Counter-Heritage

Take a Walk in my Boots

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...

A People’s History Chapter 4

A MISCELLLANY OF HISTORY A TEXTUAL WEAVING OF A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES A TEXTUAL SAMPLER Chapter Four  A few short years after our walk along Stroud’s High Street in the previous chapter, William Cobbett made his way through Stroudwater, as recorded in Rural Rides:...

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The Heavens in the Snow

Walking into the Past On a winter’s day with friends; The Heavens, where Bisley sat In the cleavage of the hills. Sunlight and clean bright water Pooled together to concentrate life, To bring people, sheep, grass and stone; Final gifting, leats, to complete this...

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The Heavens 2024 and beyond

Emma Kernahan: ‘A packed @stroudtrinityrooms on a wet and windy Sunday night to discuss the future of the Heavens Valley. The agreement to sell to the community is there but @friendsoftheheavens are in a race against time to raise the funds. £850k is the goal. £300k...

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The Diggers at Slimbridge

The Slimbridge Diggers Every Age Rewrites History But not always textually And the History may not even have been textual To begin with tbh   ‘Every Age Rewrites History?’: well, that takes me right back to 6th form scholarship-level history (yes, I did get a...

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