Wayne Rooney has apologised to his family after being caught drink driving in the Greater Manchester area. There was also another woman in the late night car. I don’t know if the apology was for her as well. Coleen, the wife, was away. I don’t know where. Dubai probably. That’s where they normally go, footballer’s wives. It would be nice if you heard she was away in Bayreuth listening to the Ring cycle or something. It would make a change from Dubai at least. The people Wayne should be apologising to, though, are not his family, in Dubai or Cheshire or Majorca, no, not them, but the other people who were driving in the vicinity of his car when he was pissed behind the wheel. They were the people put at risk, not his family. And yet, it is, as usual. at the altar of the sacred family that the modern equivalent of sacrificial animal innards are laid out. The evocation of the family (like some ritualised chorus in Greek tragedy)is transmitted through the sacred script of the tabloids. Wayne has let his family down. Wayne regrets his poor judgement. As though he had been deciding on the fate of Trojan envoys. Wazza shows poor judgement and the gods punish him with a two year driving ban. The Rooney tribe is shamed and will not be able to fulfil their sacrificial rituals in the Temple of Juno again before the new moon. There is a vibrant history of footballers and family. A footballer must never be without a wife or girlfriend; the idea of solitariness is anathema. What! On his own! No, he must be given the full set of wife and kid accessories. When Wayne brings home his £250,000 a week he refers to it as putting bread on the table for his wife and kids. The gap between the reality and the language has never been so cavernous. It is a wide as the minotaur’s jaw. The idea of what you are doing as putting bread on the table is a deep insult to all those working people who literally earn their zero hour bread and literaly put it on a literal table, if they have one, people who do not live in the Palace of Atreides or drive the chariot of Croesus. What Wayne Rooney puts on the table for Coleen and their kids is a foul blood-soaked mass. It is a filthy, unnameable organ; a sick trophy. Wayne Rooney himself is not totally to blame in all of this. He is just the poor beleagured agent blindly carrying out the ritual in the monster’s labyrinth.

peoplearerubbish.com