1:31pm Monday 12th January 2009
By Dennis Signy
As the sound of Big Ben ushered in the New Year at our apartment, I raised a less than traditional cup to propose a toast to 2009...in Lemsip.
I informed Mrs S and the visiting Adrienne King, through husky tones interspersed with the odd sniffle and bout of coughing, that my priority resolution for the incoming year was to arrange to be at Maderia next New Year's Eve among the thousands of cruise revellers who converge on the place each year for a gigantic firework display at midnight.
The intention had been to see in the New Year with the Slypers in Mill Hill and we had carefully studied the menu in a bid to pace ourselves gastronomically - but melon in cointreau, spicy squash soup, Calvados sorbet, Chicken Stroganoff with wild rice and roasted vegetables and Amoretto meringue with malt looked less attractive by the minute as the day wore on and we finally coughed in our apologies.
So began a monastic existence, with Mrs S on antibiotics with a chest infection, and me with "there's a lot of that about".
The first seven days of 2009 saw me confined to bowls of Waitrose tomato soup and one planned light boiled egg that came out so hard that a West Indian pace bowler could have split your helmet with it at 22 paces.
This lack of contact with the outside world continued through the postponement of Barnet's home game against Grimsby Town and the continuing "lurgy" confined me to barracks when the Bees travelled to Bury at the weekend.
Decision time on renewing acquaintance with the outside world came on Sunday when we had tickets for the Football Writers' Association gala tribute evening to Harry Redknapp. Mrs S, fully recovered from her infection, insisted that I only had a heavy cold and should not continue in male hypochondriacally fashion.
So, dressed in our finery, we arrived in the Beech Suite VIP reception at the Royal Lancaster Hotel to be greeted by Gerry Cox and Nick Callow, who run the Hayter's sports agency of which I was a director in their youth.
Gerry and Nick told me that they had met Harry Harris, the top football writer I mentored from his start with the old London Evening News through the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express, at a dinner on Friday. Harry, they said, had responded to mention of my name by saying that he thought I was dead.
Such reports, Mark Twain-like, of my death, I hasten to add, have been greatly exaggerated. Pat Jennings, the former Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur goalkeeper, volunteered to provide testimony that I was alive and coughing at the Royal Lancaster, Vic Wakeling ,the top man at Sky,volunteered to put a running paragraph on the news sports programme about my "recovery" and actor Warren Clarke, the star of Daliziel and Pascoe,will vouch that I had my first cigarette of the New Year with him...one of his.
Belated New Year greetings to you all. I have known Harry Redknapp since he was a boy at Upton Park; he was one of those head-down speedy wingers for whom the classic phrase "Open the gates, he's coming through" was coined.
Sir Geoff Hurst was in good form and Kenny Lynch and Bobby Davro provided a magnificent musical and comedy finale to the evening.
Pity Harry Harris wasn't there. I'd have liked to ask him why he didn't come to my funeral.
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