One thing has been fairly consistent for the last 15 years and that has been my purchase of a Fifa Football game. Currently we’re up to Fifa 11, and since that means 2011, and the first game I bought it the series was Fifa 96, that’s a lot of football games.Some years there have been world cup or European championship editions as well, and I’ve bought them too. My personal situation has changed a lot in that time, I’ve gone from being a student, to living at my parents, to moving in with a lovely someone who later became my wife but one of the constants has been playing footy computer games.
In the last few (post kids) years the time I’ve had spare has been scant and the spare time I’ve had I’ve not really spent playing video games. So my Fifa playing changed as well. I tended to only play multi player with my best mate who still lived in the North. A few games and a chat over Xbox live were what kept our friendship ticking over. When he moved down south for love, we saw each other a bit more and played games a bit more, in the same room this time, like we did when we were younger. He was best man at my wedding and I returned the favour twice. I didn’t even recycle (m)any of the jokes.
We were heading towards the point where I would have known him longer that not (we met in the first year at uni) and were still good mates despite distance, and how we’d changed/grown as individuals over the years, although I’d be the first to say we weren’t as close as we had been, when that arsehole Gordon Brown called a general election. The one thing we’ve never agreed on is politics and we’ve always tried not to talk about our political views. Suffice to say we didn’t in this instance but I did do a blog post that mentioned something he said in a post himself. I didn’t attribute it to him but I suppose he read it and didn’t like it. It was a throw away opening paragraph but that was it. Blocked on Facebook, MSN, twitter and I’ve not heard a peep since. We used to chat every day on MSN. Nothing consequential for such is the nature of blokey chat but it was really regular.
I found it odd and wondered if anything else had happened behind the scenes that I wasn’t aware of. If there were other cumulative reasons, perhaps he shouldn’t has agreed to be M’laddos godfather. Wifey has urged me on numerous occasions to email/phone him and patch things up but I think if he really doesn’t want to talk to me that much, what’s the point? I still stand by my original point any way, tolerance is a two way street, and if you don’t agree with someone’s opinion, calling them a mouth-breathing fascist isn’t the most appropriate way to show them they’re intolerant.
Therein lies the problem with blogs I suppose. It’s all very well expressing an opinion publicly but if you don’t like equal public criticism of that opinion, you’ve got to wonder whether you should express it in the first place. As it stands in late April I lost my best mate of 17 years and it makes me sad.
