Tannhauser's Journal

Hit the north
As my order for Lia Block sails into the ether, I find another potentially interesting piece of teen fiction - Boy Meets Boy. Apparently, it's a love story set in an American high school where for some reason the openly gay characters do not spend their lives being brutalised and isolated. Whether this will provide another model of action for the water polo team ("Wow! I never knew I didn't have to slam the faggoty kid's head in a locker!") will become clearer over time.

Speaking of unusual environments for teenagers, we continue an occasional set of peregrinations into the world of people who were really, really good in Championship Manager with the news that Cherno Samba, quondam teenage sensation, has signed for Cadiz. Since my knowledge of lower league clubs is informed primarily by Championship Manager, and I have not bought the latest iteration, Cherno Samba was vaguely in my head as being really good, at Millwall and only 14 - only included in the database, indeed, because such great things were expected of him. It transpires that none of those beliefs holds strictly true.

Something that is true, although not real, is Ultima Thule. Pytheas claimed to have discovered this land beyond the north, although the experiment was never successfully repeated. Pretty soon it became a metaphor for the furthest shore - for a while, Britain seemed like Ultima Thule, then Ireland. If the Empire had not ended, envious glances would have been thrown at the Arctic circle, where rumours of divine banquets would collect as the unknown world shrank around it. Whether it's worse to be understood or melted I am uncertain, but I know which one is going to put East Anglia underwater.

So, question: what's the cold, distant place that you can neither find nor truly comprehend? First person to say Skegness gets a kicking the like of which has not been seen on these isles since Harald Hardrada took a hair-curler in the jimmies.

Advertisement