Dear Mary, yes it would be bliss, To eat some sprouts with you in Diss, That levellers we may be reckoned, Perhaps we’d better eat some seconds, But if the points they dare to switch, We must avoid West Bromwich. The local team it suffers routs, Its Safeway sells few brussels sprouts, So Mary give […]

Thanks for Gordon Banks and Yashin was smashin’, (And feline, too; a hint of the animal, as well as madness, Is appealing in a goalie, don’t you think?) But the name that I beg is that of Harry Gregg, Who went back into the aeroplane at Munich in 1958, And pulled out the injured; No-one […]

Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957, and Team Universe Six years old and I’m in love with the American Dream, Disney, popcorn, Bugs Bunny jokes and strawberry ice cream, Bug eyed, chewing Hershey bars, watching movies at the base, Baseball with the crew cut kid with the freckled southern face, Trying to teach him soccer and the […]

Buy George, bye George, by George, It’s my jubilee too this year, Fifty years of hopes and fears, And while you couldn’t call my life A total exercise in active citizenship, You couldn’t call it total subjection either, I suppose. But it’s fifty years of being both English and British – An infant school pupil […]

Doctor Foster went to Gloucester All in a shower of rain, He stepped in a puddle Right up to his middle And never went there again; So he wouldn’t know about All the ways in which we shout “Come on England!” So, listen and give a big hand To Albanian, Arabic and Cantonese, Bangla, Creole […]