Brady is trying to raise a diddy butty for FC United of Manchester… to put a pie in …

Sponsor an original Steering Committee member attempting the Manchester 10K on the 18th of May before the Legends’ game, raising funds for the club…

He is taking his life in his own feet doing running. He likes settees. It may go MRI. Pies and mushy peas will be involved. Please see the article for further frightening details...

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Firstly, can I disassociate myself from the mint sauce on those mushy peas in the picture above. It looks like biz. I have my mushy peas with gravy or bald but it was the only picture we had of our pies. Secondly, even though you have now clicked on the piece don’t read it. You know from the salient headline that got you here that we are attempting to get your pie money for the club. Although you could read the piece if you are at work or travelling to or from work on public transport and as a consequence, are proper alienated as the surplus value is drained out of you. Reading it whilst driving or on a bike would be gormless. Or you could read it if you are not in work and don’t consider losing a few minutes of your life an inconvenience. I wouldn’t read it though...and I wrote it. It’ll get on your nerves as I threw the kitchen succinct at it and missed by some considerable distance. Save yourself and go and do something smashing after contributing to the pie fund at Malcolmses.

Fondests,

Robert Brady*

* Older reds will remember right at the very end of Morecombe and Wise where Ernie is carrying on with the show thinking Eric has gone. However, Eric, on his way home with his coat and hat on walks by at the back of the stage. Ernie, with his subterfuge now found out, has to invite Eric in. That’s how I became part of the Dirty Half Thirty of the original Steering Committee that formed the club in 2005. I was just walking past.

Malcolmses … denying apostrophes since 2007…

Some of you may have known Soya Milk Mark from United. Without any real corroborative evidence, he was almost certainly Cheetham Hill’s only vegan throughout the eighties. He died far too young and far too daftly but he could never be too missed as he was too loved. Not long after he had turned up his non-animal-shoed toes we were in the Half Way House in Clayton on the Holts with all the ensuing Benidorm red face tan and intellectualisation that that comes with. We discussed our future passing and thought that at least Soya Milk Mark had escaped the indignities of dementia. We decided that we were too old to be around for when they discovered a cure for the You-can-me-Alz, as it was a knocking bet that we are all going to get it. However, we also agreed that we might not be too old for medical science sometime soon to have a clearer view of it, tell you what stage the Alz was at and give you an approximate timescale for when you are going to go disagreeably woofbarkdonkey dizzylongstocking.

We agreed from those beery bones of science a scheme to take back control of our lives and how it ends. Opinion reigned that no one could go three months – two months was considered but rejected - on the beer without being toecully fedster of going out and socialising and indeed, of existence itself. You’d just be pooped doggy dogg shattered. You’d be ready to go. The first month or so you’d be all ‘aww, I know I need to go but it don’t want to’ ish. The second month you’d be getting to the halfway stage and thinking ‘I’ve had a lot of beer but there is still loads to go and I’m sort of getting used to going now as this is a right traipse’ish. The third month you’d be willing on those final few weeks as you are just absolutely fed up with beer. If you never had to see a pint again you’d be made up so a great way of going now was to get the end of those three months.

Therefore, we concluded that three months before any future May the 26th, a day we have loved for so long, that if one of us had the Alz and new science had told us when the bad stage was coming, and there was no 91st minute goal line clearance to escape from it, that we’d all go out on the beer every day for the three months leading to the 26th of May. We’d beat the horrible Alz by taking back control of when and how we died. We would choose to die on a 26th of May. So that is it. It’ll be some 26th of May sometime in the hopefully faraway future. Except it won’t for me.

That is because on the 18th of May 2025 I will attempt to end my own life by running the Manchester 10K. That is not ten Ketamine or ten Kit Kats but actual ten big bits of a mile all put together times ten … and then running it. When I spoke at my friend Basher’s funeral a few years back I spoke about taking on death like being behind the gates of Goodison or Anfield after a Cantril Farm Carpet Fitters night match in the late seventies and eighties and not knowing what was on the other side of those gates. You only knew you had to face it, so face it brave and see how it goes. It always went well enough. Very little running. Difficult but doable. Mayhemy but manageable.

I take no umbrage from friends having sweepstakes on what part of the 10K course I will die on. You see I am going to be trying to raise money for the match day Course You Can Malcolm pie fund so me dying and getting on Look North West in the ‘A dick dies’ part of the news might help tickle up the total tally. ‘Aww he died, we should buy some pies for Malcolmses’ could well be good for fundraising so I wouldn’t mind. Many of you might not know that the pie and peas at Malcolmses that you are eating whilst watching the band and other associated turns pre match at the back of the Saint Mary’s Road end is all funded by various volunteer ‘steak-and’ kidney donors – Carrot Corner options available.

To clarify, some red says that they will pay for part or even all the pies at Malcolmses at a coming-up home match before then going to the game and buying a pie back … that they had already paid for. Very Malcolmses. We buy pies from Openshaw at £1.50 and sell them at £2 to you raising ten bob for the club every time you pie-pamper yourself. If you get the homemade, ten bob, donated-for-free-made-the-night-before mushy peas with the pie then the club makes a pound on every pie purchase. If behind all that some red has paid for the pies beforehand then that is a total, glorious, ‘the-Ofs-will-live,’ mode of production that gives the club a right pie crusted, flaky pastry wedge. People before profit but profiting from people, robbing the poor to give to the poor, a pie tax on the pie poor, the corporate social responsibility department of capitalism … but really it is just reds being reds with each other to raise red money so that we can keep on being reds with reds. ‘Our flag stays red’ as the big flag says in Malcolmses by the stage. It does and it has.

You would think that such a caring and loving economic model of raising money for the club would be unsustainable but it has been going on for a short and shirt part of eighteen years. We might look daft but something about it is undaft. It is borderline beautiful. The Ofs mean that much to us. The Ofs survival means that much to us all. Malcolmses and its pre match entertainment born of the ‘Where Love is the Licensee’ warmth means that much to us. It is a gesamkunstwerk of loveliness that we are all lucky to have a seasonally appropriate coat for. Bauhaus, in the middle of our street. Cos you’re two pie, pie, hush, hush, eye to eye…

So a setteeism person like me who once had a turneroverer stick to turn the telly over before turneroverers were invented – it was a belting bit of bamboo that was just the perfect length to push the knobs in to turn the telly over from the settee. I found it in the street. It wasn’t raining or anything. I’m not a scruff. I didn’t alter its length or mess about with it. I didn’t need to, we were just born to meet. I saw it lying there all lonely and thought that looks a smashing turneroverer … and it was. Some people get rescue dogs from the street. I get rescue turneroverers – will run the 10K to raise money for the Malcolmses pie fund. You too can now pay for a future next season pie by sponsoring me which will mean you will pay for it again when you get the pie you have already paid for by buying it again at Malcolmses when you are at the game. Or something like that. It puts the ‘raising’ rather than the ‘fun’ bit in fundraising. Almost certainly.

I write for an on-line lifestyle magazine called Snedge that is without doubt the funniest, most insightful red production I have been around. Daily joy and witticism in a world bereft of so much of that. Soya Milk Mark was at its inception. So was Basher. They went, we are still here. Unlucky and lucky tipped out of a Lois jean pocket. On Snedge recently, we wrote about that beery meeting at the Halfway House in Clayton that we discussed here earlier in this piece. We added that in a street not a Dalot miskick from there, with me as a seventeen year old in a big brawl, a lad brought out a knife. We dealt with that one but then another took a blade at me from behind. He stabbed me downwards lifting his hand upwards and doing a ‘Pyscho shower curtain scene’ motion. If he had have just lunged at me in a traditional ‘to me, to you’ way I may well not be here. Luckily he was gormless and the blade went down the back of my jumper just leaving a perfectly formed knife hole in it. I liked that jumper, it was new.

In a 10K circuitous circuit way I am lamenting that it can be taken from us at any time. We all know that so in this instance it would just be great if you put something towards next season’s Malcolmses pie fund by sponsoring me to see if I die whilst doing this year’s Manchester 10K on May 18th. I will feel quite chirrupy if I live. I do like a bit of breathing now and again. I wouldn’t bet on it though. Hold it, if you do sponsor me you are sort of betting on it as everyone likes a bit of ‘Oh, you’ll never guess who has died?’ That’s a bit Malcolmses confusiony. Are you betting on me dying or aren’t you? Not Sandy sure. As we have always said, we want reds to leave a Malcolmses and then after the game, whilst explaining to mates that haven’t been, what you had done or seen so that they’ll think you’re potty. If they think you are just that bit more tapped then the club and Malcolmses have done their job. So explain to them now that you are buying some pies for the pie fund so that you can buy one back. And a blokey died.