Cottage Thinking

I’m sitting here in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. The place is called Valsjöbyn and it’s a little village in the forest somewhere between Sweden and Norway. My family and I own this cottage so we spend some days here once in a while and it’s a good place for relaxation which is very much needed in the middle of all the stress. We don’t do very much here, or at least I don’t. My parents go out with the dogs and do things like cross country skiing, but I just sit inside reading and watching the TV. That might sound boring, but I love reading and we have as many TV channels here as we have at home so I can watch as much football as I want to.

Today it’s Monday but I will have a lot of Premier League games to watch since this is a bank holiday. That prospect makes me excited and it also reminds me of the time when I didn’t like football. It feels strange now to think about it because it’s such a big part of my life now, but it was not even two years ago that I hated the sport. I have always been a horse girl and when I was six years old I started to take lessons at a riding school. Four years after that I got my first pony and now I’m seventeen years old and I have pony number five. I still love horses but I know that when I have sold the one I have now I won’t buy a new one.

I tried football too when I was little, but my parents have told me that I wanted to quit after just one training session and so I did. Since then I haven’t played more than a few times in school, so I’m really bad at it. I enjoy playing though, but since I don’t have any skills I just go all in with my tackles. I think I would fit best as a central defender and that’s where I like to play. Most people prefer to play as an attacker but I don’t because I know that doesn’t suit me.

It feels like most people who blog about football are guys who have played since they were five years old, and as a girl (especially a girl who likes horses) it’s not very easy to get respect from those guys. They don’t seem to accept that I have changed my mind about football and they definitely don’t accept that I know things about the sport. I have learnt a lot during the time I have watched football because I’m so into it, so I know quite a lot more than they think I do.

My sudden interest in football has changed my life a lot, and I have other dreams now. Before I started to like football I wanted to be a vet or something like that, and I didn’t have any plans at all about moving somewhere. Now I want to be a sports journalist and all I want is to get on a plane to England. All this has also given me a best friend who I share all my interests with, and together I think we can manage to do so many things that we wouldn’t have had the courage to do alone.