The Ned Wood Archive

Nothing can change

The shape of things to come

Max Frost and the Troopers

On the Monday, I met up with Sniff and Annie in the Coffee Bar.  Well, like usually happens, I was sitting in there and Sniff came in and started to chat and then Annie came in and tried to start to chat.  Only me and Sniff were talking football, which kind of left Annie out of it.  You know how it is when you suddenly discover someone with a shared interest.  Pretty obnoxious in retrospect for me and Sniff to hog the conversation, but there was a most consequential game coming up that evening, and naturally our minds were inclined to wander.  We did try to explain the significance, but Annie really didn’t want to know.

“It’s almost our last game of the season.  We have to win it to stay in with a chance of going up.  We’ve got 48 points which isn’t enough.  If we lose, we’ve had it.  If we win and the other games go our way, we’re pretty much there.”

“So you and Sniff are playing football tonight, are you?” says Annie.

“No, we are not playing, the team we support is”.

“So, in what way is it “we”?  How are you involved?  Do you pick the team?  Do you iron the shorts?  Do you make the tea at half time?”

“No, but we would given half a chance”

“So, you’re not involved, are you?  So why do you keep saying “we”?”

“Annie, we couldn’t be more involved.  We’ve been waiting years for this to happen…..”

And so on, Sniff and me taking it in turns, but without luck.  So we give up.  She gets mad and throws something at us – it must have been something heavy like a plate because it hit my arm and hurt.  Then she walks out leaving us to shrug our shoulders and chew over our chances.

“I think you upset her, mate,” he says.  Then he changes tack slightly and starts grilling me about my life story.

“What’re you doing down here?” he asks.  I was about to ask him the same question.  In his case, he didn’t really have a choice.  You follow your old dears around till you’re eighteen or whatever.  Like I say, he was still in school.  At least he should have been in school, because he was supposedly doing his A levels.  Maybe he had study leave or something.  Come to think about it you never usually saw him during the day, only at weekends and in the Union bar or Glen Bar of an evening.  

“I dunno,” I said in answer to his question.  Why had I gone down there?  I had the choice.  I could have gone anywhere.  I should have gone to Nottingham to be nearer the ground, so I could see all the home games.  I can’t explain why – it just seemed like a good idea at the time.  I get to see Forest in the holidays when I’m at home and I see the away games down here, in Bristol, and London.

Then me and Sniff talk about Cloughie and whether Forest have changed since he came.  Sniff can remember 74 which was the year we were supposed to go back up when Allan Brown was the boss and Duncan McKenzie played for us.  Like me, he he’s noticed some of the players we liked, perhaps overestimated in our schoolboy innocence, have moved on.  Like Paul Richardson and George Lyall.  But some of the others have stayed like Ian Bowyer and Martin O’Neill and Tony Woodcock and John Robertson.  And like me, he wants to talk about the way we play – which sometimes means buzzing the ball around for the first twenty minutes after which we either lose interest or, at other times, take teams apart.  We both know that it’s not the winning that matters, it’s the taking apart.  We start getting on our high horses and we both pontificate on the correct way of playing and how the Trickies were the only team that held the key.  And remembering what Bernie and Chris had said about the right way of living and all of that jazz, I said we were both Dharma Reds, which struck a chord with Sniff, because he came round to my room that night and inscribed the Four Noble Truths in elegant green ink on the not so nicely white-washed wall of my room near where I put my coffee table (‘so you can read them as you meditate, sitting cross legged on the floor like this’ – and he demonstrated).  Of course the Four Noble Truths were subsequently covered with the George Harrison poster from All Things Must Pass, an album I’d saved and saved for, but rarely play now, except for Wah-Wah and Awaiting on You All.  And the Four Noble Truths which he inscribed and which may, for all I know still be there, read:

The Four Noble Truths as revealed to Jon (Sniff) Moore.

• Football is beauty, Football is truth.  That is all you need to know.
• The path to true enlightenment is the correct playing of the beautiful game.
• The correct method of playing the beautiful game is to pass the ball on the ground, simply, to feet, or into space.
• Brian Clough is the Supreme Being.

I didn’t really agree with the last one.  Cloughie can sometimes walk on water, but I think a supreme being would have won promotion before the beginning of May, don’t you?  Especially in a division with the likes of Hull and Blackpool, both of whom we’d lost to that season.

Later on, when Chris saw what Sniff had written, he had a good laugh.  He asked if I’d let the Pope play centre forward for us.  I didn’t think I would.  Then he asked if I’d believe what the manager of England had to say about karma.  I didn’t know what he meant.  Bernie said it was a koan – you know, one of those riddles that Zen masters ask you in an attempt to get you thinking your way to enlightenment.

Later, at about 9:30 that night, Sniff comes back into my room to update the league positions.  Or at least ours.  We’ve won 2-1 at Plymouth.  50 points.  He takes down the Man Who Sold the World poster and changes the numbers.  Winning 2-1 is GOOD NEWS, because we have to keep winning to keep us ahead of Bolton, but neither Sniff nor I think it makes it any more likely we’ll go up.  It does mean, however, that Southampton, with 40 points and only four games left CANNOT FINISH ABOVE US.  So we celebrate with the couple of bottles of beer Sniff has brought with him and kid ourselves some more that we are Zen Football Masters and know the secrets of promotion and karma.

Then after three or four swigs, he asks me about Annie.  As in “so how are you getting on with the blond?”  And I thought I was hearing an echo from the weekend.  Have you heard that theory that if you can get hold of sensitive enough microphones you can pick up things that were said in a room days or even years before.  Because Jo had said something similar to me the day before when we were eating our beans on toast.  She just asked, “Hey Riff, How’s Annie?” out of the blue.  And I’d just said “Dunno”, which is what I said to the Sniffer, but I was thinking why’s he asking me?  Why is everyone asking me about Annie?  So I asked him what did he mean, but he said nothing.

But after he’d gone and I was rearranging my posters to hide his art I stared thinking about her.  Not like you do when you’re crazy about someone and you plan when and how you could bump into them and what you’d say to them to impress them, but more replaying the short clip I’d got in my head of her running the show in the TV room.  Then I got out my copy of Gabriel’s album and played Here Comes the Flood and that set my mind haring off at a tangent imagining all manner of biblical scenes before settling on this recurring daydream I’d have where I’m walking along some deserted strand somewhere with just an umbrella for company.

Now, the next day, the Tuesday, I meet up with Bernie and Chris.  Chris doesn’t come into the coffee bar much, but today must be special.  He’d started telling us about how that night was a full moon and how peaceful and white it would be to walk out under the moonlight.  How just by walking under the moon and thinking of nothing but the moon, we’d be that one step closer to enlightenment.  And Bernie was hooked and carried on about how we’d need to mount some big expedition, but Chris just sat back, calmly leaning against the wall saying he’d missed the point.  

And Annie came in and said Hi to the three of us and listened for a while and caught hold of the way the conversation was headed and started telling us, mainly Bernie mind, because he responded the most enthusiastically, about her plans for the full moon.  She said she and her mate Viv, whoever she was (and it was mainly Viv‘s idea she said) and some other first year girls they both knew, would find a secluded spot on the common, strip naked, smear their bodies with woad, and practice these pagan fertility rites that Viv had read about.

I thought it sounded a bit far-fetched, but Bernie encouraged Annie to tell us more and suggested we all meet up.  Chris merely sat, cross-legged on his bench and smiled at Bernie.

When she left, Bernie asked us if we thought we should join in and both me and Chris had a good laugh at his expense, because we could see Annie was having a laugh, but Bernie had bought the tale hook, line, and sinker.