This mornings Crouch End to Putney Bridge thing is yesterdays Crouch End to Putney Bridge thing but with nine additional words Ive spent the last twenty-four hours hand-picking, some proper punctuation and a brand-new title suggested by Carol Eccleston. If you commented yesterday, please feel free to comment again (as long as you improve your punctuation). *** This Side Of The Sun Bigger, darker, fiercer than us, we approached them like boy-book explorers discovering a tribe, unexpectedly, in a Victorian jungle (but without guns. Or a belief in our own superiority. Or moustaches). 9-0 down in seven minutes. Until this moment Id never wondered what they made of fifteen pale pasty poofters, full of a soft hormonal rage, full of a need to respect them, full of guilt for the sins of our fathers and our fathers fathers and, almost certainly, our fathers fathers fathers. Until this moment, theyd always been just the supporting cast in one of my three anecdotes. From Tottenham they were - not even Edmonton - and they scared us. My mate Keith, to this day, denies being scared but we both know the truth. And soon it was 18-3. To them. Obviously. And soon the ref blows for half time and soon we trudge off to a chorus of tuts and a disappointed stare from Anne who I really fancied and had made the rainy, Livingstone-like journey from Bush Hill Park just to see me play. She said. Annes stare raked across me like studs in a ruck. But there was worse to come. Our Geography teacher, the one I never liked for his smug belittling of the weak kids - the ones with weird eyes and ill-fitting trousers, the ones like me but exaggerated - our Geography teacher was our coach, our Svengali, our Malcolm McLaren, our Cloughie, our Fuhrer. He knew as much about rugby as Cloughie knew about the Pistols or Adolf knew about offside but he lambasted us at half-time, denied us an orange. Berated us. Excoriated us. Denied us another orange. And then told us we were better than this lot, cleverer: they were nothing. Nothing. And then he plucked the guilt and the clever-boy fear from our hearts, laid it on the ground in front of us, stamped on it until it was mush. We listened and we watched and we swallowed and we went back on and we won. 30-18. I scored a try. Couldve been five. Two, anyway. As we ran off the pitch in triumph, we heard our hearts sing again. And as we showered and yelled and mocked and swore in the changing-room, we knew we really were superior.
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 06:45:45 +0000
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