Come On You Wands!

In my experience, you either love glamping or hate it. Personally, I hate it. Why? Well, I'll give you a couple of clues. Camping and self catering. Now, before anybody sends me an email extolling the virtues of both camping and glamping, yes I am fully aware of the subtle differences between the two. My disagreement isn't about those. Glamping is just a poshed-up word for camping in little huts, or 'pods' to be a little bit more accurate. To me, they are just huts, pure and simple. Like a garden shed filled with somebody else's furniture instead of gardening tools.  Occasionally you might get a glamp site that has unusual little buildings to stay in, such as shepherds' huts, sort of old-style gypsy caravans, often with wheels on. But what gets me about glamping, and the same for ordinary camping in a tent, is that it is self-catering . So, you arrive at a site that is maybe knee-deep in mud if you're lucky, or in horse or cow manure if you're very un lu...

WELL... unfortunately, the cost of living has finally affected me financially. In order to offset the extra cost for food, electricity, etc. I have a need to make some extra money on the side...it is what it is. So here’s to my new venture.  I am now proud to announce that I am selling ADULT TOYS .  I hope no one will feel embarrassed to ask for them. I have all kinds, sizes, and styles according to your needs. I can send pictures and dimensions etc. Just ask. Discretion is guaranteed!! Ask for yours anytime. I have everything listed below: * Walkers * Wheelchairs * Oxygen tanks * Walking sticks  * Teeth glue * Heating pads and more * Reading glasses * False teeth Best wishes from Heather @heatherdws 25 June 2026

Desiderata is a well-known inspirational passage that was penned by American Max Ehrmann in 1927 and was recorded on vinyl by Leonard Nimoy in 1968 and later by Les Crane in 1971.  The written version is now in the public domain; the versions in music format remain under copyright.  I have arranged the passage and saved it in PDF format for download. If you wish to download this work yourself and maybe frame it to put on your wall, please click HERE and save it to your own computer. If you try to download it using a mobile phone or a tablet, it will still work and be readable but you will be unable to print it out.  This PDF is offered as a free download . It has been designed to fit onto a single side of A4 paper. If your printer cannot print to the edges of the page, you may find it easier to take the PDF file to a print shop on a USB stick and ask them to do it for you for a small charge. Enjoy! Trevor Mulligan 19 June 2026

The absolute history of the word 'soccer'. The facts speak for themselves. 'Soccer' is a word that was first coined in Victorian England around the latter part of 1885 by Oxford University students. Prior to this the game was never known as 'soccer'. The word 'soccer' is a classic example of old university slang. It simply took the 'soc' from 'Association' and added the '-er' suffix—exactly how 'rugby' was shortened to 'rugger'. Before the official rules were ratified by the English Football Association in 1863, traditional British football was a chaotic free-for-all where handling, carrying, and kicking the ball were all allowed in the same match. The nearest modern equivalent to this shambles would probably be Gaelic football.   The 1863 split drew a hard line between the two disciplines of rugby and football. While it was used for decades as a common nickname in British newspapers, 'soccer' has never be...

It has long been known that the British government is trying to push all motorists over the age of 70 years off the road. They are currently viewing, with the aid of the DVLA, to initially target drivers with failing eyesight. That's fair enough. But, they will only be coming after the over-70s, which is not fair enough. I actually fall into the above age group. I have done so for nearly a year now as I write this. Just over three years ago, I underwent a double cataract operation on my eyes. Not both at the same time; there had to be an interval of about six to eight weeks between procedures. Until my optician advised me that my eyesight had got so bad, I hadn't realised what a menace I was to other users on the roads. So, I quickly signed on the dotted line to get something done about it, as being a full-time carer without transport is a non-starter. During my recovery period, which spanned the two operations and a few weeks beyond, I was not permitted to drive. Or, rather, ...

A while ago I wrote an article in which I extolled the virtues of using Google when researching information to write about. I now find that I have to backtrack on that advice. Since I wrote that article, Google has changed to rely very much on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the robotics that go with it. This, as you may already be aware if you've read my previous articles, goes against the grain regarding what I am about. Instead of recommending that you should have no qualms about relying totally on Google's output, I am now saying 'take care' if you use the search engine for any or all of your research, because AI can and does get things wrong. That, on its own, should be a warning sign. So, what's the alternative? Well, strange as it may seem, I now recommend 'old school'. Yes, I am talking about text books, where facts and figures contained within their pages have been checked, checked and checked again before being allowed to be published in print. Th...

I very first caught the wander bug towards the back end of the 1980s. I don't mean the wanderer bug; I got that back in the late 1960s. So, what is the wander bug? It's when you get the itch to travel places, see other countries, breathe in the atmosphere, try the many different types of food on offer, fly on a Jumbo Jet, ride in a foreign taxi, get squashed riding on an overcrowded overseas bus, all those and more. I have been to many different countries since the late 1980s, yet it all started quite innocently when I took a flight out of Lydd Airport in Kent over to Jersey in the Channel Islands in the summer of 1988. I will never forget that time. It was my first time flying and it was a 52-seater propeller-powered aeroplane belonging to Dan-Air. Locally, we jokingly called it Dan Dare but, if you don't think that is amusing, here's a couple of truths about that trip. Firstly, a flock of sheep had to be ushered off the runway before the plane could take off (Lydd ai...

I seem to be on a bit of a nostalgia kick at the moment. "What's the difference between that and history?" I hear you say. Quite a big difference, in my opinion. History is full of everything that has happened, is happening and is likely to happen. Nostalgia is many parts of history that you have personally experienced and like to be reminded of and it triggers mostly happy memories. While I was reacquainting myself with 'X' this week, I came across a number of posts that took me back in time to a better place that this country once knew. I say reacquainting but that is the wrong word. When I previously used the @craywanderers moniker on there, the site was known as Twitter, which very much summed it up. I don't know what the name 'X' is supposed to signify but I guess it makes sense to somebody. Among the many snippets of nostalgia that I came across was one post for a drinks company called Corona. Older visitors reading this may have heard of it bu...

There seems to be a belief among the younger generations nowadays that Baby Boomers had life easy. I wonder how many of them would have coped with or tolerated most of the things that we had to put up with, purely and simply because we had nothing better to compare them with? I am a Baby Boomer. I am proud of that fact. I was born in the mid-1950s and I come from a working class family background. My dad worked for London Transport as a bus conductor. My mum worked part-time in an electronics company. We lived on council estates in St Mary Cray and in Orpington. Money wasn't exactly overflowing but my parents tried to make our upbringing as happy as they could. We were the typical family of the time. As a kid, I played out in the streets near our house until it got dark, then I went indoors for my tea. There were no computers or computer games to keep us indoors and away from the fresh air back in those days. I had a scooter but it never had an electric motor attached to it. The th...

If you go onto 'X' and look for @craywanderers, you will find the account has been resurrected from the days when I originally created it as the first official Twitter account for the Wands. This account was originally created by me when I was the curator of the official Cray Wanderers website but it was allowed to fall into dormant mode after I reluctantly had to give up the running of the website due to personal reasons. But, this week, I have been working on restoring the @craywanderers now 'X' account, in order to support and promote the 'Come On You Wands' blog site, thus bringing the account back into use. This will hopefully have the effect of bringing the blog site to the attention of many 'X' users and, in turn, will equally mean that more visitors will be attracted to this site. There's plenty to read on a variety of subjects, or as many as I can cover, so there's a little bit of everything to satisfy the visitors' curiosity. The r...

How do you feel about the BBC contributing a part of your enforced TV Licence Fee Tax towards the utterly futile Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) every year? Much how the Beeb wants to dress it up, the 'membership fee' that the BBC hands over to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to participate each year is around £400,000. For this, the UK is 'guaranteed' a place in the final every year because they are one of the 'Big Five' investors. That's £400,000 of our TV Licence Fee Tax that we don't have a vote on how it is spent. However, our Licence Fee Taxing 'public broadcaster' then shells out an estimated £800,000 to £1 million on producing the UK's TV broadcasting coverage of the ESC each year. That's £800,000 to £1 million of our TV Licence Fee Tax that we don't have a say on what gets shown on the channel that we all have to financially back, lest we can't legally watch TV at all if we don't pay the fee. Not only that but, i...

According to stargazers and astronomers, Venus has long since been believed to be the twin of our own planet, Earth. But, there is one major difference between where we live 'down here' and that brightly shining planet 'up there'. Venus is uninhabitable to humans. Venus is also closer to the Sun than we are, which accounts for its much more increased atmospheric volatility, thus being mostly responsible for its past oceans to boil resulting in a serious greenhouse effect. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when the B-movie style science fiction film genre was peaking, quite a number of films were made with Venus in the title, like "Stranger From Venus", "First Spaceship On Venus", "Zontar, the Thing from Venus" and "Venus Wars". Special effects in such films were nowhere near as polished as they are today but, the makers just had to do the best they could with the limited resources they had at their disposal. However, I am not writing t...

This is by no means a clever new recipe but rather an accidental coming together of five (or six) ingredients to add to pasta, be it tagliatelle, spaghetti, penne or whatever. The beauty of this is in the eye of the beholder's culinary skills. Sort of. You could call it a spagbol alternative. I found out this meal idea quite by experimentation than anything else. I had never read about it, I had never seen it on a TV cookery show, nor had I watched it on a YouTube video. I could claim it was my own invention but I cannot be 100% sure. Maybe someone, somewhere on this planet or even in a parallel universe has come up with the same idea; I just don't know. It is based on the fact that my wife and I found the 'Chicken Tonight' chicken sauce a bit bland when we added it to our prepared chicken pieces and it needed a bit of a kick. So, the next time we had it, I looked around for something to pep the sauce up a bit. That's when I found the Maggi Mexican powder mix. The r...

According to the Isthmian League website, newly promoted AFC Whyteleafe are moving in to Flamingo Park to groundshare with Cray Wanderers next season. They are the re-formed club of the original Whyteleafe that the Wands used to play against in days gone by. AFC Whyteleafe won their promotion to the Isthmian League Premier Division as a result of the Isthmian League South East Division play-offs, beating AFC Croydon Athletic 5-4 on penalties in the final following a 1-1 score line. Considering that it is quite a haul around the M25 between Whyteleafe in Surrey and Cray's ground in Chislehurst, I find the groundshare between the two clubs a little bit surprising, as surely there are clubs with Step 3 ready grounds a lot nearer to the 'Leafe that could have offered a groundshare option. Having said that, Cray Wanderers have always been a helpful lot, most certainly all of my lifetime, so I am not surprised if AFC Whyteleafe put out a 'Mayday!' request and the Wands gladly...

It is with great sadness that I have to report the passing of Del Pullman, one of my fellow ex-article writers for the Wands' matchday programmes. Del was a regular goalkeeper for various local clubs in the 1970s and would pop up in goal occasionally at Oxford Road to face the Cray teams of the time. In his younger years, before his non-League playing days, Del was an avid supporter of the Wands, a position which he came back to after he had hung up his gloves.  I recall that Del also appeared between the sticks for the Wands towards the back end of his playing career. That was when I first met him on a personal basis rather than when I used to try and put him off from behind the goal when he took his goal kicks. Del had a philosophical mind which was often reflected in his article writing and when speaking with him. I guess it is inevitable that, the older I get, the more the long-time friends I have made through my association with Cray Wanderers over the years are likely to no l...