Burslem

It's weird.

I mean, you could have easily tripped him up by asking him specific geographical questions- [laughs] Okay ... about Burslem and the other districts.

[laughs] Other districts of Stoke-on-Trent.

Well, next time, if they come back-

or the redeveloped main road when the circus leaves town yeah i've worked on the site and i've been there for a long time but i've visited for when the circus leaves town uh there's a central green space in the scheme part of which was the old center circle at main road and when it turned up there's four cones on this green space the base wasn't designed kids to play football on it but they claimed it and that was their little pitch while while i was i was working on street football i discovered the work of a photographer called ricky adams and ricky did a project in in leeds called i think called in the terraces it was about street football and he said he said something quite interesting this culture of football and streets It's still here and it's all around us.

And then I visited Burslem last May.

They unveiled a statue of Lemmy on the motorhead on the Friday.

And on the Sunday evening, I'd got an hour or so to kill.

A number of different Lads and Dads leagues sprung up across North Staffordshire.

I played in the Biddulph League.

One of them was Trubshire Cross, which is on the edge of Burslem.

Now, Trubshire Cross, they had a Lads and Dads league.

There certainly was when I started getting into it.

His father was a, a Bob Toddler Carter, um, and he was a pro footballer with, uh, Burslem, Port Vale, Fulham, and Southampton.

And Toddler was a small nippy winger, and he, he, he played with Fulham in their first season in the Football League in 1907, '08.

He suffered a, a serious knee injury whilst playing for Southampton at the end of the 1909-1910 season.

And I will give a shout-out for free.

I saw this week that Ognoggins and Burslem have started a men's night where it's a game of cards, darts, or just a chat.

And if you do need somewhere, go someone chat to.

There's obviously Andy's Man Club, who we've promoted before.

I had written thus far when I came across the following words by the British man of letters, Mr. Burrell.

How much easier to weave into your page the gossip of Horace Walpole, to enliven it with the heartless jest of George Selwyn, to make it blush with the sad stories of the extravagance of Fox, to embroider it with the rhetoric of Burke, to humanize it with the talk of Johnson, to discuss the rise and fall of administrations, the growth and decay of the Constitution, than to follow John Wesley into the streets of Bristol, or to the bleak moors near Burslem, when he met face to face in all their violence, all their ignorance, and all their generosity, the living men, women, and children who made up the nation.

But I think I could give another reason why John Wesley is a fit person to represent the social life of his century.

Namely, that though he may undoubtedly be classed among the saints, though he was one of the most unworldly of men, though he took what must seem to most of us an unnecessarily serious view of life, he fell short of hardly any of the great men enumerated in shrewd observation, and even in what in the language of his time would have been termed wit.

I wonder what he's got.

Some sleight-of-hand trick or other, said the medical man, and Philby tried to tell us about a conjurer he had seen at Burslem, but before he had finished his preface the time-traveller came back, and

Philby's anecdote collapsed.

Chapter Reflection The time-traveller has turned a lecture about four

He travels with the ball and he tries that long ping.

to top it over the top which I was talking about last week which we tried to do in Burslem on a big pitch a superb ball you know it's not just seeing the pass it's then being able to have the ability to play it and wait it properly and as it drops that's when the attention switches to March first touch is amazing caught me by surprise and it definitely caught the defender by surprise takes him inside and it just all opens up for him superbly and Again, the finish caught me by surprise.

You'd expect him maybe to go across the keeper there, but he toe-ends it into that near post and, yeah, just an all-round really, really good goal, very much in keeping with the game.

Yeah, I mean, it is an excellent ball by Tabs, isn't it? But it is also one of those kind of lofted crosses, which means that actually March has still got loads to do when he arrives at it.

So yeah, suddenly we've got options that maybe other teams would be quite green-eyed about.

Well, I think we're beginning to see the level of recruitment this summer.

There's teams in the league, I'm looking at one that's not very far away in Burslem and another one that's not very far away in Manchester that have spent thousands and thousands of pounds more, maybe even millions more than crew and are languishing in the bottom half of the table or bottom of it.

And we're not.

I had written thus far when I came across the following words by the British man of letters, Mr. Burrell.

How much easier to weave into your page the gossip of Horace Walpole, to enliven it with the heartless jest of George Selwyn, to make it blush with the sad stories of the extravagance of Fox, to embroider it with the rhetoric of Burke, to humanize it with the talk of Johnson, to discuss the rise and fall of administrations, the growth and decay of the constitution, than to follow John Wesley into the streets of Bristol, or to the bleak moors near Burslem, when he met face to face in all their violence, all their ignorance, and all their generosity, the living men, women, and children who made up the nation.

But I think I could give another reason why John Wesley is a fit person to represent the social life of his century.

Namely, that though he may undoubtedly be classed among the saints, though he was one of the most unworldly of men, though he took what must seem to most of us an unnecessarily serious view of life, he fell short of hardly any of the great men enumerated in shrewd observation, and even in what in the language of his time would have been termed wit.

They talk very heavily in depth about that, but they make it accessible in a way that relates to people's lives.

And that's a big feature of what happens in Burslem, which is one of the six towns in Stoke-on-Trent.

So that's great.

That's a great way of talking about popular class history.