I would like to begin my article this week with a minute’s silence, please, which I would enjoin you to observe respectfully and without feeling the need to chant obscenities. This particular minute’s silence is in respect of the minute’s silence which was not observed appropriately by some football supporters last weekend. That minute’s silence, held before the Spurs versus Chelsea FA Cup semi-final, was ordained to commemorate the deaths of the 96 Liverpool fans who perished at the Hillsborough football ground 23 years ago, and also an Italian footballer who died during the week.
I am not sure how those observing the silence were expected to divvy up the minute; properly speaking, poor old Piermarino Morosini, who suffered a heart attack while playing, would receive only 0.619 of a second, the most fleeting of half-thoughts. Nobody knew who the chap was, so perhaps that is as well. But perhaps, instead, everyone was supposed to remember all the people who had died simultaneously, all 97 of them — along with anyone else who had died since 1989, or had become very ill, or was feeling a bit peaky but was in some way associated with the city of Liverpool. A minute’s silence for everything, for existence and its inevitable ending.
This slightly fascistic, and in the main confected, grief observation business has become a national obsession — but there is something (unfairly, as we shall see) stereotypically Scouse about it, at least in the reaction to those who fail to observe each hastily arranged commemoration as the current fashion dictates. The psychotic bullying, the perpetual sense of victimhood, the self-righteousness, the bizarre, disembodied blubbing. There has been a minute’s silence at football grounds pretty much every week for the last six months, incidentally.
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