It’s common knowledge that
Swansea City brought in Gylfi Þór Sigurðsson on loan from the funkily monikered
1899 Hoffenheim – a classic octosyllabic metric form, you will note, combining
spondee and anapaest with the ‘anti-Antipodean’ stressed-unstressed-unstressed
dactyl – primarily because it was urgent that the Premier League’s impressive
purveyors of tiki-taka-lite
signed a tall player, a player who could reach up for the rapidly-ageing
condiments and whatnot on the top shelf of the boss’s training ground pantry:
the pickled eggs; the Gentleman’s Relish; that non-Lea & Perrins
Worcestershire Sauce, rashly bought with money from the coppers jar; a sticky
tube of spicy Vietnamese sriracha; a forlorn and dented
tin of Black Treacle; some luminous Piccalilli; that jar of Indonesian kejap
manis you
bought in Amsterdam when unable to stop eating. With the hyper-insured modern
footballer-commodity contractually prevented from giving bunk-ups or shoulder
rides, Gylfi was the obvious solution. Brendan Rogers loves his Bovril butties,
you see.
This is all true, and
widely known. But the top-shelfery doesn’t end there…
Gylfi’s new-found
celebrity, cemented with a neat brace at Wigan on
Saturday, has transformed him into a much sought-after advertising tool, particularly
for companies looking to penetrate the Icelandic sexual fantasy market. And
penetration – be that from the apex of Rodgers’s fluid midfield or in the
spoons, lotus or indeed missionary positions – is something Sigurðsson offers
in abundance. He oozes penetration. Reeks of
it.
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| Once an Icelandic 'volcano' pops, it can't stop |
The rangy
attacking-midfield thruster’s bedroom antics are already the stuff of legend
(or saga) down at the Liberty Stadium, where teammates have been quick to give
him the surprisingly oblique, though undeniably clever nickname
“Eyjafjallajökull-y”. Although it goes against the grain of many nicknaming
conventions – primarily those concerning length and what linguists call
“trip-off-the-tongue factor” (a good nickname having to be
“trip-off-the-tongue-y”) – the Welsh players are very much at home (or llanbwgfwrllygyllylycrwd)
with tongue-twisting, polysyllabic words, so don’t find this much of a
struggle. Scott ‘To Be Fair’ Sinclair prefers to call him ‘Siggo’ or
‘Volky’, to be fair.
News of this hydraulic
pelvic prowess has been splattered all over cyberspace, one or two gobbets
recently reaching the owners of niche website gilf.com –
inevitable outgrowth of the highly popular milf.com (and probable precursor to
ggilf.com). A spokesman at gilf.com’s UK HQ in Manchester
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| Top shelf attractions |
His duties do not include
any live-action performance (although Shannon Pizazz, the owner, has said the
door will always be open). Nor are the modelling assignments – both soft- and
hard-cock – for the brand’s highly popular top-shelf jazz mag as unpalatably
onerous as might have been expected, given the particular sexual proclivity to
which it caters. Indeed, as Sigurðsson himself has pointed out, there are
grandmas in Manchester who weren’t even born when Sir Alex Ferguson started up
at Old Trafford,* so potential consorts could well be “bang tidy”, assuming
you’re able to look past a babysitting method consisting largely of screaming
across drab shopping precincts: “Britt-neh… Britt-NEH!!
Get fookin’ EE-YOH. NOW!. Yoh fookin’ cunt, yoh!”
Despite all this porno
positioning – between the sheets and between the lines – the Icelandic Volcano
is reported to be deeply concerned that, even without hardcore modelling
duties, his semi-compulsive and climactically spectacular day-to-day ‘amateur’
bonking might bring on a bout of what Chris Morris has called ‘the gush’, a strange
condition in which a man just cannot stop ejaculating. To wit:
“A spunk expert explained
to me that the whole body just gets consumed in producing semen. You could eat
all day and all night but you can’t keep up when you’re shooting the moisturiser
like a fucked up oil rig… A guy with ‘the gush’ is in big demand for cream
scenes all over town. There are special agents for him. You see a black limo
with a flashing light and a siren, chances are that’s a jam wagon with some
poor kid in the back, groin going off like a sex snake, gush agent clutching a
supply of dick nappies, trying to cram in as many jobs as possible before the
spunk turns red… A lot of guys are going invertebrate now, but it’s not easy to
keep jelly when you’re inside a woman…” [Blue Jam]
Gush or no gush, the
desire to avoid such a terribly painful demise brings the very real and
alarming possibility – exacerbated by the often overstated yet
not-completely-made-up propensity for morose introspection and existential
angst among our periodically light-starved Scandinavian cousins – that
Sigurðsson may end up taking his own life; or, at the very least, may become so
depressed that he withdraws into candlelit bookish reclusion. Forever. Indeed,
teammates have already reported him missing a trip to Hooter’s to stay at home
reading the poetry of Nicaraguan modernist Rubén Darío, part of whose sonnet
‘Yo persigo una forma’ (‘I pursue a form’) has since been tattooed on the young
Viking’s chest, directly beneath the club crest.
The tattoo, the poem’s
final pair of triplets, reads:
Y no hallo sino la palabra que huye,
la iniciación melódica que de la flauta fluye
y la barca del sueño que en el espacio boga;
y bajo la ventana de mi Bella-Durmiente,
el sollozo continuo del chorro de la fuente,
y el cuello del gran cisne blanco que me interroga.
Translated, this means:
And I find only the
fugitive word,
The melodic invitation
flowing from the flute,
And the vessel of
dreams sailing in space;
And beneath the window
of my Sleeping Beauty,
The continuous sobbing
of the fountain’s flow,
And the great white
swan’s neck that questions me.
Of course, it’s not
difficult to tie all these threads together by way of a cursory exegesis of
Darío’s verse. To wit...
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| El cuello del gran cisne blanco que me interroga |
The central claim of the
existentialist philosophers was that the singular drama of human life, which is
fundamentally free, is how we face up to our mortality. Jean-Paul Sartre used
the concept mauvais foi (bad faith) to describe, among other inauthentic modes
of existence, the condition of living in denial of such an inevitability, as
one sees with religious belief in the transcendence of the immortal soul. Thus,
the motif of death – of which the swan is emblematic, of course (as per the
‘swan song’ of this regal bird) – is conveyed by Darío using the image of the
swan’s neck, the singular form, the very physical shape of which – ? – interrogates
the poet. Death: the ultimate question of life; omnipresent, stalking our every
step, a profoundly creative force…until such time as it finally claims us.
Several senior officials at the Association for the Observance of Icelandic Poetry-Enjoying Footballing Porn Stars already fear the worst, speculating that, by leaving jovial old Hoffenheim – where they were going to party like it’s 1899 – and coming to the morbid city of Swansea – with the unambiguously sombre symbolism of its crest – Sigurðsson’s destiny was already sealed, his future traced out. For the free existential self, this means a death wish: I pursue a form...
Gunnhilder Dereksdóttir of AOIPEFPS said, stoically: “In a strange way, having always seen the great swan’s neck of human mortality as oppressively black and not life-affirmingly white, he has already been heading for his ‘Swansea’, even if that were in Hoffenheim.” Ever a fatalistic bunch, plans for his funeral are already being made in Reykjavík.
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| Swan song |
* source: Con-Cencus
This piece was
previously published by The
FCF
Love the Poem (translated)
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