Counter-Heritage

Take a Walk in my Boots Stroud Walking Football Club (SWFC)   History doesn’t have to be about the great and the famous and the extraordinary. It can be about ordinary people too. For it’s true to say that ordinary lives are extraordinary too: it’s how you look at it – as William Blake said: ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.’ Well, at ‘Take a Walk in my Boots’ at Broady’s in the High Street in Stroud, we don’t reveal a life and a history in an hour, but we do something similar in 40 minutes or so per person. But what is this ‘Take a Walk in my Boots’ of which I speak, I hear you say or think. The idea is that a member of SWFC takes the stage and a mic with another player who has a mic: one asks the questions and the other answers to reveal the backstory of their life. And what’s so weird and wonderful about that you ask? Hasn’t the format of This is your Life been on television since the distant days of two channels in black & white? Doesn’t contemporary television cosset itself and its viewers with the chat show format? Well, this is what makes it different: we are a group of some thirty or so people who are all at least fifty; mostly in their sixties, with a smattering of over seventies. And we all play walking football at Stratford Park in Stroud with the Stroud Walking Football Club. This was originally set up to assist people with their mental and physical health – but like Topsy … Some us play three times a week; some twice and some just the once. Some...