As much as we wanted to laugh, we had to tell her that it was wrong to say that. She was very upset, but it made us laugh even more when all she kept slowly repeating, while sobbing, was, ‘I just said fucking boots, Daddy.’
As is normal on the school drop-off, the moment I have gone and am out of sight Harriet recovers and goes off to play, but that initial part of the transaction always pulls at the old heartstrings. A few months ago I dropped her at school all ready for her school trip. She had her bag packed, all her outdoor gear on, her teddy bear ready, and was beaming away ready to go; she had been talking about it all week. Unfortunately, I walked through the door only for the teacher to say, ‘Oh dear, the trip is next week, Mr Hargreaves.’
Hattie fell to the floor as if she had been shot, and was inconsolable. I felt that sorry for her that I cancelled everything I had to do that day, and took her out of school and to the beach. Weak, I know. Before this I had obviously phoned Fiona and sworn at around fifteen bleeps per minute for telling me that it was the day of the trip.
Like everyone, we do have our little disagreements and most are caused over tiny mistakes like that one. I once asked her for the number of a family member I wanted to text, as I needed to have a delicate chat with that person about somebody else in the family. What happened was, oh yes, Fiona texted me the wrong person’s number, giving me the number of the poor sod I was going to talk about, and yes, he received the text meant for somebody else. Indefensible, yes, and did that family relationship dissolve? Yes.
Fiona and I have that sort of relationship where we can have an argument and it will be over in ten minutes if one of us (usually me) has relented, or has made the other one laugh. After losing it one morning because there were no Shreddies in the house (I know, no need to tell me), I returned to the house for an afternoon snooze (this was pre-children, of course) to find the entire contents of the bed filled with boxes of Shreddies. The Jack Daniels by the bed trick (JD last thing at night, and first thing in the morning) has been done, as has the money on the bed routine (both being pure rock ’n’ roll!), but never has there been a bed full of Shreddies before. Fiona is a real diamond though, and if it wasn’t for her constant moaning and demands I don’t know how I would have the strength to carry on. I joke, but the real truth is that without Fiona, God only knows what I would have ended up like. It’s a cliché to say that she is ‘one in a million’, but she truly is.
I love having the children around, and although there are moments of monumental annoyance, nothing beats being out with the kids on a bike ride, or having a day at the beach. The ever so slight financial predicament I find myself in has stopped holidays to a certain extent, but with the weather now improving, and the beach being free, our summer days out will soon begin again.
On the subject of money, I am officially going into business. I have teamed up with two partners and I am buying a sports shop. It will be called ‘Sports Republic’, and I cannot wait. At the moment in the shop it is a bit like going on to the set of Are You Being Served?, but I am really excited about the whole revamp. It is something I want to do so that if I do go into management, I have a plan B. I want to try to keep my destiny in my own hands, instead of it being in the hands of a manager or a chairman.
I spent yesterday coaching the youth team at Exeter City, as Kwame Ampadu, their normal coach, was away with the reserves, and I absolutely loved it – so did the lads, thankfully – but to get a job on a full-time basis in football is still proving tough. I would say it is still a work in progress, and you never know, by the time this book is finished I may be in a post!
Last week really summed up the variety, the uncertainty and the efforts that I am going through to try to get myself back in the game. By that I’m not even referring to football, I mean back in the game of earning decent money and achieving something.
On Sunday, I visited a sports traders’ fair and spoke to each and every one of the suppliers there. I am learning a hell of a lot about the industry, not least the fact that I will need to stock ‘skorts’ in the shop – a skort is a skirt and under-short combination used for netball and such-like. I gained this bit of info after doing a bit of market research with the Sidmouth Ladies Netball Team, although when I told my wife that I had been ‘doing’ the Sidmouth Netball team, she did raise an eyebrow.
On Monday morning, I cracked on with some writing for this very book. I have loved writing it but have found it hard to concentrate on when I am trying to focus my efforts on feeding the family. Monday afternoon was spent in Plymouth at the BBC. It’s great to sit on the sofa with Natalie Cornah, the presenter, and be able to talk about the woes and ways of the games without having to worry about my own performance the weekend before!
On Tuesday, I spent the whole day coaching, which was great. I really enjoy being in and around a football club; I even joined in with the under-18 and under-16 game at the end – I don’t really like to talk about the fact that I was the top scorer, but if I have to I will – I took the lads again in the afternoon and then took the under-16 boys at the academy in the evening for the 6–9pm session. I ran home afterwards, and got back at 9.30pm. It’s incredible to think that the normal Tuesday last season would have involved an hour and a half training session, equating to about a hundred pounds an hour – multiply that by about ten or fifteen for a top Premiership player. Yesterday, if I even get paid for filling in for Kwame with the youth team, may see me earn around eighty pounds. This equates to just under ten pounds an hour – not a bad sum in the real world, but, forgetting the TV work, for my best paid day of the week it gives you an idea of the pay difference between coaching and playing.
On Wednesday, in true Mrs Doubtfire spirit, I did the weekly (I mean daily, my dear, just in case you ever read this book and haven’t killed me by this point) tidying, hoovering and cleaning. (I pull the curtains to, in case any of the neighbours spot me, and I fly round the house with a can of polish, a Henry hoover and a Robin Williams inflatable suit.) That evening I did a spot of personal training with a lovely lady in Exeter. On Thursday I had a long meeting about the shop, and coached the kids again at night, and on Friday I had an even longer meeting about the shop. Saturday started early; I took the under-16s to play Swansea (eleven pounds fifty to get INTO Wales). We got into the boneshaker of a minibus at 7.15am and arrived back at 4pm, having lost, and been frozen nearly to death for a few hours. During the last week I have also spoken to two chairmen about vacant manager’s jobs, so as you can tell, a bit of a varied week, but as it stands I cannot wait to open the sports shop.
2007/08
You don’t normally receive job offers when you are off camping, but, fortunately for me, I experienced a break from the norm during a camping trip to Devon. Some friends of ours had asked us to go camping with them; my initial reaction was no, and my wife’s initial reaction was never. However, a lot of persuasion resulted in a classic Hargreaves of Toad Hall trip to the camping shop – one where I go and buy the entire contents of the shop, do the activity once, then never use any of it again. (No wonder my finances are in trouble.) We were soon packed up and driving down to the southwest. The camping trip was incredible – we had a one-year-old baby with us, the weather was torrential with brief hints of a force ten gale, we had no heating, and the toilet was a choice of a five minute walk, or a pee in a bucket. It was just fun, fun, fun.
I phoned every single local hotel and B&B, but they were all booked up. I could easily have left everything where it was and driven off to a nice room somewhere, but, with none available, we dug in and camped out. We did manage to get to the beach a few times, but when you have to tie your tent strings to the alloys of your car to stop the tent blowing off a cliff, and when your wife is convinced there is a rabid badger roaming around the tent late at night, you know it’s going to be a tough week. Finally the torment ended; after saying our goodbyes to Nina, Tony and their children, and whacking the heating in the car to full pelt, we limped out of the campsite.
&nbs
p; After around twenty miles of driving, my phone picked up a signal again and the texts and answer phone messages started bleeping away. After reading texts from friends saying ‘Are you still alive?’ and listening to the local coastguards’ message asking if we needed help, as they had seen a badger rummaging through a tent, I picked up a message from Paul Buckle. He had recently taken over as manager of Torquay United and wanted me to pop down for a chat. A quick family conference and we decided that a walk and an ice cream on Torquay seafront might be the perfect antidote to six days spent under canvas surviving off Kendal mint cake.
I arrived at Plainmoor and was directed by a lovely young girl (I told you I would get you in, Kerry my darling!) to the manager’s office. As I was walking up the steps of the grandstand, a bloke stopped me and asked me if I could help him lump a big old TV he had dragged out of an office down to the skip at the bottom of the stand. Of course, I said yes, and with an already weary glass back, after sleeping on a flat airbed for a week, I proceeded to lift this late eighties’ beast down the steps. As I was doing so I saw Buckle running down the stand shouting, ‘Jesus, what the fuck are you doing? I’m trying to sign that lad; I want him to help us get promotion.’
In case you were wondering, he was talking about me – Torquay United had been relegated the season before and were really going for it, trying to get out of that league at the first attempt. This was no mean feat considering how former league clubs had fared in a notoriously tough division.
We laughed about that incident, and as soon as I chatted to Bucks on that first day, I had a great feeling about him, and about the club. My family and I returned to Northampton, and, as usual, we had a lot of thinking to do. I wanted to carry on playing, but I also wanted to really push on with the soccer school I had started, and Fiona had just started a very good job as head NVQ assessor at the local college, which paid well. After a lot of chatting though, we decided that we would go for it; Fiona wanted to have more of a stress-free life and to be able to spend more time with the children, and after speaking to Bucks a bit more I was really up for a new challenge. The children were excited and apprehensive about it at the same time – we had made a great life for ourselves in Northampton, and they had good friends at a good school. Fiona and I also had a great circle of friends and a really comfortable life, but the lure of Devon and a change of life was the clincher – telling the children they would be getting surfboards won their approval. It just so happened that the Hargreaves family would be returning to Devon with friends of ours, Carl and Ange, only a couple of weeks after I had first seen Bucks. I tied this trip in with seeing him again, and signed on the dotted line, after the inevitable last minute haggling and negotiation.
After saying my goodbyes to Northampton, I headed down to the English Riviera. I say I, as Fiona had to see her work commitments through, and I had to find us a house and the children schools in Devon. This was no mean feat, and would take a bit of time. In the meantime, the first thing I had to do was meet the lads, and gear up for a new season ahead.
I met up with a few old mates straightaway; the links to my past seemed never ending. Lee Mansell had signed for Torquay United after Oxford United (I didn’t mention to him much the fact that Torquay United was the second team he had taken down in two seasons!). Lee Philips had been at Plymouth Argyle at the same time as me, and was a good lad. Tim Sills had signed from Hereford United, and Kevin Nicholson, who was at Northampton Town with me, had also signed. Kenny Veysey was employed as the club’s goal-keeping coach/kit man/odd job man (his words); we had been at Plymouth Argyle together and he was a real diamond.
‘Lucky Eddie’, as Kenny would call himself, had opened up a golf shop just before I had left Plymouth Argyle, and, after meeting up again, I asked him how it was going. He said it had gone under, and that he had lost all his money. I asked him what had happened, to which he replied, ‘Well, the thing is Greavsie, no fucker played golf!’ Say no more. Along with Kenny on the staff, we had Damien Davey, who had been signed up as the club’s new physiotherapist. Damien was a huggable demon-drinker, and a joke-telling, story-weaving, bed-wetting (sorry mate, I’m sure you’ve grown out of it now), foot-shuffling injury-solver of the highest order. Shaun North, the new assistant manager, formed yet another link to my past. I was delighted that Bucks had given Shaun the job; he was a good bloke who loved the game and would be great for the club. He was also a mental England fan with a bulldog tattooed on his calf, but let’s not get bogged down with minor details.
The club had also signed Chris Todd, a lionheart of a centre-half from local rivals Exeter City, and goalkeeper Martin ‘Oasis’ Rice, also from Exeter City. Martin was the keeper who had kept them in the tie against Oxford United a couple of seasons ago. As well as this motley crew, the club still had three old stalwarts on their books – Stevie Woods, a good ball-playing centre-half, Matt Hockley, a bite-your-legs-and-tackle-your-granny midfielder, and club legend, Kevin Hill, who had played hundreds of games for the club and who bounced up and down at around forty bounces per minute. These lads added to what was now a decent-looking squad.
For the first couple of weeks I stayed in a hotel along with Kevin Nicholson and Chris Robertson, another new signing. Kev was looking to get out as soon as he could, as he had been put in the hotel dungeon, and although I was up on the top floor (in a small suite overlooking the bay), the hotel was a bit tired, to say the least. Chris Robertson, one of the tightest men I have ever met – he was a quarter Scottish and a full ginger – decided to stay for the full three months allowed and, although he was a top lad, we were happy to leave him with his money box in room 101.
I got on with Kev straightaway; we had been at Northampton Town together, but Kev swears I never talked to him. He claims I just used to walk around all day talking about Vivienne Westwood clothes and fast cars, and lifting weights. For the record, I did talk to you Kev, but you were far too busy drowning your sorrows in Jan’s bosom – Jan ran the club shop and was our own special football agony aunt – to hear anything I was saying. Perhaps you also couldn’t hear me because you weren’t in the team!
Enough banter, and back to the tale. After searching for a few places to stay it turned out that Chris Todd’s house was vacant; he was selling it, but it would be five or six weeks before it all went through, so we agreed to give him forty pounds a week each to stay in it till it sold.
It was a great laugh in the house with Kev. He was so easy to wind up, having a mass of OCD issues himself. What with him not liking alcohol and hating chocolate (he wouldn’t allow himself to enjoy it, in case he liked it too much), being obsessed with cleanliness, loathing swearing, frowning upon any nakedness (but particularly me being naked while doing press-ups), and despising fast driving, it was always going to be fun. He couldn’t bear any lights being left on, any doors being left open, dangly jewellery (odd I know), or late nights, and he had to shower at least three times a day, and definitely last thing at night. I was, therefore, his perfect nightmare for the entire time we stayed together.
We both needed to find houses for our families, so after thrashing him at head tennis after training we would head off to house-hunt most afternoons. It was like taking your ninety-five-year-old gran for a drive. I saw nothing wrong with map reading, eating a tuna baguette and hurling abuse at my fellow drivers while driving along, whereas Old Mrs Nicholson sat next to me would be having a heart attack and grabbing onto the dashboard every two minutes saying, ‘Too tight, too tight, going to die.’
It was even better in the house; we would do our shopping together like an old married couple, with Kev leaning over my shoulder every time I picked something up saying, ‘No, no, we don’t need that, it’s the enemy.’
One afternoon Kev even suggested we go for an afternoon coffee. I replied jokingly, saying, ‘Kev, I know we get on, but at this point I’m not prepared to take the relationship any further; I’m a northern bloke and I don’t do afternoon coffee.’
Five minutes later we we
re sat down in a lovely little coffee shop having a cappuccino, and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. For, one, I didn’t normally ever drink coffee, two, I rarely had time, with three children, to sit down, and, three, I would only ever go for a drink with a bloke to the pub! With Kev being teetotal, he didn’t like pubs and clubs, and so going for a coffee was a good shout. To be honest, I am now obsessed with the stuff.
Kev’s own obsession was with showering, and the degree to which he took it was incredible. All the lads would have a shower after a night game, Kev included, and yet no sooner had we driven our short twenty minute trip home, than old water boy Nicholson would have shot upstairs with his Matey (shower gel, not man friend) to shower again. He physically couldn’t get into a bed without having just showered. I soon learnt that he wouldn’t even let his girlfriend, the lovely Jenny, get into the bed unless she had just showered. It used to drive Jenny mad – this she told me when we had met one evening at the house. Incidentally, Kev was in the shower that time as well. Kev swears that the first time I met Jenny I came in semi-naked having done around three thousand press-ups. I hadn’t; it was three hundred, and I had a towel on.
When the doorbell rang that fateful evening the two young lovers hugged and stared longingly into each other’s eyes. It’s a shame Kev was there really! We all had a good chat and laughed about my and Kev’s living habits, and when Kev went upstairs for his normal hourly rinse, Jenny and I hatched a plan. I managed to turn off the cold-water tap under the sink in the kitchen so when Kev turned on the shower it would be running at around ninety-five degrees. He shouted down straightaway, panicking, ‘The shower is red hot. I can’t get in it, Greavsie! Greavesie, is the water turned on? Can you check it?’
I shouted back up, ‘Yes, mate, it’s all OK down here.’
Where's Your Caravan? Page 29