Ed, Will and Ginger

Anyway, continuing for a moment the Paul Kingsnorth theme (yes I know, I know), back in April Paul had a feature published in The Telegraph about three jolly fellows who roam the country, forage for bantam egg sandwiches in hedgerows, sleep 'neath the stars and sing for their supper. It is worth a read.

'People like to put labels on us’, explains Ginger. ‘Troubadour, minstrel...’

…Busker? Tramp? Now it would be very easy to poke snarky fun at Ed, Will and Ginger. Which, in itself, is no reason not to do so: the juxtaposition of their anti-modern values and the Web 2.0 technologies they use to promote them is inherently amusing, or at least worthy of a middling Mitchell & Webb sketch. They regale passers-by with songs of the “riddle-me-fal-de-roddle-o” variety and then hand out cards promoting their website, which includes MP3 downloads. The incongruity is perfectly captured in this picture, in which one of the minstrels, ensconced in a suitably rustic pub, taps away at a spanking laptop which, presumably, he had to do a bit more than sing for.

But – as with poets, or British surfers who embrace the bleach-blonde Zen-lite lifestyle to its full extent – Ed, Will and Ginger are only laughable to the degree that they take the thing seriously. If the project is seen as a bit of adventure, as fun, as source material for a book and a website – even as a way of promoting folk music – then it is rather admirable, in the same way that anything involving a bit of pluck and determination is admirable.

They only become ridiculous if they are described in terms of a political movement. As Vern points out below, it is telling that Kingsnorth’s article appears in the Telegraph, when the Grauniad would seem his natural home. In fact, a major part of Kingsnorth’s worldview is a sort of British crunchy conservatism (although, to certain temperaments, the very act of protesting against the mainstream is in itself more important than any worldview the protester hopes to realise).

The central conceit of this brand of crunchiness is the idea that the modern world, and its cultural, economic and political structures, is erected on a bedrock of national folk traditions. The modern structures depend on greed and shallow individualism and are less ‘real’ than the rootsy, earthy things that underpin them. And, hope the more eschatological crunchies, they can be peeled away or might one day collapse under their own gluttonous weight, to reveal the Leveller’s idyl that always lay beneath.

The crunchies, of course, have it all the wrong way round. The idyl is mythical, the crafts (here Ginger carves a wooden spoon and blogs about it!) are Dressing-Up Box imitations of grim rural poverty. Alternative lifestyles can only spring up and flourish because supporting them is the thing they are an alternative to: a complex web of tax credits, tax payers, economic freedoms and restrictions, healthcare services, pension provisions and so on. Without the context of the liberal democracy they profess to despise, the crunchies are entirely meaningless. Nothing wrong with having folksy types about the place – they add to the richness and variety of life, and nobody loves a traditional English pub more than I do – but as emblems of a political vision they’re hopeless.

Ed, Will and Ginger illustrate the problem neatly. They can sleep rough and walk all day because they are young, fit and healthy, have no family responsibilities or dependents and are free to live entirely self-gratifying lives. They are impeccably well-spoken middle-class beneficiaries of a good education, acting out Lord of the Rings and Robin Hood fantasies. Tattooed men in tracksuits tap their feet to the rhythm, writes Kingsnorth revealingly, but it’s hard to imagine ‘Ed, Will and Ginger’ being replaced by ‘Lee, Jase and Scott’.

Above all, their method of supporting themselves is not in any sense scalable. They can exist as troubadours only because troubadours are scarce. “We want to show that it’s still possible to do things like this, and the only way to show that is by example. We’re sowing seeds, I suppose…” insists Ed. But if everyone takes to the lanes and dines on wild garlic, the lanes will soon lose their appeal and the wild garlic will have to be farmed to meet demand. They can only get a free supper from the friendly pub landlord because the landlord’s other customers are prepared to pay him. And the landlord is only willing to give them supper in exchange for a song because they are a novely act: if thirty or forty Ginger-inspired troubadours come tramping in every night offering a rustic ballad as payment for pie and chips, he’d soon be booting them out on their bottoms.

Fortunately, Will, Ed and Ginger don’t really seem to take themselves all that seriously. Their blog is rather enjoyable, they seem like decent coves and their singing is nice. The appeal of their 'endless' Walk, however, can’t last, because eventually they won’t be young enough and they’ll either meet women and stop, or carry on and grow mad, ill and unattractively trampish. And in fact it turns out that Ginger has already left the band, citing artistic differences. So, as they like to say, it goes.

Men and guns

“Don’t try to analyse it, just kill it,” hissed the Lancastrian dwarf. I was standing in a field in deepest Wales holding a shotgun. The ‘bird’ flew away from me and – bang, bang – I missed it with both barrels.

I didn’t enjoy clay pigeon shooting much because I was no good at it. This was annoying and confusing because I tend to take naturally to sporty things and in the past had shot rifles competently. My first clay of the day was a hit but I knew it was more luck than judgement; I couldn’t get the feel of the thing. The consolation was that I wasn’t quite the worst in the group. That’s men for you. Of course we all know that beneath the veneer of bonhomie lies a brutish competitiveness, but what saves us (I hope and believe) is the deeper layer of solidarity under that.

We’d come miles in a horrible mini-bus from Port Talbot, relying for navigation first on an inadequate, scale-less print-off map and then on the boom of gunshot. The range – unsignposted, off-road – turned out to be a wide bowl of scrubland topped with a cluster of knackered portacabins.

We got out the bus to look about and a bow-legged old dwarf scuttled up the hill to greet us. He was armed. I initially took him to be some sort of halfwit club mascot; he bantered crudely from the off and was dressed in a battered parody of sportin’ gear: waxed cap and jacket, tweedy somethings and welly-boots. But he was Lancastrian not Welsh and it gradually emerged that he was the owner. “This gun bought the place,” he said later, without boastfulness.

He gave us the tour. The largest and least knackered portacabin contained a tea urn, a couple of chairs and a great number of shooting trophies. Its walls were decorated with pictures of the dwarf holding those trophies, or similar ones. A second portacabin was the Gents’ lavatory (indescribable). Such were the amenities.

The dwarf turned out to be an excellent coach. Like the best schoolteachers he instinctively knew which members of the group could be the targets for gentle piss-taking and which could not. He surreptitiously made sure that every man hit at least a couple of clays, even if it meant virtually pointing the gun for him. We grew to worship him. During a lull he entertained us with trickshots – starting with the gun hanging down by his side and blasting the clays one-handed. He never missed.

So how, I wondered, does he combat the tedium of his own excellence? What is the satisfaction in destroying clay discs, and where do you go next? I was just starting to get the hang of it by the end, when we were shooting doubles, right and left. It seemed I was thinking too much, aiming too carefully. “Don’t analyse it, just kill it,” explained the dwarf. I missed again. He grabbed the gun from me and demonstrated by jabbing it vigorously at an imaginary enemy. “Like you’re poking it with a sword.” He handed back the gun. “Kill it! Kill it!” he hissed. I killed it, and then I killed the other bird too. Bang bang. It felt deeply, weirdly good.

At the end we all trooped off to use the Gents’. The sudden queue was such that we asked about using the Ladies’ too. “Sorry lads,” said the dwarf. “It’s all locked up for now.”

I looked again at the third and most knackered portacabin. It was obviously long disused; there weren’t even any steps to its door. Ladies didn’t come here much, apparently.

The Bright Lights, the Desolate Shores

Without thinking too much about it at the time, when I wrote the lyrics for Abba's songs the message I wished to convey tallies well with campaigns launched recently by humanist organisations in the UK, US and Australia: “There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Thus spake Bjorn from Abba in the Guardian. Suddenly the devastating anti-ecclesiastical implications of Dancing Queen become clear. He also reckons the teaching of agnosticism should be compulsory in schools, in order to guard against the dangers of indoctrination. He’s battling God-bothering headmasters over this:

The headmasters also put it to me that there were plenty of famous free-thinking, prominent figures who had gone to Christian schools. But really this just annihilates their own argument. These people learned to be free thinkers despite, not because of, their Christian schooling.

One of them is particularly topical this year, 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species. Charles Darwin may have gone to a very Christian school but it didn't prevent him from coming up with the "best idea in the world". Nor did it prevent him from abandoning his faith.

I don’t really follow Bjorn’s logic in the first paragraph there, but his vision of a post-religious world is intriguing. A world where everyone feels like Darwin did after he abandoned his faith. What a lark, eh?

Middle distance-gazing professionals gather in conference centres to discuss painless suicide techniques. Reclining in First Class on the Eurostar we eat Asian Fusion food from recyclable boxes and tap secret, bleak poems into our Apple notebooks. A thin couple consummates an illicit affair in a wintry Norfolk beach hut; they make cold love by the Bright light of a low-energy bulb then read each other Radiohead lyrics. A botox-bloated former lapdancer stabs a fork into her poached free-range egg and hums Does your mother know? The yolk dribbles over her perfectly pink organic smoked salmon. Geoffrey Hill stops worrying and enjoys his life. A defrocked priest hangs a framed print above his Ikea bed; it depicts the London Tube map. Fluorescent tubes buzz in the clinic. A headmaster explains that existence precedes essence. The pupils respect each other’s individuality then sing the new national anthem:

Sensitive, Seldom and Sad are we,
As we wend our way to the sneezing sea,
With our hampers full of thistles and fronds
To plant round the edge of the dab-fish ponds;
Oh, so Sensitive, Seldom and Sad
Oh, so Seldom and Sad.

In the shambling shades of the shelving shore,
We will sing us a song of the Long Before,
And light a red fire and warm our paws
For it's chilly, it is, on the Desolate shores,
For those who are Sensitive, Seldom and Sad,
For those who are Seldom and Sad.

Sensitive, Seldom and Sad we are,
As we wander along through Lands Afar,
To the sneezing sea, where the sea-weeds be,
And the dab-fish ponds that are waiting for we
Who are, Oh, so Sensitive, Seldom and Sad,
Oh, so Seldom and Sad.


That’s one of Mervyn Peake’s Rhymes without Reason. It is, I think, slightly better than Matthew Arnold.

Dead Zebras and the British Class System

Early on Sunday morning as the plane eased through the clouds and good old patchy-green England was spreading beneath me, I tried to crystallise the various poetic and philosophical thoughts that emerge when one is afforded a God’s-eye view of tiny sleeping towns and miniature cars and cows and so forth, so that I could share them with you. Fortunately I then remembered that you should never attempt to crystallise and share the various poetic and philosophical thoughts that emerge when one is afforded a God’s-eye view of tiny sleeping towns and miniature cars and cows and so forth. They are so terribly lame.

However, some hours earlier than that I was lying stretched on a bench at a Turkish airport, pondering the issue of class. (The benches at the airport are made of many curved wooden slats designed to look nice and to press uncomfortable horizontal stripes into the backs of passengers attempting to recline on them, so my sleepy ponderings were interspersed with dreams about prison bars and dead zebras.)

I was thinking about class because at the resort where Mrs Brit and I were enjoying a last lazy holiday for a good while as a sprog-free couple (as David correctly identified), a high proportion of our fellow guests were thirty and forty-something Britons sporting football shirts, shaven heads, big red beer bellies and copious tattoos. And that’s just the women, ho ho. The usual package holiday mix of Bristolians, Brummies, Glaswegians, Mancs, Scousers, Welsh and Cockneys, indistinguishable except by their accents and home strip. Buggies and brats and cider and cigarettes. The flag of St George or the Welsh Dragon on everything with the space to print it. The Sun (Mirror for the Scousers), kids with earrings, big dirty laughs, women on the karaoke belting out Mustang Sally. In other words, we are talking about what used to be called the British working class.

Except of course in the quantum flux the old tripartite system of English class division is now so hopelessly outdated that the term ‘working class’, with its images of Trade Unions and factory floors, is quaintly archaic. We are all Thatcher’s children, one way or another. The tattooed skinheads soaking up the bargain-priced Turkish sun are, what, plasterers, builders, plumbers, engineers, drivers? Armed forces too, naturally, but mostly contractors and small business-owners. They live in new houses on satellite estates and drive big family cars. They have exceptionally boozy barbecues whenever the weak English sun pokes its head out.

Yet I know lots of builders, plumbers, engineers, contractors and small-business owners - I play football and go on horrible stag nights with them – and very few of them have shaven heads and copious tattoos. So what we are talking about here is not a financial class, but a tribe.

Tattoos across the back and shoulders look aggressive and thuggish but look closer and nine times out ten they’re the names of the thug’s children writ in some poncey script, a la Beckham. The ferociously patriotic but aspirational David Beckham is, I guess, the hero of this tribe. Other heroes include Ricky Hatton, Del Boy, Jordan, Cheryl Cole and though overwhelmingly white, the Tribe is not racist so throw in Ian Wright for the Cockneys and Amir Kahn for the Mancs. (Interesting that of all Beckham’s many iconic haircuts, the skinhead is the easiest to achieve for the average middle-aged bloke, so perhaps that too owes as much to him as to squaddies and 80s gangs.)

I’ve never gone in for tribes but I’m easy about it. The tribe that really hates the Beckham Tribe is the Educated Left. We’re all Thatcher’s children, but the irony is that we’re all also children of centre-left politics. Aspiration is only one half of it; the other is the many victories won on behalf of workers: minimum wage, health and safety, working time etc. For the Educated Left, it must be very frustrating to wait so long for the working class to stage a Marxist revolution and seize power, only to realise that the working class was quite happy to go on package holidays, audition for The X Factor, watch football, read Jade’s autobiography and, where appropriate, vote Tory.

So perhaps the Beckham Tribe is the key to explaining why the Left has so lost its moral compass in recent years (as detailed in Nick Cohen’s excellent book What’s Left?). The lowest British class, the baseball-capped chavs stalking hopelessly around no-go housing estates in ever-accelerating generations of welfare-dependence and despair, is of no interest to the Left, whose half-arsed solution to the cultural gulf created by benefits and wealth redistribution is merely to demand more benefits and wealth redistribution. And it can’t be bothered to address domestic issues because it has turned its attention to Palestinians and Islamic fascists and anything else going so long as it is anti-American. The Beckham Tribe dons uniform and fights racist, anti-Semitic, misogynistic terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Educated Left, because it hates the Beckham Tribe, especially when it teams up with America, opposes it and screams Not in My Name.

Well maybe that's part of the story, I don’t know. I was just musing in between dreams about dead zebras. But I do know that nobody seems to have a good grasp on what the British class system is or means any more, and that a tribal categorisation would make more sense. Perhaps we should just split Britain up along supermarket lines. The Beckham Tribe is Asda but the key vote would be the Tesco Mum. Leaders could be chosen by a simple meritocracy: the person with the most Nectar points wins.

The dogs on St Mary Street howl

Stag party the other week. Wales. Clay pigeon shooting in a backwater not particularly near to Port Talbot, then a night of good old British binge-drinking in Cardiff city centre, a hell hole.

There are so many stag and hen parties running about in fancy dress in Cardiff that, to an observer at a very great distance, St Mary Street on a Saturday night might look like a big fun carnival. Up close one is unlikely to make that mistake; the atmosphere is many things but not fun. Male tribes like dog packs eye each other as they pass on criss-crossing pub crawls. Squawking broken-hearted slags bussed in from the Valleys and the godawful death traps and suicide raps - the Bridgend Massiv – exaggerate their drunkenness.

The stag was a chap I play football with and most of the party likewise. (Generally the non-footballers were significantly overweight, whereas the footballers were merely slightly overweight, which is a neat little snapshot survey of the benefits of regular exercise as youth slips away). He was dressed as a giant Mr Potato Head and carried a bag of charlotte spuds. We, the Tribe of the Bristolian Potato, followed our mascot, our totem, through the throngs. But the real head of the pack was the Best Man. He was an ideal choice: a chain-smoking shoulder-rolling stalker, king of the practical joke and the one-line knockout; a pub accountant always knowing exactly who owes what to the kitty; and a natural at the bar, pivoting and elbowing through the crowds to bellow his round.

The streets boom and swell (the smoking ban has spilled pubs onto the pavements) and the riot vans accumulate. Tension peaks at about 11pm, after which the wave breaks and St Mary’s Street is a Hogarthian nightmare, rivers of hot blood and booze.

It is a buzz, of course, but the drug wears off with the years. Being a chameleon of indeterminate and malleable accent I am able to accommodate myself reasonably well to all manner of social groups from football blokes to dinner party sophisticates, but perhaps without ever feeling fully accepted in any of them. Nothing special about that, most people are the same. Think of England’s First Law of Social Interactivity states that: The character of a group is generally not determined by an aggregation of the characters of its individual members, but rather is set by convention and some obscure process of mutual agreement and, apart from a few hardcore types at the centre, the members adapt themselves accordingly.

Thus we dumb ourselves down or talk ourselves up to suit the occasion.

This has never been a problem for me because I’ve never felt the need to decide whether I prefer high culture (classical concerts, the brilliant and hilarious poems of Geoffrey Hill, Nigeness) or low (football, beer, the background threat of physical violence). But the strict limits on permissible conversational topics in the laddish set is such a bore. Sport, birds, booze. You open your mouth and realise you can’t say it. There’s nothing to say. Somehow, in one relatively quiet pub, I did manage to talk to a fellow. I’d previously known nothing about him except that he plays in midfield and has a ferocious right foot shot. Turns out he’s a Doctor of Chemistry and does full time research at a university. I confessed I had a BA. Our talk was furtive, it felt like we’d broken a social taboo.

Didn’t last, we were soon all following our leader and our tuberous mascot into a deafening madhouse. At least I learned that the appeal of the traditional Saturday night on the town – pub, very noisy pub, club, kebab, taxi home – has moved from zero, which is where it was before the stag party, into the negative. The pub and kebab bits are still all right, but I have, it seems, reached the stage in life where it is no longer possible to pretend that standing scrunched, swigging a pint and failing to have a conversation because the music has been deliberately raised to a volume where conversation is impossible and therefore swigging pints ever more quickly is the only possible pastime, is fun.*

What’s more, I’d been tricked into staying at a backpackers hostel. Frigging bunkbeds. Much worse, communal bathrooms! Next morning I woke horribly early and realised I would have to use one. I’m way too old and well, rich for this, I thought, as made my trepidatious way down the corridor, dreading what might await me in a Sunday morning toilet in a hostel full of stags. But for once my luck was in – the cleaning fairies had been and everything was virgin new and sparkling. The sun streamed in through the windows, bathing a pyramid of new loo rolls in sweet Welsh light. Nobody else in the whole place had stirred. A silence save for some low rumbling snores. I was so relieved and happy I decided to make the most of it and have a shower. Suddenly the prospect of going through the last few hours of stagdom (fry up, hair of the dog) seemed intolerable. I wanted to get back to my life and my wife. So I quietly got dressed, packed my bag and resolved to sneak out of there like Renton at the end of Trainspotting. And, after a quick lie down to let a tsunami of nausea and headache pass, I did.

I walked to Cardiff Central railway station, elated and carrying my hangover about three feet above my head. It was a completely different town. Sundrenched, quiet, washed clean. But Cardiff were playing Swansea in a lunchtime kick-off, and even at 8.45am the riot police were forming ranks again, and outside the Wetherspoons grizzly men with hate-pinched faces gathered in gangs, drinking breakfast from cans of Blackthorn. I was grateful even for the replacement bus that took me a long route back to Bristol, via Newport where Yates’s Wine Lodge is inscribed with the motto: “Moderation is true Temperance”. Ha bloody ha, I thought. Cardiff is bad on a Saturday night but I bet Newport isn’t far off.

What is it about? It’s something to do with the working week, and the blood running cold and finding somebody itching for something to start. Maybe the long absence of a military draft. Something to do with the inaccessible Promised Land. Probably I used to get it but I don’t really any more. But still, the dogs on Main Street howl, because they do understand...

*It should be obvious that the vast city centre pub/clubs like Walkabout and Chicago Rock are purpose-built arenas for binge-drinking and are at the root of the ‘problem’, if that’s what it is. The simplest way to combat the binge culture would therefore be to force these places to have tables instead of standing areas and limit the decibel level to background ambience. This would remove the obvious cause of the weekend free-for-all without infringing on the freedoms of the middle aged, who enjoy their liver-destruction and oblivion-seeking more peaceably than do the youths of this great and lonely nation. Bit of politics for you there.

France

The Bayeux Tapestry is a thousand-year old cartoon strip with a thrilling plot and much graphic violence. There’s also a little bit of sex in the marginalia. It is one of the greatest artistic wonders of western civilisation. Or so they tell you - actually much of it is pretty shoddy; the proportion and perspective are all over the place. However, we generously overlook these things because we take the view that our 11th Century ancestor was a simple, primitive sort of chap and, much like the talking dog, the impressive thing is not so much how well he does it but the fact that he does it at all.

We are able to take this rather condescending line because fortunately we are at the very peak of human civilisation, and in another millennium hence our descendents will certainly not look back at our world – with our Twittering, our Agnostic Buses, our complete understanding of anthropogenic global warming, our End of History and our iPhones – and offer a patronising chuckle and pat on the head.

Anyway, even though the Bayeux Tapestry is rightfully British, it dwells in a strange foreign country called ‘France’. You may have heard of it. It is reached by a gruelling ocean voyage, and long and arduous the time was, tossing and turning on the fretful seas with only an over-priced bar, some duty-free shops, three restaurants and two cinemas to pass the six or seven hours, ere we spied land. There was also a disco full of French students dancing to YMCA – a tune with accompanying actions cooked up a couple of decades before they were born. Well at least that’s one thing that we can say with confidence our descendents 1000 years hence will still be doing. Our era will be remembered as the one that gave to Eternity the Village People, and until the final heat death of the universe, space station cantinas across the galaxies will see strange and terrible creatures whooping gleefully onto the dance floor when that “baaa ba ba” horn intro starts, all impatient to arrange their various tentacles and bionic limbs into the shape of a Y, an M, a C and an A as they bop.

Well since we were in France anyway we decided to do a few of the essential French things, such as: mooching jealously and gloomily round a market full of outstanding produce and casual animal cruelty; eating croissants; drinking cheapish vin rouge; and making various traumatic visits to what pass for public lavatories.

We also found time to have an evening meal in Ouistreham with some quite delicious food and perhaps the rudest service I’ve ever encountered. It was rude in that spectacular way that you can still only find in France: a total disregard for the wishes or comfort of the customer and a blank and immovable refusal to make even the slightest deviation from the menu. The Great Gallic Non. In Britain, that expert kind of rudeness is very much a dying art, so coming up against it is a shock to the system. God knows what the Americans make of it – for Yanks, a menu is merely a starting point for negotiations, not a take-it-or-leave-it-buster ultimatum. We left a tip of zilch, which I think I’ve only done twice before in my life.

Of course, if there is any area in this world where the locals have no right to be rude to the Brits, it is Normandy. We visited the D-Day landing beaches, Pegasus Bridge and the British cemetery at Bayeux. Scanning the ages on the headstones was a grim business: 20, 21, 19, 19, 23... That’s a lot of young English lads, and their lost and never-to-be marriages and children, grandchildren, now great-grandchildren. Sometimes I wonder if it’s still obscenely early to be forgiving about all this. But of course we’re embarrassed about our pensioners and their outdated xenophobic prejudices; we see them as archaic, primitive as Norman and Saxons. The machine-gun violence still isn’t as amusing as Harold Godwinson getting an arrow in the eye, but give it another millennium and you never know.

Be that as it may, we liberated the ungrateful Frogs in 1944 and left them to carry on their wicked ways unmolested. They’re aliens, honestly. Strolling through Bayeux the penny dropped, though no doubt you’ve had the same insight at one time or another. The difference between Britain and France, the crux of the opposition of souls, lies in the patisseries. Where there is a row of competing businesses in England, the result is innovation. Special offers! Buy X Get Y Half Price! Above all… NEW NEW NEW! Try our exciting new blueberry, avocado and chilli flavour! Try the latest import from Outer Mongolia!

There’s no NEW! in France. All the patisseries in the row sell exactly the same croissants, pan au chocolats and prissy little tartlets as everyone else, feeding the monoculture what it wants, has always wanted, will always want. France is convinced it has achieved the last word in civilisation and is determined to preserve it without deviation or hesitation and with as much repetition as possible. It is admirable, tragic, heroic, depressing, suffocating, exhausting. In France, there is No Future.

Mona Lisa, Scale, Time, Roy of the Rovers

Passing a petrol station yesterday morning, I was surprised to note that Nintendo Wii are using the Mona Lisa to advertise the game Pro Evolution Soccer 2009.



Closer inspection, however, revealed the enigmatic smile to belong to the Barcelona striker Lionel Messi, which I suppose makes more sense.

Mona and Messi do have much in common though, when you think about it: the iconic international status, the unmistakeable touch of genius, the ability to waltz through the Malaga defence and curl a left-footer into the top corner... Of course I’m being silly. If anything, the Mona Lisa is surely a no-nonsense defender in the Tony Adams/John Terry mould. Willing to put her head where others are afraid to put their feet, and if it’s bouncing around in the box, just put your boot through it, find Row Z, GET RID!

GET RID! Those two words echo around the nation’s parks and amateur league football pitches every Sunday morning, and illustrate why England never win anything. Children playing on large muddy pitches is not conducive to the development of passing skills and close control; it is conducive to GETTING RID! Big boys who can hoof the ball into the next field dominate. Personally I would make all kids play exclusively indoor football, with walls and no throw-ins, until the age of 15. Stevie Gerrard somehow managed to become Roy of the Rovers despite all this though, mind, so I could be wrong as usual.

Talking of which, they’re bringing Roy back. That was my favourite boyhood comic. I once had a letter published in the Hamish’s Hotshots page, which was quite a thrill. It was an odd comic though, with a mixture of ‘serious’ adventure strips (Roy himself, Goalkeeper, Billy’s Boots) and overtly silly ‘funny’ ones (Hotshot Hamish and Mighty Mouse). As a boy I drew no clear distinction between the two types, and took the silly ones pretty damn seriously.

A notable thing about all these sporting comics was the device of using members of the crowd to provide expository remarks while the action was taking place. So in the split second that Roy Race unleashes his famous Rocket shot and the ball is exactly halfway to the goal, a chap in the crowd would be speechbubbled saying “Roy’s gone for goal! He’s hit it hard, but will the keeper save it?”, and his mate would reply “It’s now or never, there’s only seconds left on the clock and if this goes in Melchester will win the cup, and that could be just the thing to rescue the club from financial ruin and also save Roy’s marriage!”

Time is meaningless in comics. My goodness, I must have absorbed absolutely tons of this nonsense. Pictures are what count to children, much more so than the words in books. When you pick up a long-forgotten childhood favourite, the illustrations hit you like Proust’s madeleine but it’s amazing how slight the stories turn out to be. This is because as a nipper you spend hours staring at the pictures until you know every detail, and you invest each one with a world of meaning and semi-conscious backstory. Much as adults do with the Mona Lisa, I suppose. For children, eight-page books are as vast as Biblical epics. So Scale must be something you grow into, or else a complete illusion, like Time.