Stuart is a graduate of the Falmouth Post Graduate Professional Writing Programme and about to start work for the Builder Group of Magazines in an editorial postion.
He is also 24, from Glasgow, and completing a screenplay on an environmental issue in Australia.

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When I was a couple of years younger - okay, well maybe quite a few years younger - my friends and I used to love nothing more than a good game of football.

We would throw ourselves about the pitch, come rain or shine and we loved every last second of it. This feeling of joy was not, however, shared by our long-suffering mothers. More often than not, they would be faced with yet another hole in already severely patched and padded trousers, which required their immediate attention.

As a result, an observer of any of our epic matches on the local pitches would have been privileged to note the origin of the phrase 'threading a pass through the defence'.

As far as I can tell, today's breed of keen young footballers have somehow managed to slip through the net of such thriftiness. Kids have always wanted to emulate their heroes, yet today's breed does so to a degree which would have been alien to myself as a child. When I witnessed a recent kickabout amongst a group of children, not a patch or ingeniously placed team badge could I spy. Each child sported the full complement of their team's most recent regalia - I would have been at least several seasons behind the latest kit and probably squeezed into something several sizes too small.

I am not for one moment suggesting any sort of meanness on the part of my parents (although that would explain a good many things), however, I feel that there is a crucial issue surrounding the readiness of the modern shopper to shop until they drop and then shop some more. People no longer re-use repair and recycle; they simply break, bin and buy over and over again.

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