Take a Walk in my Boots
Stroud Walking Football Club
(SWFC)
History doesn’t have to be about the great and the famous and the extraordinary. It can be about ordinary people too. For it’s true to say that ordinary lives are extraordinary too: it’s how you look at it - as William Blake said: ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.’
Well, at ‘Take a Walk in my Boots’ at Brody’s in the High Street in Stroud, we don’t reveal a life and a history in an hour, but we do something similar in 40 minutes or so per person.
But what is this ‘Take a Walk in my Boots’ of which I speak, I hear you say or think.
The idea is that a member of SWFC takes the stage and a mic with another player who has a mic: one asks the questions and the other answers to reveal the backstory of their life. And what’s so weird and wonderful about that you ask? Hasn’t the format of This is your Life been on television since the distant days of two channels in black & white? Doesn’t contemporary television cosset itself and its viewers with the chat show format?
Well, this is what makes it different: we are a group of some thirty or so people who are all at least fifty; mostly in their sixties, with a smattering of over seventies. And we all play walking football at Stratford Park in Stroud with the Stroud Walking Football Club. This was originally set up to assist people with their mental and physical health – but like Topsy …
Some us play three times a week; some twice and some just the once. Some individuals are connected with others by family, the past and the Venn diagram of seven handshakes, but, in the main, people only know each other through the medium of the football match and a chinwag before and after playing. Thus, knowledge of another player is almost literally and metaphorically skin deep.
We are, in a sense, a company of strangers.
So, opening up about our lives before an audience is revelatory.
When I witnessed the first presentation on November 6th 2024 from the audience and then when I witnessed the audience from the viewpoint of the questioner, I felt as though I and we were in a Ken Loach film where ‘ordinary’ people do the acting or in a Channel4 documentary of yore. It felt almost like a hyperreality and that was nothing to do with the lager I was sipping. It really was a People’s History William Blake moment: this truly was the much-vaunted beautiful game: but, oh so different from the usual meanings invoked by that trope.
And as I sat there as an interlocutor: listening and questioning and responding and extemporising, whilst also studying and reacting to the audience, I began to think that this oral and consequently ephemeral personal history should be given some textual permanence. It was too valuable to lose: it was a Blakean moment where a world was seen in a grain of sand.
Hence this piece that you are reading at the moment.
In conclusion, so as to give all of this a bit of intellectual and historiographical heft, a few insights from Jonathan Meades’ An Encyclopaedia of Myself on the subject of memory and recall:
‘Every time I write once upon a time I am, anyway, already exhuming the disputable, conjuring a photocopy of a faded print made from a detrited negative. I am striving to distinguish the original from its replays. So why add to the store of the provisional? The forms and shades of what used to be are already hideously mutable, every act of recall is both an erosion and an augmentation. I remember therefore I reshape.’
My reply to that question: ‘So why add to the store of the provisional?’ is that we are recalling the past collectively and actively in the moment. This is no archival studious exploration in some candle-lit garret. This is individual recall as a collective experience. It’s epiphanic. It’s hyperreality.
In Brody’s. In the High Street. In Stroud. On a Wednesday night.
And as Raphael Samuel put it in Theatres of Memory Past and Present in Contemporary Culture,
'...history is not the prerogative of the historian, nor even, as postmodernism contends, a historian's "invention". It is rather, a social form of knowledge...'
Penultimately, here’s Hilary Mantel on that hoary old chestnut, ‘What is History?’ ‘… history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.’
Finally. William Faulkner: "The past is not dead. It is not even past yet."
So, take a walk in our boots and see what happens.
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