For some reason I awoke exceptionally early this morning, not long after 1.30am. When the radio news came around on the hour, the sports reporter announced that footballer Alan Shearer, Newcastle United’s all-time record goal-scorer, was returning to manage the team for the last eight games of the Premier League season as part of the club’s desperate attempt to avoid relegation. Scepticism about media reports is a healthy thing, but you have to be especially careful on April Fool’s Day, when editors like nothing more than dreaming up ridiculous ’spoof’ stories every year with which to dupe their readers & viewers. Nevertheless I have to admit – after half an hour trawling their online websites – that all the ‘sensible’ newspapers are featuring the story … so maybe it is actually true after all. Funnily enough I failed to spot a single ‘spoof’ article on any of the newspaper websites … that is, unless The Guardian story announcing that its contents were now going on-line via Twitter (on which apparently no message can be longer than 140 characters) was one. If it is, I think The Guardian may have shot itself in the foot – I’ve held the view that you could condense everything worth reading in that newspaper into 140 characters or less since about October 1972 …

Having risen absurdly early for the purpose of the above-mentioned exercise, I now find that it is hardly worth returning to bed … particularly since I am climbing the walls thanks to a bellyful of strong expresso coffee and the last two little grey-green tablets sold to me by Barry outside the canteen during my last week at Feltham … when there is now only fifty-five minutes until the volunteers in our WLFF G20 protest group set off on their expedition into central London [codename: Operation Full-Cooked Breakfast] from the railway station forecourt at 0545 hours. The newspaper websites are full of match previews, detailing the various plans (a tented ‘green’ village being set up in the City, groups of anti-banker activists intent on storming Canary Wharf headquarters, bearded anarchists arriving from all around the globe) and counter-measures (e.g. an additional 2,500 police on duty in the City alone) being put in place … you almost expect to see a pull-out supplement giving a tourists’ guide to the ‘ten best’ vantage points from which to view the carnage.

I’ve just texted Gerald, my fellow WLFF organiser for today, with an awful thought. It would be absolutely typical if our intended overthrow of the corrupt Brown-land regime were to be thwarted by the pathological inability of South-West Trains’ management to run their bloody trains on time. I’ve suggested that we should perhaps meet at 0530 hours, just to give ourselves another fifteen minutes’ leeway. The only trouble about last-minute switches in plan like this is the average age of our boys. Half of them don’t know how to find the text facility on their mobile phones and the remainder switch off their hearing-aids when they go to bed and so won’t realise they’ve had a message anyway.