Let’s go home, Debbie.

She’s running for her life but Debbie’s uncle Ethan catches her and sweeps her up into the air. He holds here there and we hold our breath. He may have thought he hated her but - no - he was just hating himself, what happened to his niece and the wildness which surrounds them. He just wants to see her safe. “Let’s go home, Debbie”. Then, after all those years of searching, Ethan can relax. It’s not the final scene, but it’s the moment when everything’s resolved. The big guy who makes most noise throughout the film eventually walks away alone but love wins in the end - and that’s the main thing. Love wins.

A bit much? Absolutely! But - fuck it - I’m giving myself a major send-off! If ye think referencing myself with John Wayne, Natalie Wood, John Ford and one of the greatest movies ever made is a bit OTT well then ye want to see some of the pish I’ve got coming up next! From Nietzsche to Julius Ceaser, from Sammy Johnson to Chuck Dee - Shavian wit to Hegelian shit - If ye cannae write anything decent then at least fill the page with the work of those who could. And, this evening, Wednesday 27th August 2008, there’s less chance of me writing anything decent than at any other time in the last eight years

Erm, quite simply, troops - quite simply this is the hardest post I’ve ever had to write. Coz, save for this Sunday’s Match Retort on the game at Parkheid, it’s my last.

Veni, Vidi, Verbosity.

Eight years ago last week the venerable Ronnie Esplin - having spied some of my left-of-centre, right-of-Conservative, a-wee-bit- underneath-and-kind-of-in-front-at-the-same-time-of-liberal Rangers ramblings in the equally venerable When Saturday Comes - contacted me and asked if I’d like to write the Rangers page of a shit-hot fitbaw website called From The Terraces. This was in the days of dot com millionairage and all that. I was starting out on my as yet incomplete (erm, still, as yet, un-BEGUN) biography of Gerd Muller - the very reason I’d decided I should get an English degree - and so the wee bit cash (£50.00 a month! KER-CHING!) which could be generated from this labour-of-love sideline was most welcome.

My first assignment was a match report on that coming Sunday’s Old Firm match at Parkhead. Ronnie said the remit was 600 words. We lost 6-2. At least I had my first word. The trouble was trying to pull out another 599.

By the time I’d spent five hours churning out my 601-word epic, I needed a crate of Smirnoff, a large Donner and a cyber moniker. Every other “journo” on From the Terraces (aka “FTT”, BTW) was using his/her real name. I wanted a pseudonym. Just to be more exotic - and safer.

That was eight years ago today. The day Fernando Ricksen was subbed after twenty-odd minutes of his Old Firm debut and the day Fat Eck was born. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which event was the more disturbing.

Within a few days, I was struggling to keep my opening paragraphs down to 600 words. Within a few weeks it was clear this was what I’d always wanted to be doing - without ever previously knowing it. I knew I loved The Rangers, fitbaw in general and writing in general. But I also had a pretty healthy disdain for football journalists or - more importantly - how even the best of them had to go about their work. Talking to footballers and building up a contact book never really appealed to me. I wanted to write about my experiences as a Bluenose. Through Ronnie - a proper author and journalist - I got a few chances to experience the press room and all that side of it. Nah. No thanks. Not for me. But giving it big licks about life as a regular Ibrox punter was - well - it was almost as easy and satisfying as eating.

Fifty notes a month was not enough to sustain my escalating Kebab habit but other ways and means were found to get by. Within a year or so the arse had fallen out the Football Webzine market - don’t THINK it had anything to do with my arrival …! - and when the site was taken over by some porn-line spiv, re-named, re-marketed and I was asked to start concocting transfer rumours with links to premium rate phonelines I decided it was all getting a bit too intellectual for my liking. Mr David Low, lifelong Saint Johnstone fan and all-time PC boffin, set up a few of us revolting web journos on his Open Football bloggers commune. Dave raised enough through advertising for half of one really good piss-up between three of us in Perth but, as always, this wasn’t about the dough. Everyone else went off to have a real life, kids etc, Rangers@OpenFoootbal became FatEck.co.uk and, before I knew it, six or seven years had flown by.

Sir Sammy J said No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money: Well, for the last eight years I’ve been one massive blockhead. I’ve been daft. I’ve been totally fucking daft about Rangers and I’ve loved it. Writing for money virtually always involves compromise or - much worse for me - genuine talent. Fat Eck.co.uk and all its previous incarnations have been the purest exercise in communication and discussion and sheer, fucking, life-affirming cameraderie I have ever experienced … without being in the same room as another human.

Of course, I will now do all I can to romanticise the experience in my own groovily dark existentialist terms. For example, speaking as someone whose been shit at everthing he’s ever attempted by way of making dosh - because his heart is never in it - but has absolutely no problem churning out thousands of football-shaped words into the wee small hours before setting off to his 9-5 job, I wonder from where I caught this desire to make my life more practically difficult. Yet, instead of thinking “Simple - yer a loud-mouthed twat who loves a captive audience” I think “it must be because I know Kafka wrote brilliant stories all night and worked as an insurance clerk all day.” Likewise, instead of admitting to myself that “Using The Rangers games for a blog is a way to gain instant inspiration to write, get an isntant response but not have to worry too much about construction, tone, grammar, spelling and all the stuff REAL writers worry about” I just go ahead and think of Factory Records when they were starting out and they hosted a Battle Of The Bands night, by way of talent spotting. As judged by the pub/club crowd on the evening, a group called Warsaw came last. But they’d soon become Joy Division and, later, New Order. Tony Wilson, founder of factory, claimed he could tell that they were different from the start:

“All the other groups on the night were better but they were all there hoping for money or fame - Warsaw were there because they had NO FUCKING CHOICE”.

Best I can manage, troops. “No choice”. That and just the simple desire to spread the love among the Bears and without, to show that there’s always someone in the congregation who feels the way I do and, most of all, to find if there’s anyone else out there who feels the same. Chuck Dee said he had to get a rhyme through the rough and crazy times. I’ve never believed Rangers are the “Public Enemy” some would depict us as, but we’ve definitely had some downs over the past eight years and I wrote this grammatical car crash of a blog as much as a cry for help as a rallying cry.

Derek, Lone Star Ranger, Barca72, Boaby, Thistledhub, A Moses MacNeil Sandal, Los Palmas, Rusty, Rooster, Tim Waits, Bluebhoy, Charles and SO MANY MORE - down the years I’ve made so many friends, fallen out with them, and made up again that I just know this blogging life has been one of those experiences I’ll look back on for the remainder of my puff, like an old rugger bugger businessman thinking back to his Harrow days or an auld accountant thinking about his time as frontman in a goth band, and think “THAT was intense, THAT was brutal, THAT was BRILLIANT, THAT - that blogging ’bout the Teddy Bears - that was hilarious and horrific and emotional and THAT was life, man - that was life viscerally and actually lived”.

But it’s at an end. It breaks my heart and I don’t really know if I’m gonnae cope without this fulminating forum - but I have to let my heart break rather than collapse.

I’ve had no choice but to write this stuff. As soon as Ronnie introduced me to this world, I was unable to stop. But last season nearly killed me. And next season I’ll be 40. That’s a bad age to be skint, knackered, spotty, without a book of your own in a bargain bin anywhere and weighing over 21 stone in yer 1FC Nurnberg strip. When we went out to Kaunas, that dark, wet miserable night in Lithuania, not ALL of me was as gutted as it should have been. Devestated, yes - humiliated, yes - but after a 68-game season, every one of those games growing more intense by the week and requiring more cyber ranting from Yours Bluely, who attended 49 of them, I knew I’d be glad of the early nights in 2008/2009: All those midweek games last season required an immediate blog response and when they were going to extra time and penalties and coming every week then twice a week and then sending you into heaven or hell, you just couldnae stop writing about it - neither I could. But when the adrenaline wore off - usually about lunch-time on the Thursday or Friday after two hours sleep - I knew Fat Eck was getting too fat and too old to keep it up for another season (WAY HAY!!). Working a crap job because I’m knacked all the time = crap wages = needing to be more picky about what away games I go to. That’s wrong! And when any part of my being is less than destroyed by a Rangers defeat, I know it’s time to quit.

I thought about doing the “Dylan Goes Electric” thing, of changing the style, of making it more “snappy” and “less time consuming”. But we don’t do populist here.This has never been a proper “blog” as such. Most Rangers matches elicit from me something more akin - in length and self-involvement anyway - to a Proustian recollection of a a dinner party than a quick diary entry. This weekend’s rant about the trip to Pittodrie is a classic example - I actually had to split it into THREE PARTS, most of which were ten times the size of the kind of blog piece ye’ll read on the Huffington Post or Angry Black Bitch, for example. I’ve got several other wee writing things on the go at any one time but most of my energy goes into responding and reacting through these pages to whatever’s happening to Rangers on or off the field and whatever the press, the tims and the Bears are saying about it all. And I can’t keep it bite-sized. Just can’t do it. Once I open my cyber gob …

Nor can I, as once considered, simply turn it into a once-a-week,wholly reflective, commenty-column-type thing. The older I get the more clearly I realise that those fans who take their team truly seriously are not the ones who’re “too upset” to show their face the day after a bad result - ye know, “for yer own good”; just in case they might have to slap ye because they’re SO upset - No, the fan who takes his team truly seriously, is seriously proud of them, is the one who NEEDS to show up when his team loses. Ye prove yer true character in times of defeat - if I can’t be on this blog straight after my return from a Rangers defeat, EARNING the faith and loyalty which so many posters of Rangers, Celtic and other persuasions have shown these cyber pages down thd years then I’m not doing it at all.

This is the most honest “work” I ever have or ever will produce. I don’t want to compromise it - it can die whole. It started on 27th August, I’ve announced its retirement on 27th August. it began with a massive defeat at Parkhead - won’t it just complete a lovely circle of life if we lose by four goals again this Sunday for my final match retort, my last ever blog post??!!

Yeah - wouldn’t that just be smashing.

Sunday’s final rant will be all about Rangers. Yeah, yeah - “every portrait painter only ever paints himself, etc” - I know but this is the only post purely about me - honest - because you folks who have kept this wee community going are clearly due an explanation as to why I’m abdicating my side of it. And the reasons are purely personal - time, money, health, donkey love etc. The fact That Rangers will, I have now established, be safer than Debbie Edwards being returned to the Jorgensen’s homestead at the end of The Searchers, is purely subjective on my part and, given that I’ve decided to pack in this blog, probably just a bit TOO handy a conclusion. But what I experienced the Saturday before last, when yet another anti-Murray campaign fizzled out and the whole of Ibrox seemed to say “Oh, grow up and back the team!”, let me know my eight years in the trenches are over. If someone else needs to start chip-chipping away at the Follow Follow Zealots or the misguided and egotistical on the Ragers Trust then good luck to them - but I think they arses defeated themselves this month. Celtic and the Daily Record? They’ve been around a bit longer but one has never really worried me anyway and the other is the Daily Record so, erm, fuck it. As long as the Rangers are safe, everybody’s happy.

After a word-free week or twelve I’m hoping to knock together a book or ten which will raise the profile of the “unheard sensible Rangers majority” even higher. That’s probably the best way to blow all the knee-jerkers out the water. For the last eight years I’ve often felt like Schopenhauer at Berlin university when he lectured to an empty lecture hall every day because he deliberately went head-to-head with Hegel’s lectures,on at the same time. But that analogy demands you think I’m anywhere near as clever as Schopenhauer … or that Follow Follow is Hegel. Aye - fuck it - but ye get my drift; the profile and vindictiveness of the Follow Follow fanzine and webzine makes ye feel yer fighting an eternally losing battle when ye disagree so markedly with their way of “supporting” Rangers. But then we had the whole Carlos Cuellar sale and reaction and various “spokespeople” deciding to tell the media what the entire Rangers support rather than just they themselves really thought. BANG! This blog was inundated with some of the most intelligent, articulate, unbelievably inspiring posts I’ve ever read. No-one was “happy” with our start to the season but very few people wanted any heads to roll. And Rangers are the fulcrum - the club itself is the forum around which we will gather and, well, “be one” - not little splinter groups with a hard-on for Neil Lennon.

Sectarianism at Ibrox? Not dead but definitely RECEIVING THE LAST RITES (Oh, ya beuuuutaaay!!). And, vital to killing the bugger stone dead, there have been several healthy and official expressions of the Protestant and Unionist identity of Rangers. It’s not how we all feel individually but if you can say “This is one stance the club comes from” then there’s no need for it to remain underground and thus necessitate bitter, negative forms of expression. I don’t like every aspect of the ways in which the club has moved on but I’m happier than ever about our future and our self image as the biggest, loveliest secret society you can ever be a member of. See all that scary “Ulster” stuff - it’s just a front to keep out the sniffy types and the sentimentalists. What ye get following Rangers is REAL love and affection - not just the kind ye sell to the media. That’s why we’re always arguing amongst ourselves - coz we’re a PROPER family!

I started this Fat Eck caper on the day of a seminal, era-ending defeat. It was crisis time at Rangers. Eight years later it still is. Yet, in the intervening 8/10ths of a decade, “Hullo Hullo” has dissapeared, we’ve won two league titles, a treble, two cup doubles, become the first Scottish team to qualify from a Champions League Group, from a UEFA Cup Group and reached our first European final in 36 years. Ye can’t always get what ye want but if ye try sometimes ye certainly do get what ye need. Continental competition has been the obsession of this blog, conceding foreign goals at Ibrox my pet pet-hate. Last season we lasted longer in UEFA competition than any Scottish team has ever managed and we kept seven - count em - SEVEN clean-sheets at home in Europe. I still WANT the European Cup in the Ibrox trophy cabinet more than I want to regain my full five-a-sides-competent physique but I’ve NEEDED that European final apearance since the day I first understood the Away Goals rule. No, hang on, I wanted it for more than three months …

We’ve shared some amazing moments over the last eight years: Beating PSG on pens to qualify for Europe after Xmas for the first time in nine years, Wee Nacho’s looping lob of animalistic delight at Parkead to seal our first win there in five years, the Scot McDonald double on Helicopter Sunday, the destruction of Lyon in France for our greatest ever away performance, Kris Boyd’s performance in last season’s CIS Cup final, Bertie Konterman’s pile-driver in the CIS Cup semi and Peter Lovenpants’ winner in the Scottish Cup final of the same season against the same team, Wee Nacho’s equaliser in Athens and his penalty winner in Florence, destroying Werder Bremen at home and Allan McGregor’s save against them in Germany. Beating Dunfermine 6-1 as Celtic beat Kilmarnock by one goal less. Watching Davie Weir defending. Watching Carlos Cuellar defending. Watching Jean-Alain Boumsong defending. Watching Claudio Reyna, Arthur Numan, Jorg Albertz and - love him or doubt him - Barry Ferguson running the midfield is a sight to behold.

All this in a time of “continual crisis”? Aye - no matter what happens this coming Sunday - I think Rangers will be fine.

Apart from anything else, I’ve been spawned by the same cybernetinterdotcom thing which splurted out The Rangers Trust. It’s good to talk but - problem is - some folk use the anonimity and safety of the net as a way to fantasise and lend some twisted credibility to what would once have simply been a parting heckle of the manager or chairman as ye left the ground. The last few months have confimred beyond all doubt that the real rangers zeitgeist, the real Rangers heartbeat, can only be judged at Ibrox on any given matchday. I would have no problem continuing to write myself to death if there was a real need for it but this ain’t Raphael Lemkin trying to get the Prevention of Genocide Convention ratified by the UN. I may well also drop dead of a heart-attack at 59 (be pleased to reach that age!), with seven people at my funeral, but I won’t do it in the name of something which is already safely “achieved” if it was ever truly an issue: Rangers won’t be taken over by the zealots and myopics - this blog has brought me into contact with far too many people who are only daft about one thing, Rangers, for me to think that could happen. Frankly, most Bears just want to talk about the fitbaw.

City of Manchester Stadium: Half-time in the UEFA Cup final and they shove on the Stone Roses, “I am the resurrection”, over the tannoy. Not every Bear danced and sang but enough of us did to make it one of the greatest moments in my puff - and a sure-fire cert that the best of the Rangers support is fundamentally unfundamentalist.

So I’d better get myself rested and relaxed inbetween games now so I don’t have anymore incidents like those previously described on Saturday at Pittodrie. I know why I was late for that game - same reason I’ve been so narky and unrelentingly beligerent lately with anyone, friend or foe, who chooses to talk to me about Rangers in the workplace or at a social event or just in the pub: I’ve spent too much time expounding my own opinions on all things Rangers. I’m knackered after last season and after the seven before it. I wrote two good pieces about the first two days of the EURO 2008 finals and then, with every passing night of being unable to resist the blog after a game which finished at 10pmish, my summer turned into not so much a EURO 2008 Diary as a EURO 2008 cry for help and sleep. Couldn’t stop myself writing abot the football. Can’t. But I need to know from now on that I can write about the football when I WANT to rather than when I NEED to, which is AS SOON AS THE GAME’S OVER!! AAAAGGGHHH!!! A KEY-BOARD!! A PC!!! … MY KINGDOM FOR A MODEM!!!

As I coughed and spluttered my way along the beach-side road on Saturday, my knackered body unable to generate any real speed as I missed the kick-off at shittodrie, I approached a surfer dude. He was by his car, slipping in or out of his wet suit, waxing his board or something. He was generaly trying to look like Patrick Swayze in Point Break and doing none too bad a job: He was chilled, he was cool, he was oozing a mellow and laid-back vibe and was as spiritually far removed from the myopic, bitter, childish bitching of a Rangers-Aberdeen game at Pittodrie as ye could possibly be.

We briefly looked each other in the eye as I slumped past him like Quasimodo chasing the last bus to Notre Dame and, ye know, “what a pathetic way to live your life” was the first phrase which came into MY head. God, I felt sorry for that poor, soulless bugger.

Imagine trying to find peace and tranquility WHEN THERE’S FITBAW ON!!! Ye’ve got all the time ye want to be tranquil when yer deid.

No, never again do I want to be so knacked that I miss the first ten minutes of a Rangers game. I need to leave the blogging lest it actually begins to cut into my attendance of games - the very point of my existence!

Even now, as I say goodbye to 8 years of love, all I can think about is Sunday and The Piggery and the continuation of a love which has lasted 31 years … and counting.

This is my valediction forbidding mourning. I’m gonnae meet some of you guys for a pint - now that I’m out the blogging game I can happily meet up for a jar-to-jar with anyone desperate enough to desire my “Live” company. Previously I didnae really like to compromise the “integrity” of the debate and/or back-slapping on the threads by having a distorting personal agenda or friendship with anyone posting on a regular basis: I don’t - erm, DIDN’T - want FatEck.Co.Uk to become a social convention - especially when I was so want to fall out with anyone who saw things different. I didn’t want us to end up forming a “Trust” for fuck’s sake! ;-)

So, for me, this is hopefully gonnae be freeing (Hoh! Troops! why does it turn out all these e-mail addresses youse have left me end in “@Mickey.Mouse.Com”??!! And why are none of you ever in when I phone??! Come on - if I wanted to PARTAAAY on my own I’d sit at home all night, locked in a wee box room with a PC …erm …)and for everyone else it’ll hopefully be a relief:-)

I was gonnae just post a piece saying “Fat Eck passed away suddenly today …” or maybe even tell yese I had a terminal disease, or that I’d been taken away by the police after they’d found thousands of images of Gary Glitter in my hard drive … maybe even fake a live shotgun suicide on You Tube, with “We should never have got rid of le Guen” my last words before unloading both barrels into my thrapple. Anything seemed more “loyal” than simply saying “I’m fucked and there’s nothing more to say”. Coz there IS always something more to say In fact, the more I do this, the more I find to “write” with each passing Rangers game.This is the trouble - I’m gonnae end up needing three months just to write a full match report for a CIS cup quarter-final at Annan Athletic. The longer it gets, the more tired I get, the less readable and more pointless it becomes to you and the more embarrassing to Rangers by association. As this auto-obituary is clearly demonstrating, I have tae stop, folks. I have tae stop.

I have a beautiful wife. So beautiful. I’ve never mentioned her before because, well, ye know the kind of toxic stuff the delusional like to come out with on Blogs - mentioning the personals is like a yellow rag to these cowardly bastards. Cheap shots would ensue.

Plus someone might grass me up to her about Big Gunther …

But, now that it’s over, I must give a mention to the person who really made all my writings possible and to the woman I love more than even the Teds of Bear. We’ve been married nine years so, with me about to be havin’ a bit more spare time on my hand for the first time in eight of those nine, look out for DivorcedEck.Co.Uk, starting next Spring!

The uxoriousness on these pages, however, has alwas been between man and Rangers. One of the few dissapointments down the years has been the lack of a female audience - at least not one which has ever made itself heard. “Boys ‘n their toys” I suppose - maybe it’s all a bit geeky. Not that women can’t be geeky, obviously - I’m just trying to say that I wish there were more women around here … no - no, I don’t mean in THAT way - i just mean … oh, fuck it. Maybe it’s just as well. Thanks anyway to Lynnty - the only “openly” female poster I ever remember. thanks for both her posts - I felt seriously politically correct in February 2001.

The lack of death threats was also VERY dissapointing. Lucky if I counted half a dozen all in - that’s less than one a year. Ye just don’t get the same standard of nutter ye used to. Sad. Or perhaps, after reading my patter, most would-be tough guys felt I was suffering enough already.

The most gutting time was, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, when Paul Le Guen left. I was devestated by the actual event, the way it happened, why it happened and what I thought it meant about the sudden plummet in standards of the support and the club itself. But I was also personally depressed because I had to disagree with so many regulars on the blog. It was a dark time and I’ve rarely felt so strongly about anything in my time as a Bluenose. The blog helped - in the long-run it definitely helped me but it was a harsh process. There were few shoulders to cry on - especially for the length of time I wanted to cry about it, which only really ended when we reached Manchester. But we kept arguing, kept falling out, kept digging each other up - and we never walked away. Rangers fans don’t walk away when times are tough. We get intae it. We pull each other through - even if it has to be by the hair, kicking and screaming.

But times aren’t tough anymore. Losing games here and there will always happen. But, while there will never be 100% agreement between The Bears on how the club is run or by whom - even when the Murray-haters actually backed our Chairman, in his slating of the press, a Murray lapdog like myself steamed intae him - you will know beyond all doubt that there is someone in the Govan Palace on any given matchday who agrees with your POV. Ibrox is often a home to the permanently outraged but I’m getting out of the debating chamber before I become just like them, before I start using a FOOTBALL CLUB as a vehicle for appearing “in the know” or “not fooled by anybody, me!!!”. I’m a Rangers LOVER and you should always know that there are people among the support who save all their altruistic ire and campaigning zeal for Amnesty International or the crisis in Darfur - they give all their blind faith and affection to Rangers. And, throughout all the arguments and attempted demos, Rangers go on.

I’m the opposite of Zarathustra - I never had any wisdom to impart and so I’m going back UP the mountain to see if I can gain some. I’ll continue to slap a wee rant here and there on some of those other silly websites currently on the go who ask for unsolicited rants to boost their advertising income - Sportingo and the like - and I’ll maybe seek a kind of perverse revenge for all the twats on the threads here over the years by getting onto the threads of Follow Follow and various Celtic websites and offering absolutely nothing except regurgitated old-hat venom. But mostly I hope I can do something by way of a book or two - something which can make you foks who’ve supported this site with such humour, compassion, friendship and typographical perfection, as proud of me as I have been of you. Something which can help us all feel even prouder of Rangers. Possible? Possible to feel prouder of The Teds than we do right now? Mmmmm …

If I make a fortune - if I become the JK Rowling of Rangers writing then the first thing I’ll do is give up the shitty day job which pays the shitty bills and I’ll restart this blog. I hate that I have to give up something I LOVE yet must continue to do something I hate - the 9-5 grind - in order to do something ELSE I will love to do. But that’s life. If any delusional millionaires wanted to offer me dough to do this blog full time then the “purity” (whatever that is) would be instantly compromised. Thix is NOT Celtic Quick News - I have no secret tie-ups with the club or subjugation to any editorial remit decided by whoever’s paying for the graphics (that’s why there’s no graphics but - hey - I’m sure Nietzsche HATED graphics). When Sir David Murray’s glorious tenure does eventually end and it all goes tits up under the new owner then I may be tempted to re-start the blog just to say “I FUCKING TOLD YE THIS WOULD HAPPEN!!!” But I’m long enough in the tooth and fat enough in the stomach to know that once you stop something as intense as this blog has been for me, you never go back. Yer body and soul has been so affected by it that they know ye have to move on - even if yer brain doesn’t.

So, you remember where you were when Gerry left the Spice Girls, when Take That broke up, when Kennedy was shot. Now you’ll always remember where you were the day Fat Eck announced his blogging retirement.

… chances are you were on the computer.

Every competitive Rangers game - and most of the friendlies - in the last eight years has been “retorted” on by my fat self, and that’s just the spine of the thing: Ranging from 600 to 10,000 words-a-piece, there’s been around 1,500 individual rants with the Fat Eck byline And it’s been a fucking pleasure.

We were Blog of the Month in When Saturday Comes - once! - and I want to say a huge THANKS to all the punters who nominated this blog and voted for it in the recent Football Census polls. Top ten in Britain - not bad! If only they’d judged it on quality of comments left by visitors to the site - we’d have been in the top nine, easy!

I dedicate this site, this blog, all those millions of Red, White and Blue words to FOOTBALL LOVERS everywhere. No matter your team. NO MATTER. Those who love the banter and want to talk tactics and need to see the action. If you love the game and love your club - if you hate to hate and feel the joy - this last eight years was for you. Thanks for sharing, thanks for reading my blether.

Alistair Cooke said he’d continue doing his “Letter From America” til the day he died. When he finally decided to retire from the BBC, and sent his last broadcast out from New York, he died two weeks later! Okay, he was 95 years old and his stuff wisnae a lot of rambling pish but, nevertheless, I’m worried by the precedent.

Last post ever this coming Sunday, troops - and that’ll be ALL ABOUT THE GAME because this blog is all about The Rangers - maybe after this next game we’ll ALL want to die, eh??!!

Ever the optimist!

Always a Bluenose.

Eternally grateful.

Aye Ready.

Aye Yours,

Fat Eck.

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Let’s go home, Debbie.,” an entry on FatEck.co.uk

Published:
08.27.08 / 9pm
Category:
News