Arsenal

Back in the day, when I was a young ILB, my regular source of erections was my Gran's TV. Gran, who lived in the same house as us until quite recently, is a keen sports fan - which is unlikely for an 88-year-old Scottish lady in a wheelchair, but she is - and for one of her birthdays, although I can't remember which, we decided to get her cable TV for her lounge (our lounge was upstairs; hers, down), so she could watch even more sports. This was good in theory, except we could only do so when we'd surgically detached my sister from the Cartoon Network. I even hogged Sky One myself when there were new episodes of Pokémon up for grabs.

But when I hit about 12, Gran's cable TV became a resource for soft porn, and soft porn only. Back then, I was kind of aware that watching soft porn was wrong. I was, I reasoned, under 18, and shouldn't have been watching this stuff. Because I was also a Spice Girls fan at the time, I had this routine that I would flick back and forth between the soft porn channels and The Box, and Viva Forever would "release me", allowing me to stop seeking sexual arousal and go to bed. Hey, it's a sad song, shut up.

I kept flicking between softcore and music channels, even when I wasn't looking to be released from my thrall, but this time because my mother had told me once that it might be possible to tell which channels you were watching the most (it wasn't), so I used the "last" button creatively to flick between things, assuming that this would fool the channels into thinking I was watching something else.

And therefore, any mention of Arsenal Football Club makes me think of soft porn.

You're confused, I can tell. Well, having grown up in a Tottenham-supporting family (both Dad and Gran are supporters of Spurs, and I suppose so am I, in a passive way... ergo: I'd like them to win, but I don't give a fuck if they don't), Arsenal wasn't often mentioned. My cousin, who's living here now, actually works for Arsenal, so it's got more prominence in the house... well, I think it does. I don't care about football in any way so I don't know. But what I do know about Arsenal is that before a cup final match against... someone else, I don't know what either... is that they released a version of Hot Stuff with genuinely inspired lyrics, such as this wonder:

I want to see the Arsenal playing some hot stuff... Come on, the Arsenal.

Marvellous.

But because of my massive amount of reliance on the "last" button, any occurrences of the track (only labelled "Arsenal FC - Hot Stuff", no album or producer or artist or anything) would be interspersed with channels which, I knew, played soft porn after 10pm, and therefore Arsenal's "cover" was sometimes punctuated with sex scenes, to that effect - appropriate, perhaps, for Hot Stuff... just not so much for a football team.

I still know which one I prefer, too.