A cliched "this podcast got me through hard times" story

You hear these kind of emails on Football Weekly, but not on Football Cliches, so I thought I'd share it here.

Almost 3 years ago I was quite ill and in a lot of pain.  What I had initially thought was a kidney stone, turned into a complete inability to urinate, and I had to be catheterised in A&E.  I spent many weeks on the sofa, in pain and unable to sleep, with a bag of piss beside me.  I used podcasts to help distract me, but quickly ran out of episodes.  Listener Michael Cox mentioned Football Cliches on (I think) The Totally Football Show and I thought I’d check it out.  I tried listening to the latest episode (roughly around episode 150) and immediately loved it.

It was hugely interesting and gently funny, but ultimately meaningless, so if I did manage to fall asleep during an episode, I never needed to worry that I’d missed anything important.  It quickly became a bit of an obsession, but I was always expecting to get better quite soon, so I just kept listening to the next oldest episode that I could find.  In the end I listened to the first 150 or so episodes in reverse order, from newest to oldest, which was a really fun way to do it.  I would hear in-jokes being repeated then eventually find out the origin of them, which made it feel a bit like a detective story.  Once I got back to episode 1 (what a shock that was!), I started listening forwards from 151 onwards.

My favourite moment was when Adam introduced a clip from an old VHS and Charlie excitedly said “I’ve got that at home!”, and Adam said, in the most disinterested and dismissive way imaginable “great”, and then just carried on.

Anyway, thanks for being the voices in my head as I lay in pain.  I’m all better now, but still addicted to the podcast.

BTW It turned out that I had a kidney stone stuck in my penis.  The reason I couldn’t pee was because it blocked the flow, and the reason I was in so much pain was because they had shoved the catheter past it.  It took ages for them to find the cause.  They even missed it on the first cystoscopy, shoving the camera past it (causing me to scream in pain) without actually seeing it.