Come On You Wands!

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...

It is a reasonably well-known fact that, Keith Peacock of Charlton Athletic became the first-ever substitute in the English Football League (EFL) to play a part in a game, when he came on to replace injured goalie Mike Rose in the 11th minute, against Bolton Wanderers at Burnden Park on 21 August 1965. At the time, the introduction of only one substitute was permitted per team per match that season, and then only for proper injury purposes. The 1965-66 campaign had started on that day. Tactical substitutions were permitted two seasons later, from the 1967-68 season. Substitutes in the World Cup were not allowed until the 1970 tournament in Mexico. What you might not know, however, is that substitutes were used in matches long before the 1960s. As long ago as 1880, an International match involving Wales and Scotland saw the Welsh team replace an already-named player who had failed to turn up. Technically not an 'off-the-bench' type of substitute but a replacement, and therefore ...

**This post now includes a video which backs up my article. Fellow writers and anyone who reads books and articles are encouraged to read this post to the end and to watch the video when you come to it.** As time goes by, new ways and styles of writing seem to be produced out of thin air. Some of them are good, some of them are reasonable and some of them beggar belief. And it is that last option that I wish to concentrate on here. I am a true believer in researching and writing my own work. The interested reader might consider that some of my stuff is brilliant (how I wish!) while other jottings not so much. I tend to write as I find and as I speak. Sometimes, that's unfortunate for the grammar police to comprehend but, what the heck? My blog site so my rules, as the saying goes, at least that's how it could be viewed and accepted. I try to ensure that my work is readable, enjoyable and thought-provoking. From the feedback I've received over the years, I must be doing some...

Did you know that most football clubs, both in the English Football League and non-League, boasted more than one fanzine during the 1980s and 1990s? Also, according to a fanzines listings website I came across recently, it shows that Cray Wanderers only produced one fanzine, named appropriately enough for the club's Oxford Road days as "What Slope?" yet I also know that there was a second, more prolonged, fanzine called "Cray Chatter". From what I recall from liaising with Pete Goringe and Jerry Dowlen a few years ago, there were only a small amount of issues of "What Slope?" ever published and that "Cray Chatter" somewhat more successfully replaced it and was produced for several seasons. I wasn't around at Oxford Road when either of those two fanzines were introduced but I still experienced the fanzine goldrush thanks to one of my ex-work colleagues, who was a Dover Athletic supporter. I often received the Dover fanzine to read at my le...

It is happening in football more frequently nowadays. Only the Saturday just gone, there was an incident where an English Premier League (EPL) footballer got his marching orders after VAR picked up on the fact that he had 'tugged' at an opponent's hair. But, was it intentional or not (see further reference below)? Currently, as the Laws of the Game stand, committing such an 'offence' is dismissible under the terms of Law 12 which covers fouls and misconduct, even though hair pulling is not specifically mentioned. Now, here's the interesting part. Hair pulling is not actually forbidden in the game of association football. However, those wonderful Laws of the Game changers who rewrite those laws to suit their own aims, the International Football Association Board (IFAB), have decided that pigtail-pulling is an offence punishable by a direct red card and a three-match ban. In one particular incident I watched live on TV recently, VAR got over-excited at such an i...

Cray Wanderers had a remarkably successful and fun time during their first season in the Isthmian League back in 2004-05. Having won the Kent League title for the previous two seasons, Cray finally pushed for and were granted promotion to the next footballing level. The Wands had been ground sharing at Hayes Lane with Bromley FC since the mid-1990s and so they had a rock-solid ground share agreement in place. As the club was to quickly find out, such an agreement was paramount to Cray actually getting promoted to the Isthmian League. With no ground of their own at the time, except for the 'temporary' lodgings at Oxford Road in Sidcup where only the Reserves continued to play, the Wanderers needed to go several stages further than most clubs to ensure their promotion was ratified. Prior to the season that Cray moved to the Isthmian League, there was a better than 50% chance that the Wands could have landed up in the Southern League. At the time, the footballing pyramid was still...