Getting a Bit Passionate

Oooh, Matron!!!

Ok, so hands up, I confess, I didn’t do a post on Monday or Wednesday but I have very valid reasons for that. Monday I was on a canal boat and about fifteen miles away from my laptop and yesterday I felt like death only ever so slightly warmed up. My fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue have been running rampant and unchecked and when you add the Labrador induced sleep deprivation I had on Tuesday night then you can surely sympathise with me for being a tad poorly.

But one can’t stay angry with a dog for long, can one?

So here’s the thing. To make up for it I’m doing two posts today. I mean, I still feel like poo that’s just been trodden in and is now being scraped off with a stick, but no-one can say I don’t honour my commitments.

Plus, it would be awfully wrong of me to ask for your subscriptions and then not provide content.

Anyway, the first of today’s two posts is a blog post from my Blessham Hall website and it’s about how we all have things we’re passionate about. It’s a light-hearted and good humored piece that I think you’ll enjoy and hopefully will encourage you to read my blog further. And lets be perfectly clear, my blog and my Substack are two separate things that very occasionally might overlap.

Getting A Bit Passionate - Oooh Matron!!!

I was watching the local news recently and a certain story caught my attention. Of course, when I say local I mean in the wider sense. Despite living in North Yorkshire we get North West Tonight news on the Beeb and so we hear all about what’s going on in Manchester, Liverpool, Cumbria and the surrounding areas. Even the Isle of Man. But that’s not the point.

The particular article I was watching was about Stockport County Football Club gaining promotion to League 1 from League 2. Now, far from it being the dizzy heights of the Etihad Stadium, Old Trafford or Anfield, nonetheless the cameras were pitch side at Edgeley Park to record this event and to interview players, staff and supporters of the club.

I follow Derby County (someone has to, may as well be me) and am not really all that fanatical about them although I do like to see them do well (which is rare these days). Contrast my nonchalant feelings towards my club then to the young man in a Stockport shirt who was interviewed by the news team.

He was an ordinary looking guy, mid-twenties I should say, and there was nothing particularly distinguishing about him other than the fact that he had tears running down his face and was sobbing with unadulterated joy at what had just happened on the pitch.

I was moved gentle reader, I honestly was. Here was a young fellow who was so passionate about his club that he was crying like a four-year-old that has just fell off its tricycle and needed mummy to kiss its boo-boo better. And I thought to myself. Wow, to have that much fervour and passion over something like football. I know, I know, Bill Shankly said it was more important than a matter of life or death but to me it really is just a game that comes with highs and lows and disappointments and victories in much the same way as any facet of human life.

However, for some reason, even after the news had finished and I was watching Great Canal Journeys with Tim and Pru, I couldn’t get this young mans tearful response to his club’s promotion out of my mind. I mean, it wasn’t as if Stockport had just won the European Cup or the Premier League, but to him it was every bit as special. And as I pondered this I began to think to myself, Oh to be that passionate about something – anything!!!

That thought stuck with me for a few days until the Wednesday when my wife and I and one of our neighbours went to Sedbergh for the day. And then I realised, I am passionate about things.

Many things actually.

Not in a sordid, sexual way. No, more of a kind of can’t shut me up when I start talking about them kind of way.

Sedbergh is generally known as the book town of the North. It’s only a small town, barely more than a large village, but there are lots of little independent book shops. I was like the proverbial kid in the candy shop from the moment we arrived. So much so that I made myself sick with over-indulging. I reached a point of starry-eyed bewilderment and if left unsupervised and unchecked I would have spent a lot of money on books. A silly amount probably.

I love books! I always have ever since I was a young lad and I could talk for hours with anybody about literature. I love to discover authors I haven’t heard of (the wonderful David Nobbs recently) and delve into any book that piques my interest. I tend to judge a book by the title and the blurb, not by the cover.

In the end I had to be taken for a sit down with a restorative latte and a posh but well over-priced cheese and chutney sandwich at a converted woollen mill to calm my over-stimulated little mind.

And I’m deeply passionate about my own books and the worlds of Blessham and Ingleby that I have created. I’ve populated them with great characters; heroes and villains both loveable and loathe-able, and I seize upon every opportunity to tell people about them, usually with a swiftly brandished business card pressed into their unsuspecting hands.

And, do you know what, when I sell one of my books or get a review online then I begin to feel a little of what that young Stockport supporter was feeling. Maybe not tearful to the point of looking rather silly on television, but certainly elated and filled with the urge to do a little jig of joy. I don’t do a jig though because I would probably end up in A&E or whatever its called now, but the urge to is there.

The more I thought about being passionate the more I began to realise that there are many things that I am passionate about. So here’s a bulleted list of the other things that I, Alan Leonard Stevenson, have a passion for:

·         My marriage/wife

·         My faith and beliefs

·         My dear friends and loving family

·         My home

·         TV Quiz shows

·         The Yorkshire Dales

·         Carry On films

·         1970’s Progressive Rock

·         Tomatoes (seriously, I’m addicted to them)

·         Weight loss

·         Self-improvement

The list could go on but I don’t want to water it down. Needless to say that for all of us, there are many things that we all get passionate about. And for me, it took the sight of a supporter of a small football club weeping like a freshly lanced boil on North West Tonight to make me realise what it is for me.

Let me know what your passions are in the comments section, but keep it clean.

Here’s the link to MY BLOG

The second post for today will appear shortly.