This is part 2 of a series on English Football’s Anxiety. Part 1 can be found here: Masturbation and Muscular Christianity: A Brief History of English Football’s Anxiety – Part 1 link
The atmosphere of this island is enough to choke all artists dead
– Arnold Bennet, English Satirist, b1867-1931d
Take a deep breath. Take in the crackle of the kerosene lamp, and the salty musk of earth’s womb. To your left is the dripdripdrip of stalactites, formed from the precipitation of minerals over a millennium. At these temperatures, even rocks sweat. To your right you’ll hear the monotone interspersed with the clatter of metal pick on stone, all for the purpose of extracting more metal. You’ll find that there isn’t much air to breathe in here. Stay here too long, and you may choke on the smell of your own sweat/toxic fumes/sense of nihilism. Yet, miners like Aleksei Grigorievich Stakhanov remained hopeful.