Bücher von Jon Berry

What is it like to follow one of English football's perennial non-achievers? Hugging Strangers is a celebration of what it means to support your club through thick and thin. It speaks to all who love the game but are lumbered - by way of family, geography or plain bad luck - with a team whose glory days are few and far between. At the end of the 1963/64 season Birmingham City stayed in the first division by winning on the last day of the campaign. In the 55 years that followed, the Blues kept either survival or promotion for the final fixture on a further 12 occasions. Stir in nine relegations, eight promotions, along with play-off failures and embarrassing exits from cup competitions and you'll have an idea of what it means to be a Blues fan. But you don't have to be a Birmingham fan to enjoy this book. This light-hearted collection of tales from a lifelong, hopeless football addict will strike a chord with anyone who has asked themselves quite why they allow this simple game to assume such importance in their lives.

You had one bath a week whether you needed it or not. You knew with iron certainty what was for tea on any given day of the week. There was every possibility that grown-ups, known to you or not, might clout you.But being a child of the 1950s endowed you with privileges that could only have been dreamt of by previous generations. Free secondary education and health services and, for a while, a booming economy and full employment not that you knew much about that as a kid.Did the baby-boomers, the beneficiaries of all of this, build a better world on the back of their advantages? Did they turn out to be progressive or just self-satisfied and selfish?In this series of essays that range from politics to education to sport and bits of silliness, a boomer paints the world. You can judge if its a pretty picture.