The Interior Life of Paul Scholes

Wayne seemed quite excited this morning. He's got a new mobile phone which he was showing everyone. He was telling me he's on twitter and has half a million followers and can tweet anytime from it. When I asked him if you could send text messages on it he looked at me funny and muttered something about me having a brick. I think he was having a bit of a go, but I don't mind, I only use it for phoning Claire and my mam.

Paul let the kids in then brought the shopping into the kitchen. 'I always like a Friday,' he thought. 'Digestives, Tetley,' he rummaged in the bag. "Radio Times."

He made himself a nice cup of tea, took it into the living room and sat down on the settee with the Radio Times. There was a big Alan Titchmarsh feature but he turned down the corner and turned the page. That would have to wait.

Paul flicked through the week's listings 'til he found what he was looking for - new series of Celebrity Masterchef. Alright! He ran his finger down the names to see who they'd picked. Linda Lusardi, she were nice. Better hope the missus doesn't find out, he chuckled. Matt Dawson, Keith Harris. He scanned a bit faster. Sonia, Duncan Bannatyne. The first drops of rain were hitting the window. Lionel Blair, Angela Rippon. Someone called Tony di Bart. Weekdays, 5pm.

He sighed and closed the magazine. 'Gaffer probably wouldn't give me the time off anyway.' Still, it would've been nice if they'd asked. He never got asked.

would have quite liked to see scholesy on celeb masterchef

lol@Toni di Bart

He cook with a ruthless efficiency and a wee bit more creative flair than you'd imagine. And he'd accidentally & clumsily scald his closest competitors with hot oil.

Isn't Tony di Bart dead?

I'm thinking of Tony de Vit.

"Isn't Tony di Bart dead?" he thought as he filled the kettle. "That were a boss tune though..."

"Not sure why he liked hanging around with all those fellers."

"tributes paid to Tony di Bart" was the headline on BBC News as Paul turned on the telly. He sips his tea, it was not a shock to him. Tony and Paul used to go pick up the kids together after Paul's training, but then Tony started doing remixes of the real thing and getting the kids to take the bus. "The moment he swayed from his routine", Paul sighed, "he was dead."

thread of the week imo

Paul was on the ground. Everything had gone white, but slowly his sight was returning. He pushed himself weakly to his feet, his hands and knees bleeding. His body bleeding all over. There was no sound except for a dull, unbroken ring. The buildings around him were debris. Minutes passed before he realized where he was, what these buildings had been. He hadn’t been here, though, when it happened. Despite his confusion this much was clear to him. How had he got here? He looked out over the brick remains of violently sundered homes. There, three streets away, was the terrace where he lived, now ragged heaps of stone and twisted metal and broken people. People were lying everywhere, all of them red and torn; few of them moving. He stared at his own wounds vacantly, oblivious to any pain. Some of the less injured people were trying to find others, or help others. There was movement beside him and he turned slowly. A man – not someone he recognized. Haunted eyes implored Paul, weeping blood and tears. He was holding something. His mouth worked, saying soundless words over and over. He pushed the thing towards Paul, showing him. A baby, but not like a baby. Limp, and still, and dirty. Paul looked at the baby and looked at the man, fighting to comprehend. Gently he took the soft, cold thing from the man’s supplicant hands. Reaching into the back pocket of his jeans he pulled out a biro, and wrote SCHOLESY in large round letters across the parchment white stomach.

dark...i laughed. the man was daniel taylor obv.

john o'kane surely

the man is siralex and the baby is utd's midfield.

this might be a stretch but feel like could have a quality thread where ppl do these interior life thingys for different players and others have to guess who they are.

Paul Scholes said: "I am not a man of many words but I can honestly say that playing football is all I have ever wanted to do and to have had such a long and successful career at Manchester United has been a real honour. This was not a decision that I have taken lightly but I feel now is the right time for me to stop playing. To have been part of the team that helped the Club reach that 19th title is a great privilege. I can now vary my routine by coaching in the morning instead of training, but I'll still pick up the kids from school, play with them, have tea, get them to bed and then watch a bit of TV."

You don't know how much i wanted that last sentence to be true.

awww rip little man

Tributes today will have been paid to the late united legend Scholes as the ceremonial bloodletting continues apace outside the Old Trafford megastore, and not just by the store managers who finally can offload the surplus stock of limited edition Scholesy Shivs. Many will have opined that Scholesy himself would have 'bled red', and indeed that is the colour of the pavements today. Scholes slipped into a coma a mere fourteen minutes after his retirement was announced, and as he drained his last mug of lucozade, his aphasic mutterings ceased and a steady rivulet of drool attested to the loss of all cognitive functions.

Followers of the diminuitive asthamtic will long have heard him describe himself as a man of few words and no interests outside of football, so it will come as no surprise that a man whose passing was out of this world has now passed out of this world after his sporting gifts have left him.

Venerable United boss Sir Alex Ferguson will have been seen in hospitals throughout Manchester, seizing ginger babies that they may yet fulfill the prophecy of "The Second Scholes". Yet even if the unlikely prediction, having been gleaned from a numerical translation of a Ronnie Wallwork tweet, comes to great fruition, Ferguson has known one of the great players of his generation will be nigh on close to impossible to replace at this level.

This thread is incredible

he was an incredible man ;_;

Scholes was not just an example on the field, he has been exemplary off it. No lurid headlines; indeed, no headlines at all unless they were football-related; a family man whose main priority, once his day's work was done at United's Carrington training centre, was the school run.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/philmcnulty/2011/05/the_cause_was_a_losing.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggiXAQqnYds

Sleep well, Ginger Prince.

Awww look his little leg's twitching, he's maiming opposition centre forwards in his sleep.

nult is reading ilx, that's now generally accepted, right?

I like to think back to the good old days when we thought Scholesy was going blind.

never knew he wasn't your typical footballer, interesting to read so many articles revealing that today.

"Paul Scholes was one of the Man Utd greats - Nicky Butt"

Judging by today's tributes to this wildly over-rated water-carrier I'm going to have to turn off the internet for about three months when John Terry retires.

Must not bite...

... said Paul as he collected the kids.

The next day Paul Scholes's 85-year-old agent, Harry Swales, picks up the phone to discuss his client's enduring appeal. Swales, who wears extravagant mutton chop whiskers and is known as an "old-school" representative, has enjoyed a quiet life with the deal-phobic Scholes but wouldn't want it any other way.

"He's always been a player who wanted to play and train hard and when he'd finished go home to his family," said Swales, the day after Scholes had launched his memoirs, at Old Trafford. "All he wanted to do was what he did. He just wanted to pick up his kids from school.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/oct/01/paul-scholes-manchester-united/print

you're making that up.

oh.

he's fucked when his children move out.

driving perpetual circles around the school, waiting, waiting, waiting.

There's always tea

t minus ten seconds once his kids move out imo

The great tall windows looked over Manchester industralia. It had rained steadily all day and droplets came together and ran haphazardly down the glass - now left, now right, pausing for a time while lower drops rearranged themselves, but always pouring forward the only way they knew how. Amid it all the great iron clock gleamed dully, the glamour of grey water and regularity.

The kids watched the hands from the corridor. They never moved. Sometimes they'd look at something else and when they looked back the hands would be in a subtly different position, but there was nothing flashy about, just hands moving in the way the great hands of the past had always done. The school across the road had installed a digital clock when the renovation money came in, which was nice to look at but unreliable somehow. You never knew whether you were going to see '3.25', '1525' or even 'EEEE'.

No such worries here. Twenty-five past it said, what you saw was what you got. And in five minutes the bell would ring, and everything would follow naturally. It would be time to move outside, they'd get picked up, then it would be time to go home. Maybe other kids would go to the shops or hang about first, but it was too serious for that. This was life.

The hands were between twenty-five and half-past now. The rain weren't letting up. At least the kids knew they'd be getting picked up promptly. It would be miserable waiting in this but you didn't complain, you just got on with it. It had been hard sometimes these past few years. First Nicky Butt's kids left to go to that basket-case comprehensive across town; then a while afterwards Rio's kids went to college; now even Chicharitoito had left and got himself a job too, and the kids were the only ones of the old gang left.

Truth be told, the corridor wasn't really where they wanted to be. They still had something to give in the classroom, they were sure of it, but Sir wanted it this way. The desks were too small for them now, or the new pupils answered questions with the abandon of youth. And there was something in that. But you still felt you could do a job, you just dropped deeper and answered slower. Yet even those appearances in the classroom got fewer and fewer. Recently they'd just been hoping they'd be allowed in the corridor at all.

In their darker moments they wondered what it would be like outside. A day would come when they wouldn't come to school, they'd ... wherever it was people went outside. A shiver went through the place, as if a ghost had passed down the corridor. They looked back to the clock. 3.29.

Forcefeeding his kids their tea even whilst they're swimming:

He seems in his element in the pool, he's a real water baby and it's wonderful that he's got that to enjoy. Some children with autism are scared of water but Aiden's the opposite. He'd be swimming every minute of the day if he could and on holiday we even feed him in the pool.

Genius, IK

yeah since finding out his kid has autism this thread seems p mean

Hmmmm. Just for the record, I was unaware that one of Scholes's kids was autistic, and I would agree that knowing that does make this thread seem pretty mean, but I hadn't even bothered to read JM's post when I made my post, so, er, when I said "Genius, IK" that wasn't intended sarcastically.

I didn't know about the autism either, I think the weird and incessant cliches about Scholes still make the thread more than just mean-spirited...

I was unaware too and it does make my post look pretty bad read in that light, but for the record it really wasn't intended that way.

thread looks more prescient than mean imo

Think they tested the wrong member of the family for autism imho.

thread's not mean, obv. Kid's autism hasn't been a feature, for a start.

it cd be perceived as being a bit insensitive i guess. is it google proof?

The director Gabe Turner, one of the two brothers who made The Class of 92, has a revealing story about Paul Scholes's debut in the movie business. The feature-length documentary is about the great Manchester United generation of Scholes, Ryan Giggs, David Beckham, Nicky Butt and the Neville brothers, Gary and Phil, and is released next month.

When Gabe and his brother Ben sat down to interview Scholes, recently retired for the second time and third on the club's all-time appearances list, the man himself had one major question.

Gabe takes up the story: "Paul said, 'Is this a movie then?' And we said, 'Yes'. 'Not television?' Paul said. 'No, Paul'. You could see him thinking. He said, 'Does that mean there'll be a premiere?' We were like, 'Yes, probably there'll be a premiere'. He said: 'Would I have to come to that?' We said: 'I'm sure we would want you to come to that. Would you like to?' 'No,' he said. 'Not massively'."

Paul said. 'No, Paul'.

said Paul 'Paul, no?'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiT-4V3IZFQ

'It will be difficult to look past the likes of Kroos and Ronaldo for Real, and I think Fabregas has become a key man for Chelsea, Pirlo for Juventus and Robben for Bayern.'

Paul Scholes was singing and dancing to the sounds of Rick Astley in the Salford City dressing room after they dumped Notts County out of the FA Cup on a historic and euphoric night at Moor Lane.

until the stark horror of the lyrics revealed itself in his mind. never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you

the kids. training.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2017/05/05/ryan-giggs-prepared-psychologically-life-manchester-united/

Spending time with my children these past 10 months has been a great pleasure, but they have their own school lives and the hours between drop-off and pick-up have to be filled too.

The one thing I felt was unique to a footballer’s stress was that every day when I left my house I never knew what I would encounter.

There might be 30 autograph requests over the course of the day, or 30 selfies. There might be none. There might just be nice things said. Or there might be aggro, and a harsh comment.

It was the uncertainty about what the day held that got to me.

i'm not a qualified psychologist but

Lol! Never mind interior world, one could detect more sentience + intelligence in a mollusc ffs! if I was his shrink I'd just give him a big dose of LSD!

He does seem to be grasping for that type of thing where dithering inarticulate alpha-male millionaires "open up" a la Beckham on his struggles with OCD etc. I also like childish/imbecilic concept of "stressful" grown-up jobs are all white-collar of course.

It was the uncertainty about what the day held that got to me.

people i met had different faces and said different things. it was as if while i went about my day, with my thoughts, they too had days of their own, thoughts of their own, which i knew was impossible yet still the nagging sense persisted that these others were more than met the eye.