Yes, I must be a Jonah or something like that I’ve been out to Het Stayen at St Truiden to see STVV play against AA Gent – and they lost 2-0.

This morning though, I had a nice lie-in until about 09:00 even though I might have awoken briefly at 03:45. And I’d been on my travels too. I was in Crewe somewhere last night and there was some issue over a spanner. I ended up having to chase after someone and we went all the way up Middlewich Road at Leighton and round across the top of the town to Haslington and Winterley. I ended up at some tiny Tudor house that was suffering from resettlement where there was some old woman living. I asked about the guy and she said that she’s fetch him. But by now this tiny house had developed a kind of verandah with an open wood-stove with oven pumping smoke out, smoke that was being carried out with a draught of air. Eventually the guy turned up and we discussed the spanner. He said that he needed it but he would fetch another one, and cleared off, presumably to look for one. Meanwhile a whole group of men came in to do some work and we were chatting about tools. They showed me some of their spanners – all encased in a blue kind of plastic covering and of all weird sizes like 7 3/8″ and that kind of thing. Meanwhile, after waiting for well over two hours, the guy still hadn’t turned up with a spanner and I had things to do and was wondering whether I ought to continue to wait or whether I should give it up as a bad job.
A little later on, I was running my taxi business and needed a small car to do a regular long-distance route. I ended up with a BMC 1100 ADO16 but my brother was saying that it was totally unsuitable and wouldn’t last 5 minutes on the job. What I needed was some kind of adapter for the gearbox and our father had sold him something suitable that he was wanting to sell to me. Of course, knowing my brother, I immediately smelt a rat. Meanwhile my father came in, picked up the appliance, said that this was exactly what I needed, and banged it down on the table as if to emphasise the point – only for it to shatter into a thousand pieces.

That was enough for the morning – time to rise up from Ye Stinking Pitte.

It was a very leisurely morning, as every Sunday should be. The most exciting thing that I did was to go across the road for my baguette for lunch.

And after that, I carried on doing almost nothing until 16:15, when I left for the station.

Now that I’m officially a miserable old ghit, I found that I was entitled to a reduction in the rail fare.

Last time I went to St Truiden it cost me €8:20. but today, a 65+ ticket to which I’m now entitled cost me €6:80. So how about that?

As I stepped out of the train at St Truiden – a Class 19 pushme-pullyou – the heavens opened. A howling wind and really piercing hailstones lashed me all the way to Het Staaien or Het Stayen or however it’s spelt and I was drenched to the skin.

And here was some bad news. The match is a sell-out. None of the cheap €15:00 seats. There might have been some of the expensive €45:00 tickets left but as I was working my way around to the other side of the ground, someone sidled up to me.
“Do you want a ticket for the match?”
“Well, actually yes. How much?”
“Give me what you want” he replied.

So I had a look. A complimentary ticket for the directors’ box. Having made sure that it was a valid ticket and that I could really get in with it, a sum of €20:00 changed hands. Worth it to me, I reckon, even though the view wasn’t as good as it might have been.

As for the match itself, STVV played much better than they had the last time that i saw them, and three players – Yohan Boli on the right wing and Samuel Asamoah and Daichi Kamada in midfield – particularly caught my eye.

I would have them in my team any time you like.

But the outstanding player on the field, and by a country mile too was KAA Gent’s midfielder Birger Verstraete. He’ll be in the English Premier League before too long, that’s for sure.

The match hinged on two moments of madness. All throughout the match STVV had been playing this weird kind of suicide football on the edge of their penalty area, and I mentioned that this is all going to end in tears very shortly.

And shore enough, a suicidal under-hit backpass to the keeper was intercepted by a KAA Gent player and that was that.

In the second half, a stupid misplaced clearance out of defence was easily intercepted by the KAA Gent right-winger who took it down to the bye-line, crossed it right across the goal to the big unmarked Ukranian centre forward Roman Yaremchuk who also had a good game, and no-one should miss goals like that.

The couple of thousand Gent fans were delirious for the whole of the rest of the game.

But one thing that really gets me these days – this fetish for “short corners”. Here we are, STVV one goal down, well in stoppage time of 1 minute so just a couple of seconds to go – and they win a corner.

So instead of banging it into the centre pretty quickly and hoping for the best, they play it short and before the receiving player can work out what dodo with it, the ref blows for half-time.

It’s totally senseless and pointless.

Back through the wind and rain – as far as the fritkot outside the station. Half an hour before my train so I grabbed a bad of chips and ate them in the corner of the fritkot in the warmth.

The train was packed on the way back – loads of students going back to University all dragging their cases behind them.

However I came back home and went straight to bed.

Hospital tomorrow and I need to be on form.