The Hoddle of Coffee: Tottenham news and links for Wednesday, September 14

good morning everyone -

I’ve only ever been in the travelling section of a football crowd once, and that was sitting with the Wolves fans at Craven Cottage back in 2017.

I do applaud those Spurs fans for travelling thousands of kilometres to support the club. Sometimes I wish I could go. If not for the football, then at least for the surrounding sites.

And what better way to spend extra time in Lisbon, Portugal, than by visiting the Casa Fernando Pessoa, the house that the famed Portuguese writer lived in the last fifteen years of his life.

By car it is only a 15 minute drive (8.5 kilometres) from Sporting CP’s stadium. For you public transiters, that trek extends to approximately 40 minutes.

Pessoa’s greatest work, the Book of Disquiet, has been discussed in hoddles past. Your HIC has even been a part of those discussions!

It took me a long time to read that book. In fact, I put it down for close to an entire year before completing it during the pandemic. I was intimidated, really. This wasn’t a book that I could read passively. Every single word carried such weight to it that, whenever I reached a stop, I would need to pause before continuing to fully appreciate the words he wrote.

Here’s a snippet from the book, which I have reopened tonight for the first time in months:

“Life’s mystery wounds and frightens us in many ways. Sometimes it comes to us as a formless phantasm, the monstrous incarnation of nonbeing, and our soul trembles in the most terrible of fears. At other times it - the whole truth in the horror of our inability ever to know it - lurks behind us, visible only so long as we do not turn round to see it [224. 23 March 1930].”

I don’t often “bunny-ear” pages of books I read, but I did for that one. And often. It is a remarkable expression of the stream of consciousness spanning decades told by Pessoa, told by others created by Pessoa.

The Casa Fernando Pessoa contains a three-floor exhibition with a library specialising in world poetry, crossing memory, literary creation and reading.

This year marks the book’s 40th anniversary, and the site has a “Game of Disquiet” exhibition to honour it. Much like Pessoa’s pseudo-homonym Bernardo Soares wandered the streets of Lisbon, so too will visitors wander through a maze and read excerpts of the book in non-linear fashion.

I have never visited Portugal, meaning I have never visited the museum. I had hopes this year of going, but those were dashed. Perhaps I will make it during the Book of Disquiet’s 41st, 42nd or 48th anniversary.

Fitzie’s track of the day: Smile at You, by Fleetwood Mac

And now for your links:

The Athletic ($$): Antonio Conte fires Tottenham warning after Champions League defeat

Todd Boehley wants Premier League all-star fixture to raise funds for football pyramid

USMNT to face Germany in November friendlies

Preston Football Club ban fan for derogatory tweets relating to royal family

Northern Irish schoolboy becomes UK’s youngest-ever senior footballer

New York Times ($$): The future is always now at Ajax