Stay Close (Netflix series) MAJOR SPOILER ALERT! 

Several friends contacted me this week. They felt, bless them, they needed to get in touch to ask me whether I was still standing by him. There was no need to name names, we all knew they meant Boris. 

My answers boiled down to something along the lines of, somebody has to, and it looks like it’s me. 

I am acutely aware that soon, I might be the last woman standing. Or perhaps Priti and I, long after Carrie leaves. 

But I am worried.  

Horoscope writers must be loving this week’s developments; ‘Days ahead not looking good for you, if your name is Andrew or Boris’.

I am not keen on conspiracy theories, but this current slow burning attack on the PM feels well planned and premeditated. Somebody has been gathering ammunition, waiting to pounce, and this week, pounce they certainly did. My money is on Cummings, the creepy king maker, but I cannot rule out Gove the career backstabber, Theresa May hellbent on revenge, or even the smooth operator, prince of furlough, Rishi Sunak.   

Cummings is the most likely candidate because he knows where all the bodies are buried, which means he can manipulate the situation any way he pleases. Not unlike the lovely Lorraine and her impressive collection of corpses in Stay Close. 

One of my friends who got in touch suggested that it might be the latest Mrs Johnson herself doing the dirty on her husband, as she decided  enough was enough and longed for a proper family life. Sweet and romantic as this idea is, I suspect she prefers to be married to the PM, rather than to an ageing, overweight dishevelled has-been he might become in not very distant future.

Why do I still stand by him?

I have several answers, all of them shallow and disappointing to everybody who feels genuine anger and moral outrage right now.

One reason for my ongoing loyalty might be that in movies, I often side with a villain. I am willing the script writers to allow the serial killer to get away with it, I cheered Hannibal Lecter on. Just something I do.

Another explanation might be my own moral decrepitude, but, I hasten to add that my sympathy does not extend to Prince Andrew. My dodgy morality is still kind of selective, it favours cannibal killers and rule breaking Tory Prime Ministers, but draws the line a jowly royal perverts.  

Joking aside, briefly, the real reason for my hanging on is that whatever happens immediately after Boris, politics will return to its dire dullness, which it was plagued by pre-Boris. His trademark effervescent enthusiasm, confidence  and optimism will be hard to replace. Nobody does buoyant belief in Britain like he does. No matter who replaces him, it will be a turn towards uninspiring boredom. 

PMQs between Starmer and Hunt? Kill me now.  

Another friend of mine decided to really test my Boris boundaries. She used a cunning what if question to probe what would make me finally abandon him. What if, she said, we were to find out that Boris had been to Jeffrey Epstein’s parties too, would that change my steadfast loyalty to him. That caused me considerable distress. I wish I could un-hear the question. The answer is that in those circumstances my last remaining scraps of decency would kick in, compelling me to ditch Boris, which in turn would create a vacancy for my hero-worship figure.  

This would pose a problem, as I believe we are experiencing a depressing deficit of decent candidates to admire in politics. 

As a diehard Conservative, I have a potential pool of 360 MPs to choose from.

Let’s have a look.

There is Jacob Rees-Mogg, whom I love to bits for his gorgeously Victorian demeanor and a voice to die for. His floccinaucinihilipilification moment alone would have been enough to have earned him my undying devotion, but I do recognise that he comes short. He is perfect for Somerset on a hazy summer day with a glass of cloudy lemonade, and his reclining skills are second to none, but I have to admit, with a heavy heart, that he is not quite suitable for much else.   

Sadly, that’s it. Nobody else among the current MP cohort makes me feel in the slightest way excited about politics. The good news is that after Boris goes, because I do fear his days are numbered, and it’s a steadily decreasing number, I will refrain from commenting on politics, until another Boris like figure emerges. And that is a promise.

The top two most exciting sporting events of 2021 were Euros 2020, followed by Tokyo Olympics 2020. 
To an alien visiting Earth for the first time this week, the above sentence would sound absurd, but to the rest of us it sounds perfectly normal. This says a lot about how far we had come since it all began. 

Back to the two events. At the end of the first one, football very nearly came home, which felt very nearly fantastic. A couple of young players missed the penalties in the final shoot-out,  but it was alright, because one of them had made sure that schoolchildren were being fed during school holidays, so in order to deflect any abuse hurled at the players in the immediate aftermath of the penalties they had missed, we all decorated our social media profiles with temporary frames declaring we stood firmly with the three lions. That was nice. Were we becoming nicer in the summer of 2021? Some of us? Answers on postcards, please.

I do not remember much of the Olympics, except a very young child winning, or was it nearly winning, a skateboarding competition and Tom Daly knitting a Union Jack sock for his medal. 

What else happened? Meghan Markle gave an interview on Oprah in April, or was it June? Luckily for Meghan, somebody made a short video parody of it, which showed a bird pooping on her dress moments before the interview, which made Meghan tearful. Luckily, because there is now a good chance that in a couple of years time this might be the only thing people will still find worth remembering about that ghastly interview.   

Traditional spring events got delayed until the autumn, which meant both the London Marathon and the Chelsea Flower Show took place in October. Did Wimbledon happen at all? Ascot? Emma Raducanu won US Open, so that must have happened, but was it US Open 2020 or US Open 2021? I have no idea. 

It was hard to keep up with what was going ahead and what wasn’t. Weeks and months passed without a single lasting impression, and it all felt like a repeat of 2020, except schools stayed open. I never thought the day would come when I welcomed the sight of teenagers blocking the pavements at 3pm again, but welcome them I did, as they helped to restore a veneer of normality to the world. With bus stops, and top decks of buses, train stations, corner shops, and supermarkets reclaimed once again by noisy packs of children and teenagers, you could have been forgiven for thinking it was 2019 or another carefree year from the BC (Before Covid) era. 

2021 turned out to be the second year in a row when my passport did not see the light of day. We chose Scottish staycation for our main family holiday, which meant we not only stayed away from the stresses of tests to release and passenger locator forms, but significantly reduced our risk of premature aging due to sun damage at the same time. 

Meeting up with friends continued to feel like a guilty pleasure in 2021. Do we hug, do we fist bump, do we awkwardly raise hands in robotic hellos? Hugging a friend after a long absence felt like a defiance, immediately followed by sadness that it should feel that way. Vaccine status was nearly always mentioned at some point during those rare encounters, somewhere between reciting a list of cancelled plans and pondering the uncertainty of just about everything.

Today, as I prepare to say goodbye to the low key non-eventful 2021, in a low key non-event in my living room, I am allowing myself to hope that we will not see too many 2020 flashbacks in 2022, and will dare to dream of the return to the old normal.

Happy New Year!  

My first Christmas in the UK ended up being a surreal event. I worked as a nanny in Muswell Hill at the time (book plug number one: the story of my nannying days features in the book), but my employers made it crystal clear that they expected me to make myself scarce from Christmas Eve until the New Year, so as not to spoil their picture-perfect family festivities with my strong Eastern European accent, my ghastly jumble sale clothing range and my general foreign weirdness.

My options were limited. Most of my Polish friends from Poland went back to Poland for Christmas, which I didn’t want to risk, as there was no guarantee I would be allowed back into the UK in January, or, to be more accurate, I knew that there was precisely zero chance of me returning to the UK in January, because I would have needed to secure another invitation, make a few trips to the British Consulate in Warsaw and convince the consulate worker that although I had overstayed the previous 6 months visa, I had no intention of overstaying again. (book plug number 2: I describe the whole process in detail in the book). So no, I wasn’t going back to Poland for Christmas. My friends from Westminster Cathedral Young Catholics group (you guessed it, book plug number 3, I write about them in the book), liked me well enough as an occasional badminton partner, but not sufficiently to invite me to spend Christmas with their families.

York University Natives came to my rescue once more (final book plug: York Natives feature in the book, naturally). One of them, Helen, charitably arranged for me to stay with her boyfriend’s sister’s American boyfriend at an… American army base, somewhere in Kent. She apologised for not being able to invite me to her parents’ house, as her family relations were strained enough without bringing an awkward, socially inept me into the equation. She didn’t say any of it aloud, the tactful person as she was. I cannot remember the exact location of the barracks, and I didn’t think it necessary to jot it down in my 1988 diary, so the name of the place is now forever lost to me in the murky clouds of time. It might have been Surrey, or one of the Sussexes.

The accommodation was depressingly bare and basic. Every room was packed with a mix of Americans and the rest of us, a gathering of misfits and lost souls that somebody took pity on. Christmas Day was spent trying to cook an enormous turkey in the comically small oven, and then carving it with an electric saw. Apart from the badly undercooked turkey, the food offering was markedly modest. Somebody had an idea to baste the worryingly pale looking bird in peanut butter and jelly (what else).

There was a lot of religion throughout the day. We celebrated the birth of Baby Jesus as if it were the one and only time He was going to be born in our lifetime.

As it turned out, Helen’s boyfriend’s sister’s American boyfriend’s girlfriend was expecting him to propose to her on Christmas Day. When the boyfriend got drunk beyond salvation and fell asleep by 5pm, his girlfriend became morose beyond reason. The last droplets of Christmas spirit, if ever there was any to begin with, evaporated quietly into the cold damp air around the barracks.

The moment I saw Helen’s car pull over outside on Boxing Day morning to take me away from the Kent or Surrey barracks, remains one of the happiest memories of my life, despite the fact that I have been rather spoilt in my choice of happy memories ever since.

Also known as Dick and Dom do Croydon!

A rare outing for all five of us together, but such was the pull of Dick and Dom in da house that we jumped on a 468 in unison, and off we went to Ashcroft Theatre at Fairfield Halls, Croydon, to watch Beauty and the Beast panto.

In our defence, we were given the tickets practically for free, interval ice-cream included, a couple of months ago, and it sounded like a lovely idea for a cosy family pre-Christmas day out at the time.

What can I say. I have seen better pantos. In fact, I am not sure if I ever saw a worse one, but perhaps I was expecting too much. It was never going to be Dawn French at the Palladium, it was always going to be Dick and Dom in Croydon. Dick himself acted as if he’d rather be anywhere else than Croydon. I am not a fan of the place, but when the Croydon jokes kept coming, even I thought they were laying it on a bit thick. Some people have no choice but to live there.

Dom was putting much more of an effort into his moves, he didn’t seem to mind making a fool of himself in Croydon. I mean, he was being paid to do so after all. They did the bogies routine, several times, and we even ended up singing ‘My bogies lie over the ocean, my bogies lie over the sea’. Yes, really.

The whole thing quickly turned into a Dick and Dom show. The Belle and the beast story persevered nevertheless, bland and irrelevant as it was. Gaston was weirdly renamed Benedict. I felt sorry for him a couple of times, as the audience made a big show of disliking him, and the booing went on awkwardly long each time he made an appearance. I was willing the actor to call it a day and walk out, because that might have made the show actually exciting, and worth talking about, but he remained politely bemused by the rudeness piled up on his character and waited patiently for the booing to subside.

This panto was clearly pitched at young audience, which was probably why I wasn’t loving it as much as I was hoping to, especially after being starved of theatre performances for the last 18 months.
The jokes were bad, but not so bad as to become good. You know the comedy is thin on the ground when a ‘madeira cake’ joke scores the biggest laughs.

To finish off our Croydon Christmas extravaganza, we went to a recently opened Wendy’s for a McDonald’s experience by a different name. My husband got a bit nostalgic there, as he had some fond memories of Wendy’s from his time in the US, many moons ago, so it wasn’t all bad.

A few days ago I took part in an online book club, where the guest of the day was none less than Jeffrey Archer, an author of some fame and renown, as well as a man followed by controversy, corruption and perjury scandals. Firstly, I would like to say what an unexpectedly warm breath of humanity Jeffrey proved to be. He was brilliantly entertaining throughout, his sense of comedy and situational humour was great, he came across as a skilled raconteur and conversationalist. He gave the book club host, who happened to be my son, a seemingly hard time, but after an initial shock of how abrupt Jeffrey was with my baby boy, who incidentally turned 27 on the day, I quickly realised that it was all done in the spirit of friendly banter in anticipation of fast approaching season of good will to all mankind.  

Jeffrey took questions from the audience for an hour, and did his best to answer them all at length, no matter how disjointed and random some of them were. Answering one of the questions, about the key to his literary success, he said, ‘write about what you know’. Nothing ground-breaking here, this piece of advice gets bandied about with such other pearls of writing wisdom as ‘make sure you do your research’ and ‘avoid dangling participles’ at every creative writing course in the land. And yet, somehow, for whatever reason, these cliched words sounded more profound to me than they would have done, had they not been spoken during my son’s book club, and had I not been, in fact, a great fan of Jeffrey’s storytelling for decades. The truth is, I read all his novels and short stories, some of them more than once. His books have accompanied me at many Mediterranean beaches over the years, so whatever the reason, the ‘write about what you know’ stayed with me, and I have been mulling over them since Thursday evening.  

It is easy for Jeffrey to follow his own advice and write about what he knows, because as far as I know, the things he knows read like a table of contents of a great novel, before he commits a single word to paper. He knows about being a long-term politician, winning an election to become an MP at an early age, becoming a deputy party chairman, being declared bankrupt, running for the post of the mayor of London, being a defendant in not one but two high profile trials, as well as working as an amateur auctioneer, and serving a long prison sentence.

What do I know about? An attempt to answer this question did not make for a comfortable journey of self-discovery. After some seriously intense navel gazing, head scratching and knuckle-cracking, I came to a painful realisation that, contrasted with Jeffrey’s capacious expertise, what I know about amounts to very little. What’s worse, none of it is of any significance or the slightest interest to anybody outside my closest family and friends, and even they tend to switch off half way through most of my stories, and then there are some stories which sound exciting to me and me alone, so I spare anybody else the agonising torture of listening to them.

Every time I think that I know quite a bit about something, I quickly discover there are people who know much more about it and in much more depth. Which means, the only thing I can safely say is that I know a little about a lot of things. I know a little about travelling, but much less than a lot of other people who know seriously huge amount about travelling. I know a little about film, but much less than a lot of people who know much more about film. I know a little about musical theatre, but, yep, you guessed it. There are people who can converse for hours about nuanced differences between Alfie Boe and John Owen-Jones performances as Jean Valjean, and which role was Lea Salonga most suited for during her career, and why, and this leaves me looking like an amateur, who likes to listen to a nicely delivered tune.

I know a few practical everyday things, which are not a good writing material. I know how to do gentle yoga, how to tidy the kitchen, soft-boil and egg, and how to ice-skate, none of them very well, mind you.

One thing I know quite a lot about, if I am not being unnecessarily modest, is court interpreting, and the intricacies of criminal and family law proceedings. The trouble is, I already wrote a book about it, and despite my best spamming efforts on Facebook and LinkedIn, it didn’t make a bestseller list and no movie deals were forthcoming, even though I still believe that Helena Bonham Carter would make the role of an intrepid Polish interpreter her best yet.  

The thing I know most about is children. My own children are the best thing that ever happened and keeps happening to me. Other people’s children are a different story, and on the whole they are greatly overrated. I also know that as soon as you give birth to three children, you will not have a dull moment for the rest of your life, or at the very least for the first twenty five years of their lives.

Impromptu conversations with teenagers are among life’s most precious moments, the perfect gems of absurdity and nonsense. Every parent goes through a multitude of such exchanges every week. This one took place about an hour ago.

– What are you watching?
– You don’t want to know. 
– I do want to know. 
– ‘Love hard’ 
– You were right, I didn’t want to know. 
– I did warn you, and now you know it, you cannot unknow it. Next time, take my word for it. 
– I’ll do my best.

This concludes part one of my Jeffrey Archer school of writing blog piece. I should probably check the copyrights issues with his agent before I come back with part two, so please do not hold your breath. I am a little concerned that what I am doing here might be akin to making the film, Being John Malkovich, without checking with John Malkovich, only on a such infinitesimally smaller scale as to become not comparable at all. 

Post-Brexit, post-pandemic public service interpreting offers a peeking Tom’s perspective on how the other half lives. In this case, the down in the dumps, half-forgotten half. Most GP consultations, most Universal Credit job coach interviews, PIP health assessments are still taking place over the phone.  A three way conversation with a telephone interpreter has never been a fully satisfactory way of conducting certain types of difficult conversations, such as mental health therapy sessions, or conveying unhappy medical news. Service providers, service users and interpreters alike, we all have long resigned ourselves to this unsatisfactory reality of how non English speakers access public services. ‘It is what it is’ has become our mantra. 

Today, I am assisting a homeless man who is speaking to a homeless charity, or rather the man is shouting and screaming his frustration down the phone towards his support worker who has called to check on him, because she is worrying about the state of his mental health. At the start of the conversation, she informed him in a monotone dispassionate voice, that she had completed  all the necessary data security training and all his details will be kept confidential unless, during the course of the conversation, he discloses something which would indicate that either he or somebody else is in immediate danger of harm, in which case confidentiality rules will no longer apply. 

The man interrupts, ‘Hello, hello? Can you stop sounding like a recording and start speaking to me? I don’t have much time, what do you want? What are you calling me for?’
 – Adam ( not his real name), we have received information that your mental health is a concern, and that you are being suicidal, is that true, are you having thoughts about ending your life? 

– You’ve received information? Wow! From whom? The CIA, the FBI? Do you have me followed? Have you got nothing better to do, I do not have time for this, I had to leave at 7am this morning, so I could get to the Park Place (not real name) soup kitchen by 11, before they stopped serving hot breakfast, and now I am on my way to Croydon (real place, but not the one he really said he was heading to), to use their free showers, I will then go to the Junction for dinner, and then back to the house. By the time I finish today, I will have walked for about 7 hours, because the place I am staying at now has nothing, nothing, nothing at all, I don’t even have a kettle to make coffee, today I had the first hot meal for 3 days, I have nothing, nothing, nothing. I was better off on the streets. In fact, I will return the keys today, and I am out of there. You can offer my bed to another of your projects. 

– Adam, we offered you a food voucher yesterday, but you refused to ..

– No! I am sorry, but I don’t want your food vouchers, I told you before, that stuff is inedible, send it to Afghanistan if you dare, I don’t want it. 

Adam then proceeded to reiterate that he was leaving the accommodation the next day, as he didn’t appreciate the way he was treated there, with nothing to sit on, no cupboard to put his belongings, no cooking facility, no food suitable for human consumption. His rant was erratic and inconsistent to my impartial ear, and it must have been a stuff of nonsense to his support worker. Adam sprinkled his monologue with unexpected eloquence and witticisms, even if they were not matched by logic or reason. Nothing positive could possibly come out of the conversation, but we carried on for close to an hour.   

Is any of this shocking? Not to me, not any more, not after interpreting a hundred similar conversations in the last six months or so. 

Our Scottish staycation proved to be the gift that kept on giving. 

First, a word of advice. If you are planning a short break in Caithness, make sure it is just that; three days is plenty.
Due to my evident inability to grasp the basic rule of ensuring continuity of holiday accommodation, I initially managed to book three nights in Wick, followed by two nights of homelessness in Scottish wilderness, followed by a weekend in St. Andrews. After some frantic last minute messaging, booking.com came through for me, but we ended up with a couple of spare days on our hands in Wick. 

And that’s how we came across Whaligoe Steps. 365 of them, leading all the way to the sea. We spotted them buried deep down among various ‘Top 10 attractions near Wick’.
The steps were hardly going to pose a challenge to us, our calf muscles still bulging after our Ben Nevis climbing triumph less than a week before. 

Whaligoe Steps ended up as one of those memorable experiences that usually happen to other people. 
We parked the car nearby, crossed the A99 at our own risk, and set off looking for the steps. 

A man came out from his garden shed adorned with several sets of antlers and horse shoes, and asked us, ‘are you looking for the steps?’ He then gave us a once over and added, doubtfully,  ‘Do you feel fit enough?’ We grimaced in half-smile. He then kept talking to us for an uninterrupted fifteen minutes or more. He told us he had been working on the steps for the last 25 years. He went into his house, took out a poster size old photograph of the steps and proceeded to describe every single item along the route down to the sea. He introduced himself as Davy. He told us how the Whaligoe got its name. Goe means an inlet, and a dead whale washed up there once.  

He carried on. He told us a story about a group of generously sized Americans who visited a few years ago and how they struggled to climb back up. He didn’t seem to be aware that fat shaming was a bad thing to do. He told us about the time Billy Connelly came round and what a fun and easy going man he was. 
After a suitably long time, we let us go and do the steps. As we walked down, we recognised all the points Davy mentioned in his story. When we came back up, Davy was pottering around his shed again. He asked us how we liked the steps, and continued telling us details about how they had fallen into disrepair and how he and others have been fixing them over the years.

We were standing in the doorway of his house, and an unusually big spanner caught our attention. He noticed that and said that he had more interesting things to show us too. He pulled out an antique looking sword, which he said he’d found  in one of several local abandoned houses many years before.
We all had a go wielding the sword, with some larking around a Scottish flag added for good measure.

For his final trick, Davy offered any of us ‘a hundred pounds in cash’ if any of us managed to ride his bike for the full minute. We all followed him to the shed, and Davy wheeled out a bulky looking bike. Amelia, our ready for anything daughter, had a go a couple of times, but only lasted a couple of seconds each time. I am not sure what it was exactly, which made his bike unusable, but apparently the bike was totally counterintuitive to what we know about cycling, and as you think you will be turning right, the bike turns left and you fall off.

After that we said our goodbyes and were on our way. The Whaligoe Steps Davy is most definitely Caithness’ best kept secret. I don’t mind sharing it here.

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If I hear grade inflation one more time, I will not be held responsible for my actions.  

On Tuesday this week, I drove my older daughter to school, where she ripped open the envelope with her A-level results. Based on what she found in the envelope, she is likely to be labelled as having been awarded unfairly inflated grades. Except, she really wasn’t.

If it were up to me, I would have added an A star in Resilience, Endurance and Determination, and a Distinction in Keeping Her Shit Together to the three straight As she had achieved. 

Earlier this year, when the government announced that the official A-level and GCSE exams were to be cancelled and replaced by teachers’ assessments, my daughter took it in her stride. Her Sixth Form college was among thousands others which decided to place the bar at least as high as any external exam board would have.

Assessment after assessment followed, a piece of previously unscheduled coursework after another piece of previously unscheduled coursework, two sets of mock exams, in the form of pre-PPEs (pre-Pre Public Examinations) followed by PPEs. It was relentless. All this punctuated by periods of self-isolation for the whole year bubble, whenever one of the students tested positive. Key members of teaching staff got sick too, and were not available for weeks at a time. My daughter carried on, setting herself her own deadlines, weekly goals and assignments.

The (cancelled) external end of year exams were replaced by… internal end of year exams. These exams were identical to the pre-Covid ones in everything but the name and level of formality, with added ambiguity and uncertainty as to how exactly they were going to be marked and graded.

My daughter plodded on and persevered. Night after night, throughout autumn, winter, and spring, she was frequently the last one to switch off her lights. We hardly saw her during the weekends, when she was only emerging for food. She worked insanely hard. What’s equally impressive, through all of this, she kept her sense of humour and perspective. She recognised that the challenges she was facing were not the end of the world on the greater scale of things.

She deserves everything she found in that envelope. Also, huge respect for her teachers for recognising that.

On Thursday this week, I drove my younger daughter to school, where she ripped open the envelope with her GCSE results. Based on what she found in the envelope, she is likely to be labelled… I don’t flipping think so.

Today, I reached the age my Grandma was when she married her second husband. 

When my mum informed me about Grandma’s upcoming nuptials, I was horrified. The shock was so immense, I still clearly remember the moment. ‘Old people do not get married, marriage is for the young, everybody is going to laugh at her, everybody is going to laugh at all of us’, I sobbed, to my mum’s bemusement. I was seven at the time, and all I could think of was that Grandma was very old, which meant her getting married was beyond embarrassing, because she would die soon, which would make me sad, because I liked Grandma a lot, she made the best chicken soup ever, and she could speak French, which was like the best magic trick ever, but old people die, so I didn’t expect her to live much longer. 

As it happened, Grandma lived for another 35 years, and went to her bridge club as usual a couple of days before she died.

Still, I think I will avoid eye contact with seven year olds from now on, in case I catch them feeling sorry for me for being so very old, especially that there are a couple of things that tell me that I am, in fact, getting on a bit.

One example is my birthday date itself, 24/7. I remember the time when it was just that, a date, with no other meaning attached to it, because nothing was open and available 24/7. The world of my youth used to close for the night, and wake up afresh the next day. I know, right? 

And finally, I am one of the fewer and fewer people on this planet who can say that they were alive (only just, but still) when England won the World Cup. History doesn’t get much more ancient than this. 

Please fold your flags neatly away, and store them safely. It’s coming home, it is just being delayed.

Thank you, the English team, for giving us two weeks of sheer unadulterated joy and happiness. Thank you for lifting the spirits and making us sing.

Today, we are heartbroken. Today is for if onlys and what ifs. Tomorrow, the countdown to 2022 begins.

We now have the best team in my footballing memory (which is older than any of the current players by the way). The team led by Gareth Southgate and Harry Kane deserves everything there is to win in football and they will get there.

Semi-finals in 2018, final this year, next year the trophy.