As I said last year<\/a>, that old Bob Marley song kept going round and round my head during the darkest days of Sandra’s illness. What I didn’t say then was how it came into my head, which also why it’s back now. I hate to admit it, but it’s all Ajax’s fault.\n<\/p>\n\nI’m not an Ajax fan even if I live in Amsterdam, as I long ago gave my loyalty to Feijenoord, though for most part this has been academic, as I never followed football all that much other than during European or World championships. But when Sandra got ill and kept being ill, football was one of the things I fled into, something that I could absorb myself in, something that in the long run doesn’t really matter, but which can get me worked up enough not to think too much about what could happen; perhaps most importantly, football was and is something that doesn’t remind me of Sandra, something I don’t associate with her. And so I found myself watching games I never would’ve in normal times, including Ajax playing European matches. Which meant, as in the video above, hearing Ajax supporters singing their songs, of which “Three Little Birds” is a particulate favourite of theirs and it burned itself in my mind, damn them.\n<\/p>\n
\nThen of course it was a song that embodied a sort of slightly cynical optimism to me; now it just reminds me of better times and I can’t help but get a bit choked up hearing it. So much for finding escape in football…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I said last year, that old Bob Marley song kept going round and round my head during the darkest days of Sandra’s illness. What I didn’t say then was how it came into my head, which also why it’s back now. I hate to admit it, but it’s all Ajax’s fault. I’m not an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[333,27,242],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-football","category-posts-interesting-only-to-me","category-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}