When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?
My interest in football is close to zero hovering around minus two or maybe minus one if I am pretending because a
friend likes it. However, when I watched Derby's Jamie Thrasivoulou on facebook performing his anthemic poem "We Are Derby"
to a Derby County crowd of 33,000 I was impressed. So much so I decided to copy him or at least write my own non-football
related version for Leicester. It's the first poem in this booklet. Thanks Jamie and if you want to read Jamie's original
you can buy his book "Our Man" on Amazon which has loads of other great work in it.
One of the things I particularly appreciated about Jamie's poem "We Are Derby" is how it gave the people of Derby a
shared sense of identity referencing workplaces and local heroes as well as football managers. This is refreshing in
a world where we are encouraged to claim our identity by the brands we consume. A world where we are not where we
work or socialise but what brands we talk about when we are there. We regularly hear people utter such statements
as "I am an iPhone person" as if defines who they are and the tragedy is that it often does.
It makes what I see as the raw primitive nature of a football crowd seem desirable in comparison and offering at least
hope of some kind of meaning to the human race.
The prose part of "We Are Leicester" was actually written 12 years ago in the garden of The Pump and Tap,
Braunstone Gate. It is the opening passage of "Taking the Dolphin out of the Spin Dryer" which I was writing
at the time. The title? It was a very weird dream. In the dream I opened my spin dryer to a poor gasping
dolphin with skin a wrinkled dehydrated mess. It looked up at me pleadingly and I resuscitated it by pouring
pints of water over it. Then I woke up.