Meenzer

Maybe the NBA VAR team is made up of massive racists who think they all look the same.

Aye, this really shouldn't be up for debate. Unfortunately (quite aside from the issue of vested financial interests) there are plenty of ordinary folk who equate those two things, and so here we are.

No change there then

Quite right too. Eddie Howe's second trophy, the Mathematical Safety 2022/23 Cup, to sit alongside the Mathematical Safety 2021/22 Cup in the St. James' Park trophy cabinet.

Post-match dressing room photograph. "No one goes home until we work out if we're mathematically safe or not!"

Al-Rumayyan on the pitch after the match, playing with a calculator.

Get Wor Flags on the case. "MATHEMATICAL SAFETY HAS NOW BEEN OFFICIALLY SECURED" across the entire length of the East Stand. Inspirational.

TURKEY (population 76 million) is joining the EU and Newcastle United could still get relegated. The threats are REAL, people!

This is just a bot posting text from a template now, isn't it?

"Trains well" was the kind of comment I got from the PE teacher on my report card. It meant "can't kick a ball to save his life but runs around a bit".

I hear he pays good money for that kind of thing

I told my GP and it's very much on my medical record - I must admit I hadn't thought about what that might mean further downstream, though I'm not aware of it having caused me any problems yet. "Your mileage may vary" and all that, though. One of the first things my GP told me was that the liver is remarkably good at self-repair, so even if your readings are up now (mine certainly were), they'll definitely come back round again. Variety is the key for me. Alcohol-free beers are so, so much better and more readily available than they used to be, so that can see me through a night in the pub quite nicely. Tonic or bitter lemon as an aperitif. A tomato juice with tons of Worcester and Tabasco to force you to sip it slowly. Crodino is lush if you can source it - decent Italian restaurants often have it. The occasional mug of tea in the middle of a busy pub, just to fuck with people's expectations. And mocktails, dahling, mocktails! Even the chain restaurants have all kinds of interesting alcohol-free things on their menus now - Pizza Express do various long drinks with Seedlip etc. And hipster places adore waxing lyrical about how authentic their alcohol-free IPAs are or how they've sourced this extra special kombucha that definitely doesn't taste like every other kombucha. I promise you, your future is not two glasses of weak pub-tap Diet Coke and then home again. That said, if I'm out for the night, the truth is there will be a point, maybe about four drinks in, where I'm aware of everyone else getting drunker and less interesting and I start weighing up my options for making my exit. There's only so much you can take while sober. But honestly, at our age who has more than a few hours' worth of stuff to say to people anyway?

Definitely sounds like the kind of thing I'd say. Mind, I had to shift at least 20kg of vodka-infused timber before running was an option. Not saying it'll necessarily be like this for you, but I found this got (a bit!) easier once I had properly given up, rather than just trying to have a bit of time off here and there. You can make it your thing, say it out loud so other people become aware of it, even be a bit absurd about it. For a while my standard bar order was "what's your most ridiculous soft drink?". There's nothing quite like making your mates come back from the bar with five beers and a Fentiman's Rose Lemonade. Either way, it's more definitive and while there'll always be some people who still want you to drink with them to justify their own drinking, these days most people absolutely get it. You don't owe them an explanation and nor should one be expected. Saying you're looking after your health or doing it for the kids or just "I'm too old for hangovers" is absolutely fine really. No one needs to know the full story. And if that feels like too much, just say "doctor's orders!" and have a follow-up line in your pocket about being on antibiotics or something. Plenty of ways to navigate the social pressure as long as you're willing to navigate yourself in the first place. As much as it pains me to agree with the Fish, he's spot on. There's lots of people never even get this far. Keep digging, there's gold in them hills

If there was a magic bullet that worked for everyone then I suppose no one would have a drinking problem in the first place. And it's not like what I've done has been flawlessly successful - I lapsed several times in my first year, and I had a few more wobbles during the worst of the Covid lockdowns too. But I think it's really important not to see that as a "back to square one" failure like AA would have you believe. For me the main thing is the intent. If you come to the conclusion that you really do want to (and need to) stop drinking, and you start taking steps to achieving that, it's completely fine to fuck up along the way as long as you're moving in the right direction overall. Think of it as training for a marathon. You wouldn't expect every training run to be better than the last one - you'll have days where it doesn't go like you want it to, you'll have injuries and niggles and setbacks and days when you can't be arsed, all of that. The main thing is the broader picture. That's why I see December 2013 as "when I stopped drinking", even if I haven't abstained completely ever since - it's the moment when it clicked with me, even if it took a while to unlearn some pretty unhealthy behaviours and get the right tools in place. Absolutely no one can do that from one day to the next, and if they say they can, they're a liar (or they're setting themselves up for a massive relapse one day). So I think you do need to internalise what you said there - "the negatives now greatly outweigh the positives" - and keep hammering that home until it begins to stick. "Never drinking again" does feel like a big imposition when you frame it like that, but "never feeling like absolute shit after drinking again" is a pretty good incentive if you can flip it round that way instead. For what it's worth, I went to in-person meetings with a group called SMART Recovery for about nine months in 2014-15 (and then again online for a few months after my lockdown wobble). I found them really useful, and I don't think they're necessarily just for people who have a more "conventional" addiction (i.e. using every day or whatever). They deal in science-based approaches, digging into why we do what we do and challenging the thinking that leads you to engage in addictive behaviours. A lot of it is CBT-adjacent, cost-benefit analyses, that kind of thing - the stuff your logical brain knows really but that you're liable to throw out of the window when you're feeling shit and just want to get blitzed, so the more you work through it and internalise it, the more chance there is of you applying it when it comes to the crunch. I don't know if there's anything like that around your way, but I'd definitely recommend an evidence-/science-based approach over AA, which I tried for one meeting and found to be absolutely depressing - all that "I realised I was powerless in the face of my addiction" stuff - bollocks. The choice to drink is just that, it's a choice you make, so you can also choose not to. The point is not to surrender yourself to your feelings, but to work out what it is you're feeling and what you're telling yourself that gives you the "permission" to make that choice in the first place against your better judgement - and, consequently, how to make different decisions in the moment. (Absolutely no shade meant on AA, it works well for a lot of people, I just think you're probably like me in the way your brain approaches these things and I imagine you'd benefit from something more rational.) In practical terms, cravings are definitely a right bugger, and for all they've lessened greatly for me over time, they still kick in in my weaker moments. There's nothing that definitely always works for me - it's a bit different every time. Sometimes a non-alcoholic drink scratches the itch enough (including in a pub environment, if you feel confident to do so without hitting a real drink - sometimes "low-stakes social contact" is actually the itch that needs scratching), sometimes pigging out on unhealthy food does the trick (not exactly a long-term option, but practically speaking it's a far lesser evil in the moment), or sometimes you just need to distract yourself or exercise or just get out of the house and have a change of scene until you can ride it out. Weirdly I found myself eating loads of Haribo after I first stopped, without asking myself why - turns out the body craves the sugar as much as the actual effect of the alcohol, so that's quite a common side-effect of stopping drinking. Tangfastics instead of Tanqueray. Who knew? I realise the above is all a bit stream-of-consciousness and I'm not sure any of it will be actively useful, but there's some jumping-off points there at least. Feel free to PM me any time if you want to, obviously, though if you're happy keeping the discussion here then it might help others too, you never know!

I are. Expect a WhatsApp

I need to get back to the big smerk on the Sunday already so I'm leaving that for next time, but the mate who's coming on the trip with me has booked himself an extra couple of nights in Porthmadog to explore the coast after I leave, the cheeky cunt. I'll be passing on your ideas. Through gritted teeth.

It's MS Paint time!

In all seriousness, if this does happen in some form, I'll try and time a visit to the parentals to coincide. We'll probably need Cath to play Mam and actually get us organised though, for old times' sake.....

One for the xG aficionados among you: BBC News - VHS tapes sent to the South Pacific - how football's data boom began https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/61084931

Live footage from the Fist household

A superiority complex that defies logic?