business or pleasure, is an escape. Maybe a light excursion. In any case I am rarely in the place I can reasonably call my home in August, and instead stay in other people’s basements, in their living rooms, on their couches. I sleep on what was once a little brother’s bunk bed and wash my hair in his parents’ shower. I walk down the stairs and see their children’s fingerprint smudges on the banister. I stay in hotel rooms by myself and think: What a waste. (I am convinced that hotel rooms are designed for sex, even though I am not particularly into the quality they have—sealed, hermetic, identical. Hotels are to sex what time zones are to jet lag, I think. A change of interiors out of proportion with the body.)

I am against August. When I try to explain this position, some people instinctively want to argue. These people seem to love the beach beyond all reason, to have never suffered a yellowed pit stain on a favorite white T-shirt in their life, and to eagerly welcome all thirty-one days of August as though they are a reward for a year well-lived rather than a final trial before the beginning of another. These are people who vacation with peace of mind. To them, I say: Go away. To the people who agree with me, I say: Go on. 

How Norse sagas and medieval myths inspired The Lord of the Rings

At last, welcome to the most important episode in the Ramble’s history. Jim, Pete and Luke provide a definitive lowdown of that most glorious of football phenomena: animal pitch invasions!

From Anfield’s plague of cats, to a dog being interviewed pitchside in Argentina and the time a pigeon had a poo in Ashley Young’s mouth, we relive all of football’s weird and wonderful meetings with the animal kingdom!

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Sign up for our Patreon before the end of August and get 15% off an annual membership! Plus exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble

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How a sense of excitement and cultural renaissance awoke across the continent

June 1 – August 27, 2022

August 4 – 27, 2022

In 1967, the Jornal do Brasil asked Clarice Lispector to write a Saturday newspaper column on any topic she wished. For nearly seven years she wrote weekly, covering a wide range of topics—humans and animals, bad dinner parties, the daily activities of her two sons—but the subject matter was often besides the point. These genre-defying missives are defined by a lyricism and strangeness that readers of her fiction will recognize, though they are a thing apart in their brevity and interiority. Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, which collects these columns and others Lispector wrote throughout her career, will be published in English by New Directions this September. As Lispector’s son Paulo Gurgel Valente has written, “Enjoy the columns, I know of nothing quite like them.” Today, the Review is publishing a selection of these crônicas, the final installment in a series.

March 13, 1971

Animals (I)

Sometimes a shiver runs through me when I come into physical contact with animals, or even at the mere sight of them. I seem to have a certain fear and horror of those living beings that, though not human, share our instincts, although theirs are freer and less biddable. An animal never substitutes one thing for another, never sublimates as we are forced to do. And it moves, this living thing! It moves independently, by virtue of that nameless thing that is Life.

Welcome to our very first Ramble Reacts! We kept Marcus, Andy and Luke up late to relive an astonishing Manchester United win.

Lisandro Martinez defied his critics and his height, while Marcus Rashford got back on the scoresheet ahead of his World Cup-winning goal in December. But what on earth has happened to Liverpool? Elsewhere, Graeme Souness fights Casemiro at a wedding and we uncover shocking revelations that Andy’s godfather is in fact Louis van Gaal.

Join us for Ramble Reacts episodes throughout the season, where we’ll bring you our takes on the biggest games! Get involved @FootballRamble on Twitter, or email us This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up for our Patreon before the end of August and get 15% off an annual membership! Plus exclusive live events, ad-free Rambles, full video episodes and loads more: patreon.com/footballramble

***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!***

Why mending objects can have a healing effect