It has been an eventful Summer. No, not all the other footy business – I’ll come to that later.

It has been an interesting time for assessing Summer Twats throughout continental Europe and beyond. Sadly I must report the British Isles (that is, England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales) have completely surrendered in the battle for good – nay, reasonable – dress sense. The battle is lost. Summer Twats prevail throughout Blighty and amongst the Celts, plastic and otherwise. I would say it is a sobering thought but the adverb couldn’t be more inappropriate. Usually, said divvies are pissed out of their brains too. Add in a rolling fat gut and the rest of the ugly aesthetics and you have the worst visual-oral disaster since Punk Rock projected its first stream of saliva.

But of course there are humorous if trivial compensations to be had. One of them is to compile a descending order of ugliness. Yes, I know this is almost entirely subjective. (And just to confirm this – if you don’t like my opinions, well, fuck you, I hope it hurts.) But so what? Someone has to make a stand against these seedy, smelly beasts of Generation X. They aren’t revolutionaries, they are retrogressive Neanderthals with the dress sense of an aard vark, the table manners of a gruntpig, the halitosis of a thirsty camel and the intellect of a rabid moth. They should be dangled over a cliff by their bare ankles and made to suffer badly before being dropped square on their empty skull on the sea-washed rocks below. If ethnic cleansing was ever to become acceptable then we should start with Summer Twats. And cull them mercilessly. However, since we are civilised we must settle for taking the piss therefrom.

Early in the Summer I noticed one of them walking in the rain. This had a few promising offsets. One of them was, it almost drowned the insensate thick bastard. The other was, it kept the smell to the minimum as long as he stayed more than three metres away. Still, he was only Bog Standard Summer Twat. Which meant he was wearing sandals without socks and no tie-up bobbles dangling from the ends of his stupid three-quarter khaki kecks. But he had POCKETS! near the bottom of his useless culottes. Just when you finished shaking your head and giggling along came a fashion mutant of the same genre. This one had the addition of BLACK SOCKS! and kecks pockets with FLAPS! and TIE-UPS! The next variation had SOMETHING BULGING IN THE POCKETS! The road to hell was open and crowded with pilgrims. My sides were aching but still I had seen nothing. Plainly, Bog Standard is now considered conservative. A Californian I know turned up with KECKS IN STRIPES OF DIFFERENT COLOURS! His companion was wearing identical kit with WHITE BOBBY-SOX IN OPEN TOED SANDALS! An Oz friend had a tee shirt with FUCK YOU POMMIES! written across his tits and had rings through his nose and eyebrow. I almost fled to the hills shouting, “Kamerad! Kamerad!”

I make none of this up. I am as righteously horrified as you are. I blame the unprincipled mad Yanks and Ozzies, particularly the latter. Things have never been the same since we handed the colonies back. The Mother Country must reassert itself over its misguided, unruly offspring. Tough love is required or we will sink under a tidal wave of irresponsible, uniform colonial ugliness. Maybe we could start with taxation without representation and penal colonies. Or we could do a Clockwork Orange on the culprits. We owe it to Civilization, Kenneth Clarke, Noam Chomsky, Stanley Kubrick, Karl Marx, Buster Keaton, Umberto Eco, Eric Morecambe and Leonardo da Vinci to ensure humanity progresses in the way these great men would want. This year must see the Last of the Summer Twats. Enough is enough. As if.

Meanwhile, our beloved club has once again had to withstand contretemps. This time from Paul Gregg’s temporary abandonment of his role as the Invisible Man, and the usual uncomprehending apocalyptic tripe from the tiny minority Melledrew Tendency. This of course was as symptomatic of the modern game as the takeover shenanigans at Old Trafford and analfield, the Paddy Vieira Arsenal-Real Madrid hypocrisy, the Hawarden Terror to Real/Gerrard NOT to Chelsea, Wayne Rooney’s future, Villa’s empty war chest, Bolton flirting with economic disaster, and so on and so forth. We’ve all been here before, one way or another. You would think, wouldn’t you, some fans would learn how to make a reasonable judgement by now. Alas, no. A hefty minority of the fans have become every bit as twisted as those spivs who run the game temporarily. This will continue for as long as the guilty parties keep their heads buried in the sand. Nothing new there, then.

We’ll see where Bill Kenwright’s eve-of-season proposed financial deal takes us when we get a chance to view the details. The proposals are part – only PART – of the predictions I made last May, indeed at the end of last season. None of which required the mysticism of Nostradamus or the mind of Johnny van Neumann. All you have to do is pay due attention and absorb available information. And I suggest you stop listening to the thick dopes in the Melledrew Tendency, except to take maximum mickey.

Of course, the absurd loons in the Melledrew Tendency have already shot themselves through one collective foot and then nailed it to the floor and accordingly run in circles because of earlier unconditional acceptance of Paul Gregg’s back-of-envelope empty promises. Which “logic” demands there must perforce be acceptance of Bill Kenwright’s proposal since, subject to, erm, “due diligence,” means he has – for the moment – wiped the floor with dear Paul. Be interesting to see if Paul’s unnamed backers are now willing to supplement the new proposals. Shouldn’t be hard, should it, not with supposedly £20 mill already on the table? No? Oh well.

I have to say I find the Tendency’s near disappearance up its own anal canal highly amusing. I hope Paul hasn’t yet paid the bills of that PR company in Mathew Street; jaysus, but did THEY do a lousy job. But there is much, much more to come in the boardroom bun-fight. It will only get serious when we get to the introduction of custard pies as ammunition, or if property developer pinky Steve Morgan tries to buys us out as well as the analfielders.

Moyesy’s job has been made so difficult you wonder why he wants to stay. Certainly his patience is not inexhaustible and nobody could blame him if he runs out of it rather abruptly. He hasn’t been able to get the players he requires and it looks very much as though we are in for a truly parlous season. If things go really badly he might be on his way before the season ends, possibly as eventual successor to Ferguson at Old Trafford. It would be a tragedy for us but who in their right mind could criticise him? Human flesh and blood can only take so much. I suspect he already has given as much as anyone can. I hope we get the opportunity to see what he can really do with his own players and team, the ones he would prefer, all things being equal – which they never are.

See, there’s the rub. Our scientists call this “synchronicity.” Well, that’s what we pay them for: to tell us nobody has a fucking clue what’s going on, but, hey look! here’s the formula for entropy. But some admit this more readily and sensibly than others. The latter are easily identified by the smile of reason. You’ll find it on Voltaire’s statue in Paris too. Go look.

We can grumble or delight all we like in the players who have come and gone. Theoretically the newcomers are slightly less experienced than the departed. Which would indicate even more difficulties, which in turn means relegation if taken to its logical conclusion. On the other hand they will be Moyes buys, aided by Bill Kenwright’s rattling of the kids’ piggy banks. It might just be that that will be the crucial centre of the season, the single most important thing that gets us to relative safety, the Moyes Factor. After all, only one of his buys has let us down so far, but was the return of The Ears really a Moyes choice? Manager and players have both said lessons have been learned and they are determined to correct the “errors” of last season. Well, veteran fans will know after the first five matches or so.

Speaking of which, the very first match at home to Arsenal was perhaps the biggest test of all. Last season of course they became immortal champions when they not only won in magnificent style but also didn’t lose at all in the championship. It was a truly incredible achievement, perhaps never to be repeated. If you compared the squads and individual players you either stopped yourself through hysterical laughter or had a nervous breakdown. Or went into it with your chin up, whistling “Dixie.” Since everything was in theory already lost you surely had nothing left to do but go over the top armed only with a swagger stick. I figured anything less than a 3-0 scoreline would be a moral victory.

Well, we got massacred by a team on a different planet. Even without some of their best players. There’s no point picking out individual players of ours for criticism because The Gooners could have won by a few more and still not broke into a sweat. Relatively, we had maybe ten good minutes at the start and again after the substitutions in the second. And that was it so far as we were concerned, though our second half compensatory goal was neat enough. Obviously the clearing-out process must continue even if it takes us down into the next division. Friends, I’m talking cauterising FIRE here. The guilty old guard from last season have to go, and go soon, at almost whatever the cost. Mind you, that might give the Melledrew Tendency a real problem since many of the players they whine about have gone or will go. What then? More whining?

Our only feelgood factor was once again Joey Yobo who had a superb game against Henry, whose contributions only improved when he drifted wide out of Joey’s clutches. For the rest, varying levels of mediocrity and just plain garbage rendered the season visage the bleakest I have ever known. This time there may well be no miracle and it wouldn’t do to mislead anyone that there will.

Around me in the Lower Street End there were rows of empty seats and four of last season’s long term regulars appear not to have renewed their season tickets. Sadly for us regulars some of the replacements are utter knobheads. One of them confirmed it with a classic, “They’re onny winnin’ ‘cause we aren’t gettin’ stuck in.” Actually, we WERE getting stuck in. It’s just that Arsenal were gone by the time we got there. Great teams are like that – as we once were, two hundred years ago – because they don’t wait around and make you do all the work.

The real question is whether we can avoid relegation this season. Too many of our fans are unwilling to even consider the possibility without taking into account the increased baggage we carry on and off the field. This time it’s quite different. Which means we can do without the kind of knobhead behaviour not only at the match but elsewhere amongst a tiny minority of fans. Only those who can genuinely cope with adversity are required. The anti-everything hysterics can do us all favour be fucking off altogether. They aren’t wanted.

Next week, Crystal Palace. Mark appeared at half time to show off proud photographs of his and the lovely Anna’s new Evertonian addition. He said, “The season really starts next week.” How true. But for genuine Evertonians like him the season is of course perpetual.

That is, as in “always.”