All these years I’ve supported Plymouth Argyle, the football club from the city where I lived as a boy, while my father was still serving there in the Royal Navy. And now they are going to be back in the Football League next season (which us old people still call the Second Division) which is where they surely belong. Argyle nearly went broke a few years ago, so it will be great next season to see the team back in its true position. Football is the people’s game. Long may it continue to be so.
When I was a child, I had a Grannie, Aileen Maltby. When she came to see us, she would sit at the kitchen table drinking tea. And as she did so she smoked, non stop. She didn’t even take the cigarette out of her mouth while she was speaking, it would balance precariously on her lip. A drift of smoke would curl upwards into her grey hair, which had developed a tobacco-coloured stripe at the front. Her conversation with my mother, sitting at the opposite end of the table, was often about her old hockey friend
As a child I always knew that my grandmother had played hockey for England, and was later an international selector. In the 1960s, long after her playing days, the England women’s hockey team were given one Saturday each year when an international match was played at Wembley, and old internationals and selectors like her would get free tickets. As we lived in Gerrards Cross, much closer to the stadium than my grandparents’ cottage in Northamptonshire, she would arrive by car for a break on her way to the ma