This is a story about the future of football. A new star emerges in a game that attracts, and demands, ever greater extremes of wealth, fame, and physical prowess. Ardro Holst, in his pursuit of glory, has to work out what is real and what is false, in sport, in life, and in love, in a new world in which the virtual has become almost indistinguishable from the real. He finds himself apparently abandoned by the people who have admired him, supported him, controlled him, and exploited him. Can Ardro rediscover who, and what, he is and work out who he can depend on in his darkest hour? This is a story about the future of football - and the future of love...

Tender, nostalgic, romantic, funny, absurd, magically real, speculative, ironic, nightmarish, entertaining and elegantly rendered...these stories span a century of Man's consciousness. Once, a man might be a Gatsby chasing his girl half-way around the world, the captain of a football World Cup winning side, a raging Picasso bull in a mythical maze refusing to yield lover or art till his last mortality-defiant egotistic gasp. Straightforward enough choices, dreams, behaviour. Suddenly he is man interrupted, underwhelmed, overworked, ridiculed, young, rock-solid or unreliable family man, father, husband, friend; his freedom evaporates: he's globe-trotting inbox-fatigued nonsense-hearing corporate, military civil-serving quiet ministry of Everyman. He's so exasperated he might just run away and prop up a bar, or contemplate mild treachery just to get by, and he's put-upon, as he zigzags across #TimesUp, political correctness, game theory, oh... and... the women in his life. Now here he stands staring down the barrel of the 21st Century - he's superman, he's transhuman, he's disassembling, he's nearly done for ...or is he?

This is a story about the future of football. A new star emerges in a game that attracts, and demands, ever greater extremes of wealth, fame, and physical prowess. Ardro Holst, in his pursuit of glory, has to work out what is real and what is false, in sport, in life, and in love, in a new world in which the virtual has become almost indistinguishable from the real. He finds himself apparently abandoned by the people who have admired him, supported him, controlled him, and exploited him. Can Ardro rediscover who, and what, he is and work out who he can depend on in his darkest hour? This is a story about the future of football - and the future of love...

Tender, nostalgic, romantic, funny, absurd, magically real, speculative, ironic, nightmarish, entertaining and elegantly rendered...these stories span a century of Man's consciousness. Once, a man might be a Gatsby chasing his girl half-way around the world, the captain of a football World Cup winning side, a raging Picasso bull in a mythical maze refusing to yield lover or art till his last mortality-defiant egotistic gasp. Straightforward enough choices, dreams, behaviour. Suddenly he is man interrupted, underwhelmed, overworked, ridiculed, young, rock-solid or unreliable family man, father, husband, friend; his freedom evaporates: he's globe-trotting inbox-fatigued nonsense-hearing corporate, military civil-serving quiet ministry of Everyman. He's so exasperated he might just run away and prop up a bar, or contemplate mild treachery just to get by, and he's put-upon, as he zigzags across #TimesUp, political correctness, game theory, oh... and... the women in his life. Now here he stands staring down the barrel of the 21st Century - he's superman, he's transhuman, he's disassembling, he's nearly done for ...or is he?