Championship Letters 4: Peter Ridsdale as Harold Skimpole

Bleak House has a strong claim to be the pinnacle of Charles Dickens’ artistic achievement. Early in the novel, the scrounger Harold Skimpole attempts to trick Richard Carstone and Ada Clare into raising the money he needs to pay off the bailiff who has arrested him on a writ of debt. Cardiff City fans will no doubt have reacted in the same open hearted way when asked to delve into their pockets to buy season tickets recently. As Skimpole says, “I almost feel as if you ought to be grateful to me, for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity. For anything I can tell, I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness.” Peter Ridsdale couldn’t have put it better himself: he is, of course, “but a child, a child.”

Rob Langham

Rob Langham is co-founder of the defiantly non-partisan football league blog, The Two Unfortunates, a website that occasionally strays into covering issues of wider importance. He's 50 and lives in Oxford while retaining his boyhood support of Reading FC. He tweets as @twounfortunates and has written for a number of websites and publications including The Inside Left, When Saturday Comes, In Bed with Maradona, Futbolgrad and The Blizzard as well as being nominated for the Football Supporters' Federation Blogger of the Year Award in 2013.