TheNamelessThing.com

The backbone of the firm is the mill-grinder, the praeternatural tight-knit platoon that always surrounds the maps and charts, discussing where and what to do next, in excited voices, strong and dithered for effect 'neath the light of foreign moons. When alien feet patter on the silver cobbles, you feel the stomach ripple and adrenalin fills the receptors deep in the reptilian brain. Where are they? How many are they?

Through the entries and back-ginnels they trot, like rats or sharks, destined to go toe-to-toe with whatever they have to offer. The men. In black, jogging through unfamiliar Manchester Quadrants with grim intent on cold evenings when others are snug in the snug and the dominoes are clacking like the bones of Klingon warlords, fragmented, utilised as playthings for the elders of the pub-bound tribal generations spawned by Manc mischief. So what if you cop for a smarting eye or a kick up the arse? What's important is that they know who they're facing, that they are made to understand the whys and the wherefores of how the cog-wheels work. The night is black; there are too many lights polluting the sky, and too much physical pollution hanging in the air overhead, to afford us any glimpse of the ancient stars burning in their sockets like a mass of jelloid metallic eyes staring from on far, from the distal end of the theatre of the Universe.

The stars are fascinating, and when you've just been knocked out of the FA Cup by shite like Portsmouth, you need them to dream on, to steel your nerves against, like distant calibrators of the spirit. And, yes, Barnsley beat Chelsea, but that doesn't help us, even though the Barnsley lads deserve to win the cup now - they have defeated Liverpool and the southern pretenders - and nobody could ask more of them than that. Portsmouth, on the other hand, are a lot of wankers, and how they won at Old Trafford today I will never know. I can only imagine that some evil warp in the fabric of footballing logic somehow shot through Manchester and bent United out of shape. They hammered Portsmouth, and Mr. Redknapp's ill-disguised smile as he shook hands at the final whistle said it all: Sorry, but I'm glad, and this is a fucking great opportunity to walk in that cunt of a chairman's office first thing Monday morning and ask for a rise. Yes, Mr. Knapper, you can take a well-earned nap tonight and dream of your immortality in the pathetic Portsmouth bollocks machine, but you know it was undeserved and you know you're not going to win it. Barnsley are.

Sometimes, when I walk under the black sky, sprayed as it is with glorious stars, I gaze upward and smell the eternity above me. The stench of organic compounds surrounds our little orb, and we are suspended amid a teeming tendril loaded with life of every description. They are here, and they know that we know. But there's nothing we can do, but shop for furniture and save for our holidays. Only the mill-grinder will ever dare to seek them out and do battle. The backbone of the firm.