Categories: football
Tags: Football
Date: 21 September 2009 10:45:07
Today is the memorial service at the cathedral for Bobby Robson. It is an invite only affair and Palace Green is pretty much sealed off at the moment.
It was surreal needing to pop into the nearest appropriate venue to do some photocopying / printing and finding that I was entering a security zone. The area is normally bustling with tourists, students and wandering clergy but today it is media types and security and a strange kind of suspension of reality. The world heritage site currently has outside broadcast units from all the major media providers parked on there and the green is set up for celebrities to be interviewed in the rain.
I wish I had a camera; the juxstaposition between media and religion (media trailers and cathedral) would make a wonderful photo, representative of where society is in late modernity.
As it is I will sit and work I will be aware that those who go to the service are going to celebrate / remember the life of a man whom I greatly admired as a kid growing up in Tractorland. These are the people who knew and worked with him, they are the people for whom Sir Bobby was more than a celebrity figure, he was their friend and often, I guess, mentor.