No credit

The weather's not getting any better so the chances of Burridge playing this Saturday are slim.

There was a letter waiting for me when I got home from work. It was unnecessary to open the envelope in order to find out who it was from, I recognised the rounded consonants my name and address had been written in. It was January's invoice from Hamble School, whose synthetic sports pitch facilities we use for our training sessions for an hour each week on Thursday evenings. It is £160 in total for four sessions. Missing in the envelope was any credit note for the two sessions the school cancelled in December due to sub-zero weather conditions that had frozen the pitch. Maybe my request for that credit note had not been taken seriously because it was written in green felt tip pen. If they'd rather it came printed off in Times New Roman, then fine, £80 is still £80.

Burridge manager, Paul Dyke, had requested Saturday 8th's game to be postponed as a significant chunk of our squad, including goalkeeper Ryan Jones, were in Disneyland, Paris, to celebrate Ryan Hurst's twenty-first birthday. Years ago, my peers and I were satisfied in marking the occasion by going drinking in town and ending the evening hugging the toilet bowl in a nightclub cubicle. Clearly things have altered since we reached that landmark age. We have the opportunity to improve on our current position of seventh place, with games in hand on all teams placed above us in the Senior Division of the Southampton Football League.

My drive home from work at around five-thirty was marred by poor visibility, as my windscreen was forever steaming up. This was a result of various items of football kit in the boot, much of it that had been there for some time, the guilty parties being a pair of size eight and half metal studded Adidas, and a set of shin pads, all left to fester in a Nike sports holdall that is slung deep in boot of my car underneath a canvass bag of leather Mitre footballs. The boots need the attention of a good clean that I have been delaying for over a month.

I drove down Basset Avenue alongside the Common and tried to ignore the partially blocked windscreen, the thought of my filthy boots, as well as my fuel gage, that once has once again dropped perilously close to empty. As per usual I will wait as long as possible to part with hard earned cash to fill the tank with diesel. During my short walk from my car to my flat the roads and pavements were testament to the day's weather forecast, with any slight camber or dip filled to the brim with rainwater. With further heavy rain forecast for the remainder of the week it is unlikely that the opportunity to improve on seventh place will arrive this coming Saturday.

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