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In the depths of lockdown, The Fiver attempted to better itself. There was a three-month self-imposed Tin ban, now long forgotten amid a blizzard of park-bench swilling not seen since the days The Fiver was a fan of The Levellers. The front garden at Fiver Towers was set for the Capability Brown treatment and yet long weeds grow among cigarette dimps and discarded Frazzles packets. Inside, box-fresh copies of Philip Roth and Dostoevsky lie unthumbed on the shelf, as the complete works of Jeffrey Archer have been devoured as comfort reading. And an attempt to become better versed in statistics amid the barrage of log files and seven-day averages of Covid-19 has also failed. Standard deviation is still what Weird Uncle Fiver gets up to of an evening. The grey matter is not what it was way back in those happy, carefree days of February when the world’s biggest worry was how Nigel Pearson might get on at Watford. It may not just be The Fiver whose senses are dulled. The Big Cup and Big Vase tombola on Friday was a shambolic affair to suggest that any new normals are going to feature panicked, disorganised chaos. Even smooth-talking erstwhile Football Weekly panellist Pedro Pinto looked ruffled as a series of video links crashed, and various Euro football club bigwigs defied social distancing guidelines in those brief moments when Zoom was actually working properly. Continue reading...