Familiar tones of rage, pain and betrayal that envelop men’s football were missing during England’s joyful run to glory
“Y
ou can’t stand their voices? ALL women’s voices?” “Yes.” “Are you married to a woman?” “I am. And she feels the same.” Hmm. To be fair to Dave from Egham, whose name has been changed to protect the confused, the whole setup here was pretty bleak. It was Dave’s destiny a week on from England’s victory at Euro 2025 to find himself going viral after an appearance on LBC radio.
In the clip Dave objects to the sound of all women’s voices, even if they’re Adele or Billie Holiday. Specifically he objects to women talking about women’s sport, which Dave hates because it is being thrown down his throat, and thrown down his throat to the extent he has to ring up a radio station and talk about the women talking about the women’s sport, simply to disentangle its tendrils from his throat, to steal a few gargling, sputtering final breaths.
What are we supposed to do with this? In Ernst Gombrich’s A Little History of the World, which is the best history of the world even when it’s wrong, he suggests that language evolved because humans were driven by the ice age into caves, forced to find ways of sharing social spaces, that this miracle of industry, sociability, turnip production schemes, and ultimately beauty, poetry and abstract thought, evolved out of a closeness driven by basic human survival.
