Herald Express wants YOU.

[The Farmers Friend]

the lame performance and defeat at Colchester when a win would've kept us up was the one that made me most angry, not often I lose my temper at a match, but the display and passion from the team that day made my blood boil, still does!

That day changed my whole relationship with football and Torquay United.

I wasn't so much angry as stunned by the sheer sickening twist of fate - I remember that final day relegation battle being described as having 13 possible outcomes, only one of which would have seen us relegated. The irony that only one year previously I'd made the same journey back from Essex in ecstatic mood only added to the misery and tainted the memory of the Southend game.

Prior to that, I'd only missed one home game in around eight years, gone to obscure pre-season friendlies and youth games, plus plenty of away games, made sure I got married on a day when United couldn't possibly be playing etc. etc. but thereafter decided I was no longer going to put my life on hold for something as unreliable as a lower league football team.

Fair play to those who continue to do so, though.

[ferrarilover]

This really isn't as hostile as I'm sure some people will try to tell you it is...

Going to football and arranging certain elements of your life around it is not putting your life on hold, it's doing something with your life.

We are each allocated 168 hours per week to use as we see fit or as is dictated to us by biology, circumstance, capitalist agenda, Maslow, the modern world and a whole host of other determinants. Of the time we have remaining once we have paid our various pipers, attending a football match seems to me to be a perfectly excellent recreational use of time. Not as worthy, perhaps, as attempting to cure cancer, but certainly better all round than shooting up in the alley behind a pub.*

Non-footballing acquaintances insist that the time I spend trawling all over the country following United is a grotesque waste of time. I usually respond by asking them how they spent their Saturday in the alternative. Upon this question,I am usually met by the face of a dawning realisation that what they in fact did was absolutely sod all, in the pretence of having a embarrassment of riches in the spare time category. Of course, this is late Sunday evening, by which time it's far too late for them to make amends and they spend the next 5 working days contemplating the futility of their wasted lives before resolving to spend the coming weekend doing something productive. Me, I already know what I'm doing at the weekend because Torquay are playing (alright, not THIS weekend, but in general) so I not only feel the benefit of putting my time to good use, but I save time during the week also, by not having to soothe my tortured soul.

Football is win-win.

Matt.

* Druggies - I saw a thing on TV the other day which seemed to suggest that large quantities of vitamin C and/or citric acid were a hallmark of heroin use. I have Googled it, but I can't find a satisfactory explanation as to the meaning of it all. Help a brother out?

[SteveDeckchair]

Probably what it's cut with and perhaps citric acid is produced when it is cooked up? Educated guess by the way and I never have and never would touch the stuff!

[bixieupnorth]

citric acid is added to the mix when its diluted to help aid solubility, they may be helpless drug addled fiends but they know their chemistry!!

full info here http://www.drugs-info.co.uk/drugpages/h ... eroin.html