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Obsessed as we are with Beckham’s toe

Stuart Butler

26th April 2002

Well I’m sitting here in the garden, sitting under the apple tree with nobody else but me, having just dug the potato patch and now I’m grabbing a breather before the wife arrives home with new orders and the kids with new demands for money.

End of season…Radio 5 on … a cup of tea… beautiful April afternoon… so perfectly English…A little moment of leisure – “A dull life this if full of care, We have no time to stand and stare” etc..

Which reminds me – if anyone out there is a fan of W.H. Davies, the tramp poet creator of these famous lines, then our musical-poetical-dramatical radio ballad of his life is available from us for the princely sum of £10. “Days That Have Been”, the Stroud Football Poets first CD, grew out of a commissioned play. Davies lived the last few years of his life in Nailsworth (that’s where Forest Green F.C. is) near Stroud. A fascinating cove, he lost a leg in Canada, riding the rails in a bid to get to the Yukon Gold Rush. After that, he went on a peg leg tramp round England, hawking his poems and pins, sleeping in the workhouse and in doss houses, until patronised by G.B. Shaw and Edward Thomas. Fame and some fortune quickly followed and he was lionised by high society around the time of the Great War. It’s a good story – and well told by us on the CD!

But for the moment, I shall enjoy the excitement of the last days of the season – and then enjoy the leisure of that brief interlude before the World Cup takes over our lives. More on the website about our ideas for that e’er long, but for the moment, keep those Beckham poems coming in!

“A dull life this if full of woe,
Obsessed as we are with Beckham’s toe.”

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Source: http://footballpoets.org/news/2002/04/26/obsessed-as-we-are-with-beckhams-toe/