RETURNED battered and hungover from Derby last Monday. No, I wasn’t battered, my football team Brighton was — exterminated out of the Championship play- off semis by a young and rampant Derby County, whose Will Hughes will surely play for England one day. 

Our poor manager Oscar was so traumatised by it all that he resigned 24 hours later. Bizarre, to be honest, since he did very well to get an injury-ravaged and, to be frank, not quite good enough team there in the first place on a small budget.

But if you’re going to lose a football match and you love real ale, there is surely no better place in the country to drown your sorrows than Derby. We visited seven pubs before and after the game and everywhere there was the camaraderie and solidarity that proper football fans generate. 

Despite the awful depredations of the moneymen our national game, at its best, is still in my opinion one of the greatest spectacles and rallying points that popular culture has ever produced.

A few days earlier I’d watched the first leg of the semi final on a helpful punter’s laptop in Stourbridge, where I did the first of a series of gigs organised by prospective Labour parliamentary candidate Pete Lowe. He is real Labour, not the pale pink travesty which sadly infests so much of the party these days. 

He has a solid community base in his home town, if elected will be the first Stourbridge MP to be born and bred there, and is a thoroughly good bloke. I wish him all the best.

The gig at Katie Fitzgerald’s, a friendly local ale mecca, was wonderful. I was ably supported by The Humdrum Express aka Ian Passey, a sharp and surreal observer of Black Country and national life. They have some accent round there. On more than one occasion I had to ask people to repeat themselves, as I did the following day when I went to see my widowed 80-year-old uncle Maurice in the isolated Gloucestershire hilltop village where he has lived all his life. 

With him it really is subtitle time. He lives only 60 miles from the Black Country but there’s a completely different shade and standard of incomprehensibility! 

I’m lucky enough to travel literally all over England and Wales and I can assure you that, despite globalisation and the effects of the mass media, the regional accent is very much alive and well. I love the fact that you can travel 50 miles and hear ordinary people talking in completely different ways — like the grass roots of football, it gives me a sense of continuity and community in this age of identikit town centres and mass bland corporate entertainment.

Finally, a book review. We all know that privatising the railways was a vindictive, stupid, crass piece of brainless Tory ideological vandalism. In her excellent book Plundering London Underground (Merlin Press) London Underground worker, activist and former RMT executive member Janine Booth explains how the part-privatisation of the Underground was, unbelievably, even more cretinous than that. And it was implemented by a Labour government. 

Privatisation simply means handing over huge sums of public money to inefficient and greedy companies, often set up for the express purpose of plundering the public purse. If Labour pledged in its manifesto to renationalise the railways and utilities it would win by a landslide. I simply don’t understand why it doesn’t. 

Less spine than a fillet of cod, sadly. 

www.attilathestockbroker.com.