John Keats and Bobby Moore and the Likely Lads and Jean Baudrillard at the Crown and Sceptre

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The Cainscross and Ebley Co-op bread vans were being withdrawn,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.