You see, for the thousands and thousands of Burnley fans, Saturday afternoons are the only reason they have to get out of their beds in a morning. The sea of Claret and Blue that parades around the fortress that is Turf Moor every week is at times, breathtaking to say the least. This, along with the endless shouting of 'Golden Gamble', complete with chorus after chorus of 'Stan Ternents Claret and Blue Army', make me extremely proud to call Turf Moor my home away from home.
The friendly banter between ourselves and our rivals before a game (we have accumalted many over the years), open my eyes to the absurd prejudice that surrounds the people of Burnley. Why only before this game, a drunken Blackpool fan seemed to take great delight in prancing around in front of me shouting 'Yer mums yer dad, yer dads yer mum', making himself look a complete arsehole in the process. By the look on the faces of his surrounding friends, I believe I was correct in thinking they too shared my views on their total prat of a friend.
My attention is then drawn to a group of teenage girls who are in what seems to be some kind of uniform. If I didn't know any better, I would have been fairly confident that they were all part of some strange religious sect. However, when you have lived in Burnley all your life, you begin to understand that the 'fashion' amongst the brainless lassies from the less deprived areas of town, is to dress as if you are ready to spend the night on numerous street corners. The funniest thing is that I have spent my entire years of adolescence turning my nose up at the dense female characters that can be seen parading around Burnley all day and all night, and I am ashamedly beginning to realise that the longer I stay here, the more chance there is of me setting up home with one of Burnley's finest . . . I shudder at the thought to tell you the truth.(I am not a snob, I just have standards)
Recently, a lad joined our school after he had moved to Burnley from London. He has been here for about a year now, and I still haven't got a straight answer from him as to why he has moved from the capital city of England to Burrnley. You cannot begin to wonder how hard it is for me to understand why anybody in their right mind would want to move from their natural habitat to Burnley - a world of flat caps, grid-iron housing and derelict cotton mills. It beggars belief really doesn't it?
After events of the past twelve months, Burnley has finally started to hog the limelight . . .for all the wrong reasons, namely the race riots and the election of the BNP. I have an Uncle who lives in America and he told me that Burnley had made front page news of the New York Times. For a second, I felt tremendous pride at this 'little old mill town of mine' hitting the headlines on the other side of the pond - that is until I realised exactly what it was about 'this little old mill town of mine' that had made front page news in the first place.
Picture the scene - on a hot summer's day, bald headed, overweight lager louts, (thugs if you don't mind me putting too fine a point to it), partake in an all day drinking bout. Eventually they get bored, and their extremely short attention span switches to causing an immense amount of trouble. So, with their union jack patterned bowler hats and each of them clad with some item of Burberry clothing (which is common as muck amongst the numbskulls with only two and a half brain cells and only a job on t'bins to occupy their daily activity), they turn to each other and decide to embark on what the whole of Burnley has been trying to avoid for a long time - racist riots.
For these half heads it was fun and they got a full scale inner city riot for their troubles. If only they had been present in the lesson which taught social skills at school, they would have the common sense to realise that it doesn't cost a thing to be civilised.
Well, Burnley have just scored and it is time for that goal celebration. So, here it goes . . .