At the weekend, I went to Boris-loving Bromley and back twice. There, I've said it. Phew. The second time was on Sunday when my youngest son celebrated his eleventh birthday with a bunch of his friends at the local Quasar Elite. The first was on Saturday when my family visited one of my wife's brothers and his family, who live in Bromley (and are very nice people indeed, just in case you were wondering).
The original idea had been to watch Bromley FC play Bishop's Stortford in the Football Conference Blue Square South league. Why? Because of Dave Robert's book The Bromley Boys, a charming comic memoir about supporting "the worst football team in Britain" during the 1969-70 season. I was planning to write about the match and memoir together.
Alas, the weather forced a postponement, so until my brother-in-law and I can again synchronise our diaries with Bromley FC's fixture list, you'll have to make do with this winning excerpt from a season in the life of a very devoted fan of a losing suburban team. It provides, I suspect, an insight into certain type of Bromley mentality. Perhaps we could call it "Kentish". Forty years on, some things seem not to have changed.
My parents told me that because of my increasingly poor attendance at school and difficulty getting out of bed in the mornings, I would be boarding there.
Although this shouldn't have come as an enormous shock, it did. I was distraught, and pleaded my case for carrying on with the existing arrangement, which in theory was my waking at 7.30 a.m. getting the bus to Sevenoaks from the end of the road and getting to school in plenty of time for assembly which started at 9.00 a.m.
That was the theory.
What actually happened was that I'd leave the house around 8.00 a.m., wander in Bromley where I would to the Egg and Griddle and pass much of the day there, drinking tea. I would also spend hours on end at the office of the Bromley Advertiser, looking through full-sized prints of photos of Bromley games, occasionally buying one. My other regular place to visit was W.H.Smith, where I listened to the latest recordings in their flash now soundproof listening booth.
It was decided if I boarded at Sevenoaks, my school attendance would be more reliable. As the new school term I was beginning to realise the implications of becoming a boarder. The most obvious thing was that I would be forced to miss Bromley's midweek fixtures. The school was a 55 minute bus journey from the ground and I was sure my House Master wouldn't let me go.
Also, as if wandering through the streets in a straw hat wasn't bad enough, I'd have to wear a pink tie. It would have been easier to wear a sign around my neck inviting the town's hooligans to please beat me up.
Go on, treat yourself.
