it is a reasonable question to put to a seventeen year old who is still in the sixth form at school and whose only regular income is 1 a week during the football season from cleaning the mud-drenched kits of a local team at the launderette ... a weekly routine in which i am wordlessly castigated by the middle-aged women who look on in disgust at my washing machine with its agitated water , the colour of boiled diarrhoea .