By I can’t wait to get old. Specifically, I can’t wait until I’m old enough to stop learning. It happens to everyone; you spend your whole life soaking up knowledge and then, one day, your mind snaps shut. You only read publications that reinforce your beliefs rather than challenge them. Anything new is suddenly treated with fear and suspicion. You yank up the drawbridge, you retreat behind a barricade of outdated opinions, you vote Tory three times and then you die. Truly, it is the circle of life.
By my calculations, I’ve only got 20 years of learning left in me. It’s definitely coming – I’ve just hit the point where I’m quite happy not really knowing who Cardi B is – but when it arrives I will luxuriate in it. Because this is just the way the world works. Or at least it was until Neville Southall came along and buggered things up for everyone.
Neville Southall is a 59-year-old former binman and retired goalkeeper who hasn’t played top-flight football for 20 years. By rights, at this point in his life he should be the landlord of a failing flat-roofed pub called The Admiral Nelson rammed with football paraphernalia, curdled day-drinkers and framed Nigel Farage photos. If anyone has earned the right to live in the past, it’s him. But no. Instead, Neville Southall has chosen to engage with the world.
Southall’s public awakening started late last year, when he began tweeting things like ‘If your gay straight trans or anything else you should be able to be what u want. Not live a lie. Without discrimination or prejudice’. Which, considering that he’s a working class Welsh bloke who’s pushing 60 and grew up in the spectacularly lunk-headed world of professional football, felt remarkably progressive. The world had sped along since his glory years but instead of burying his head in the sand, Southall was actively trying to understand it.
It isn’t just that Southall is inquisitive, either. Whenever he broaches a new subject, he does so with compassion and self-awareness. When he started discussing trans issues on Twitter, for instance, he quickly announced that it was ‘a bit of a mine field’. And this might be his best quality of all. Twitter, as we all know, is a toilet. It is the world’s least suitable platform for conversation. Great for sloganeering. Great for driving deeper and deeper into your own impossibly entrenched views. Amazing for shouting at people. But it isn’t known for being a fantastic place to express vulnerability. And that’s what Neville did. He politely asked for more information on a subject he didn’t fully understand. And it worked. People were lining up to help him figure it out. Imagine.
This is what’s most impressive about Neville Southall. He refuses to rush to easy conclusions. When he’s in doubt, he puts the work in. He asks questions. He consults experts. He doesn’t always immediately land in the right place, but he’s determined to get there one way or another. His intentions are relentlessly noble.
And god knows he’s been through the ringer for this. This weekend, in a very Nevilleish way, he tweeted about sex work decriminalisation. But, instead of guiding him towards the answers he was looking for, parts of Twitter came raining down on him like a ton of bricks. He was asking questions rather than delivering blanket statements, and Twitter saw an opportunity for a fight.
This will forever be our downfall. We don't love triers. We expect our allies to fall from the sky fully formed, with all their views and credentials completely aligned to our own. If they fall slightly short – say, because they’re trying to figure something out on their own – then we leap on them for not being as virtuous as we clearly are. It’s a tedious and predictable reaction, designed to crush conversation. And yet it hasn’t affected Big Nev at all.
Usually when they find themselves on the end of a Twitter savaging, the victim retreats, wary of the hammering they’ll receive should they ever dare to voice an opinion in public again. But Southall hasn’t done that. He’s still on Twitter, figuring it out and handing out rose emojis like some sort of batshit Englebert Humperdink tribute act. He won’t be shifted.
Southall has had so many opportunities to change direction, to cultivate enemies and tweet bitterly about haters, and yet he hasn’t. He’s still in search of something, and nothing can sway him from stumbling along the path at his own pace. The man is a credit to us all. I’d be proud to grow up like him. I won’t grow up like him, because it’s too much effort, but I’d be proud if I did.
