Breaking The Silence

You don't have to possess the observational skills of a native American tracker to have noticed that some time has passed between this sentence and the one previous to it was posted on the blog you're reading now.  Quite a considerable bit of time in fact.  471 days to be especially precise.

Why has it been so long? Well, that's a question which doesn't really have a short answer but I'm going to keep it as brief as possible by listing the two main reasons why it has been so quiet around these parts.

First of all I haven't seen Mossley play since their win over Osset Albion back in September of 2011, the topic of my last posting one year, three months and two weeks ago. Actually that's not strictly true. I did see a small number of games around the turn of the year but a mixture of both apathy and the fact that most of them weren't worth putting finger to keyboard for (a goalless draw with Clitheroe being a particularly low, low point) meant you didn't read about them on here.  That of course leads to the question as to why I haven't seen the club I've supported for over three decades play for almost twelve months, to which the answer is: circumstance.

On a personal level last year was bad.  This year was worse and the way things are going at the moment it's highly likely that I'll have to resort to looking in a thesaurus to come up with a suitable adjective to describe 2013.  One of the consequences of this current predicament is the 'financial pinch' and something had to give.  The something in my case was football.  I'd like to say it was a tough decision to make but the truth is it wasn't. When it comes down to priorities in life, unless you make your livelihood from the sport, football is much closer to the bottom than the top of the list.

And that's why this blog has been in hibernation for the time it has.  When you run a website about watching football it's hard to produce content when you don't see any at all.  There are a few other things, mainly to do with the game itself, which had an effect on my decision to move the importance of attending football matches down a few levels in my life but as I'm going to stick to my intention for once to keep a posting brief, they can wait for another day to be explained.  Besides, compared to the reasons outlined in the previous two paragraphs they're tiny almost to the point of microscopic.

Anyway Mossley seem to be doing rather well in my absence and in case there's a correlation between my non-attendance and the club sitting four points clear at the top of the Evo-Stik NPL First Division North table, as they are at the time of writing, I'm probably doing more good staying away than turning up and possibly jinxing their season.

So until there's a change for the better in my circumstances my appearances at Seel Park are going to be hovering between none and irregular (most likely the former of the two) for the foreseeable future.  This does mean that new match reports aren't going to be showing up on Mossley80 for a good while longer yet.

However, as I hate the fact that I've neglected this little part of my life for so long I will at some point in the new year be updating it on a regular-ish basis again.  In lieu of my ramblings about the Lilywhites ongoing trials and triumphs on home soil though other subjects will be covered.  It might be football, it might be something else.  It might even be football and something else; the decision on what form the content will take changes regularly but the options are slowly being narrowed down.  All I know is that whatever appears here is likely to be as long-winded and as objectionable to some as my take on matches were but I also hope it's a readable and half-decent diversion at the same time.

Until we meet again then on here in the not-quite-so-far yet not-quite-so-immediate future, I'll end by wishing you all a Happy New Year as we pass inexorably into 2013.