Category: Write Up

Buddleia in broad gauge bloom down on Stroud station,
Crazy golf flags out at the Brunel Goods Shed,
As I lazily read the Stroud News on the train to London,
Until I came across Rodda Thomas of Crown and Sceptre fame:
‘’ The whole game, in real time, kicking off at 3pm on Saturday,
exactly 50 years to the minute since the real game kicked off …
We will also pretend not to know the final score and it will be only 10 shillings
(50 p in new money) a ticket too.”
This struck me as a sort of post-modernist collision with the Likely Lads:
The No Hiding Place episode when they try to avoid finding out
The score of an England game before watching the highlights on TV …
But now with the clever conceit of a pub post-modernist TV twist …
This time we actually know the score but pretend we don’t …
Not so much a suspension of disbelief as a suspension of knowledge …
I suppose that’s why Chris Farlowe was number one on the day:
‘Out of Time’, July 30th 1966.

The train trundled on to Swindon and more Stroud news from 1966,
Real, this time, no pretending:
The Cainscross and Ebley Co-op bread vans were being withdrawn,
Losing money, shopping habits changing, supermarkets …
Mr. and Mrs. Staines, directors of Taylor Bros Ltd since the war,
Were retiring and so the 70 year firm in Gloucester Street was to close:
The newspaper said it
‘Had served generations of cycling schoolboys
and vehicle owners in its 70-year history.’

There was no mention of where cycling schoolgirls might go.

By Didcot, I was on to the Guardian, to discover another World Cup tale:
The blue plaque unveiling at Bobby Moore’s childhood Barking home –
His daughter, Roberta, said:
“This is where it all began – kicking a ball out here in the street
with his friends before embarking on an incredible journey
which we all know led him up the steps to collect the World Cup
from the Queen at Wembley 50 years ago this week.’
By now, I really was beginning to think that everything really is all interlinked,
In a cosmic hyper-reality Alice through the Looking Glass sort of way,
Obvs,
Especially when we got to Reading,
Where I was now on the Guardian G2, and serendipitously reading
About John Keats’ ‘negative capability’, or, as Stuart Jefferies put it:
Humanity ‘is capable of being in uncertain systematic doubt,
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’

Which is just what we’ll be doing up at the Crown and Sceptre, I suppose,
In a sort of post-modernist, knowingly ironic self-referential way,
Where John Keats meets Bobby Moore meets the Likely Lads
Meets Jean Baudrillard sort of thing,
(Blimey! There goes Battle of Britain class, Lord Dowding,
34052 in steam at Southall – perhaps it is 1966.),
And it was all very well for Baudrillard to say:
“Power is only to willing to allow football
a diabolical responsibility for stupefying the masses”,
And I daresay I might agree with that some times,
But I’ll see you up the pub on Saturday,

For once, I really can’t see us losing.
Can you?
Might go to extra time though.

Enter Edgar, King Lear, Jon Parkin, Ye Beast, Dale Vince as Duke of Frocester, Scotty Bartlett and various morris dancers as footballers
Scene ; The white cliffs of Dover

‘Come on, sir; here’s the place: stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ’tis, to cast one’s eyes so low!
The footballs high that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as the Beast: half way down
Hangs one that goal-hanger lurks, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The football men, that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring Beast,
Diminish’d to a speck; a speck, a Beast
Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge,
That on the unnumber’d idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high. I’ll look no more;
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.
But wait anon! The Beast doth soar high yet –
He crashes the ball high in the Dover net.
My Lord! Come thee hence to scry this wondrous scene.

A late winner methinks for the lads of Forest Green.’

When you explore the Brunel Goods Shed’s maze,
You might want to reflect on the parallels
Between mazes and labyrinths and the human mind –
Amaes: Old English, delusion or delirium …

A maze:
A representation of self-analysis and mystification,
A wander through the mind so as to discover
The fundamental assumptions and determinants
Of one’s thoughts, ideas and ideology:
The a priori and the posteriori in a young life’s
Acculturation, socialization and mystification;

Mystification:
The presentation of social facts as though natural:
Inequality, austerity and capitalism, for example;

Don’t forget to take your thread with you:

A stitch in time might save your mind.

May Day Walk:
from the Source of the Slad Brook to its Confluence with the Frome

Seventeen of us gathered at Bulls Cross,
(Oblivious of the midnight ghost coach spectre)
To cross longitude line 88 and a threshold
To another liminal world,
Where the hangman swung in Deadcome Bottom,
Where Cabbage –Stalk- Charlie and Percy-from-Painswick
Watched us from the shadows of the bluebell woods.

We reached the source of the Slad Brook,
Beech leaf green with a gravity rainbow,
Tripping to the sea, and tripping us
Two hundred years to water wheels and weavers.
We talked of Lee and Robert Frost and Edward Thomas –
But before we could take a path less travelled,
A redcoat appeared out of the wood to read the riot act.

We descended towards the village,
(Miss Flynn there: down by the pond)
When a young spinner stopped us in our tracks,
She told us why she had to go on strike,
Why there had been riots and gatherings
At the mills and on the hillsides and in Stroud;
She showed no remorse, nor regret, but pride.

Others looked for the invisible
What is hidden in the landscape,
But denoted on a map:
I saw Kel bend down and pick a roadside leaf,
Just as we reached longitude line 87;
We talked of longitude, chronometers, the Empire and slavery,
Just as we reached Stroud scarlet town.

The brook had now lost its wild dignity;
Culverted and trapped and tunneled,
But sometimes finding daylight in the streets,
At Badbrook, the bus station and the railway viaduct,
Then trickling past Macdonald’s and the main road,
Beneath and around a roundabout,
To reach the Frome, the Severn and the sea.

It was just another sultry Tuesday
At the Clothiers Arms on the Bath Road,
Beer and fags and crisps and mobile ‘phones,
When a flash contingent of walkers popped up,
All arrayed in Stroud Scarlet uniform:
T-shirts, frocks, dresses, jackets, tunics, leggings,
Seventy -five people demonstrating
Their commitment to Rodborough Fields,
With a meander through time and space;
William Cobbett and weavers’ riots
(‘I have the sweat of the brow, but no bread’),
Mills, ponds, canals, bridges and viaducts,
Kingfishers, dragonflies and butterflies,
Fronds and ferns by the shaded River Frome;
We ascended side by side through the fields,
To listen by our venerable oak tree,
Stroud scarlet stretched on shared tenterhooks,
Sunlight shimmering through the scarlet flags,
A silent evangelical procession,
Pilgrims’ Progress on the straight and narrow path,
Memories recorded by the gateway,
A pitched camp of symbolic resistance,
Standing sentinel in Rodborough Fields.

Thanks to Mike and Richard and John and everyone for making this such an utterly memorable occasion – and thanks to BBC2, too, for their appearance.