Bring me the head of Dr Schadenfreude!

It's late in the day. I'm in London having watched Blackpool lose at Millwall - five games, five defeats - the worst start to a league campaign in 116 years. [Oh, and the drive down yesterday took me a staggering 8.5 hours.] Millwall supporters are not renowned for their generosity of spirit but they showed not the slightest trace of schadenfreude today. They had only sympathy for the plight of Blackpool fans and the shambles that is our football club at the moment.

I sometimes think that football matches are the civilised substitute for the spectacle of public executions. I'm sure we've all been shocked by the spate of beheadings in Syria and Iraq in recent days, but it's only a couple of hundred years ago that such events were standard entertainment in the cities of the west. Crowds were intrigued to see how many swipes of sword or axe it would take to sever a condemned head - the more it took, the more excited they became; and the mightier the head that was falling, the more pleasure they derived from the event.

Hacku
Laughter
in face of misfortune.
Blood smeared in a smile

Thanks for reading, Steve Rowland ;-)