A convoy of tractors rolls along Woodlands Avenue every Saturday morning, and it’s starting to become frustrating. We play a different team from Burghfield nearly every week, all of them mystifyingly named after a colour which bears no relationship to the shade of their kit. A haven for the colour blind. But the question is, why don’t they set up a league with other teams from the venereal belt instead of troubling us every week? Nately Scures, Preston Combover, Aldermaston Soke, Tutts Clump. There’s a bright future for you, Burghfield, if only you could lift your heads and see it.
But anyway, we had to play them and, reassuringly, they scored after 1.3 seconds, buoyed by fresh farmyard protein: ‘breakfast with the master in the morning, feel the breeze and brush against a cow’s leg mmmm!’ We struggled to support our strikers, big time. It reminded me of when M&S simply couldn’t find a way to support Jeremy Paxman (but the confusing thing about that was, why did he go to the media with it? Why not keep it between himself and M&S customer services?)
Sometimes you need to abandon the game plan. There are days when all you’ve realistically got to offer is a primal scream or the incidental offerings of the degenerate – all meaning is lost, almost before you wake up. Listening to James Taylor and The Dixie Chicks in the evening cannot prevent you from waking up like a man or woman possessed, tearing through the house disgracefully in a bid to leave it.
Wokingham & Emmbrook lost touch with the stratagems of Thursday, as we all do from time to time, omitting to pass or play much relevant or coherent football for the entirety of the game. Evan was bench bound for most of the game with the double whammy of a hand and nose injury.
Connor was superhuman at times but that single-mindedness was a double-edged sword; he was brilliant but sometimes without the added and crucial effect of fostering the same quality in others. All in all it was a good effort but ultimately ‘not right’ as Roy Walker would say, and we were left to ponder one of life’s deepest mysteries: Lower Earley.
Why do we play a different outfit from Burghfield every week, but never a team from Earley, Lower Earley, Maiden Erlegh or any other form of Earley? It’s a big place and just on the outskirts of Woodley. Does it have an identity? Is it the Surrey of Reading, existing only so you can leave it? And where are the Lower Earley landmarks? Where is its spiritual heart? I think of Rushey Way, but ultimately that’s misguided. It’s more of an arterial route.
Lower Earley’s archetypal road, its spiritual touchstone, its ultimate conduit, its calling card, is Kilnsea Drive. Watch it curve in a beautiful arc through South East Reading, uniting its cul-de-sacs with effortless elegance. You could argue that it blends beauty and meaning like no other street in Reading. If we could only tap into that. We wouldn’t need Burghfield, or we wouldn’t need the full batty spectrum of the Burghfield rainbow, anyway.
Wilderspool Causeway 