Happy Thursday Evening 2024

It must have been 1965,
We were having a lunchtime kick-about.
‘It’s Good News Week’ by Hedgehoppers’ Anonymous
Was playing on someone’s transistor
Just behind the goal nearest the school,
Someone was puffing out on the wing,
And crossed hopefully towards the edge of the box,
Where I had strayed, and where I stood,
Predicting the precise path of the ball.
It came, as anticipated, at waist height:
I leapt from the ground before the ball’s arrival,
Levitating horizontally a metre up in the air,
To meet the ball on the volley,
And send it hurtling into the top left hand corner.
I landed on the ground, elated,
It was the best goal I had ever scored,
A perfect harmony of prediction, execution and ambience,
And it was all so perfect that I didn’t even celebrate,
I just stood there in a Zen state of bliss,
Knowing that such an immaculate conception
Only happens once in A Good News Week Lifetime.

But tonight, nearly sixty years later,

At walking football at Stratford Park,

The ball came to me twenty yards from goal;

I hit it with the outside of my boot,

Creating a perfectly accurate curve,

That saw the ball travel towards Selsley Common,

And then arc through the midsummer sunlight,

In the direction of Cashes Green’s chip shop.

The goalkeeper, as they say, quite rightly,

Stood rooted to the spot, caught unawares.

No one could have predicted this parabola.

I raised my right arm in quiet triumph.

Team mates and opposition alike

Praised the perfection of the execution

With shouts that rose to the very skies.

It was, once more, a moment of Zen bliss.

‘I can still do it,’ I said, ‘on occasions.’

Nick replied: ‘It’s never gone away.’

As T.S. Eliot might have commented,

If he’d been playing last night:

‘We shall not cease from exploring.

And the end of all our scoring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.’