You see the good thing about NOT playing sunday league football is that you got to the pub at one minute before opening time instead of 30 minutes after opening time like the ones who DID play sunday league football.
Life was very simple in the mid-1970s, regimented almost, licensing hours for pub openings on a sunday lunchtime were as strict as you can imagine, two hours only, 12 noon until 2pm is what you got, at 2pm prompt the pub shut and the landlord went for his sunday lunch and the bar stayed closed until 7pm – that was the law.
In The Fox the letter of the law was obeyed to the, erm, last letter, mainly because Norman the landlord loved his sunday lunch and his wife had his on the table at 2.15pm prompt every sunday – last orders were called at 1.50pm, glasses collected at 2.10pm, “Have you no homes to go to “? called at 2.12pm, everyone out of the door and locked up by 2.15pm – thus was it writ, every sunday.
My mates all played sunday league football, I didn’t because, well, because I’ve never been good at team sports, lose interest too quickly and theres another reason that escapes my memory currently, oh yes, thats it, I was crap at football.
So while they all awoke at 8am on a cold, wet, sunday morning and met at the co-op to find where they were travelling to for that weeks fixture, I spent a couple of warm toasty hours under the quilt.
While they all got changed in the back of their cars at the side of a muddy football pitch on some godforsaken council estate in East Leeds I spent a leisurely sunday morning eating toast, drinking coffee, reading the paper, listening to my dad tell me once again what a “bloody good turn” they’d seen at the club last night and while they got kicked in the air once again by a team of neanderthals in football kits I had a leisurely elevenses snooze and then wandered aimlessly down to The Fox at the bottom of the hill ready for 12 noon opening.
My first pint of bitter would be quaffed while all my friends were trying to scrape off the worst of the mud from their tired and aching limbs at the side of the now even more muddy pitch, and then transport themselves back to our home suburb having already missed a half hour of the precious two hour sunday lunchtime drinking slot.
Four pints would fit comfortably into that two hour slot and the tap room would be full to bursting with men, simply men, no women at all for the women were all at home making the sunday dinner, men drinking beer, men nursing hangovers from saturday night drinking beer to make the hangover go away, men drinking beer and looking forward to their roast beef and yorkshire pud sunday lunch, men drinking beer, playing darts, playing dominoes, shouting at each other in that banter-esque self depravating way that men do in tap rooms (ladies you would not understand, you’d start fighting the first time you were grossly insulted by your best mate), men comparing football wounds, bits of caked mud dropping from the foot of their tracksuit bottoms as their knees dried out, sunday lunchtime in the pub, its never been the same since they extended the opening hours to all day drinking.
Under strict instructions from my mother to be home at 2pm prompt I missed the deadline every week and would arrive back at the house ten minutes late and four pints the worse to find them sitting at the table tucking into a huge mountain of sunday lunch-stylee food, “Its gone cold” my mother would berate me every week and I’d simply point to the plate where the food would still be glowing red after being cremated for hours beforehand, it often took fifteen minutes before anything was cool enough to place in your mouth.
To sit at the table with your family and eat a huge sunday lunch after four pints of Tetley Bitter was a pivotal point of the week, a totem post memory now stored away for posterity for it does not happen in these times when pubs are open all day on a sunday, there is no defining cut-off point for punters to be sent home and in any case no-one inhabits pubs these days, tap rooms are gone and women are allowed to stand at the bar – we’re all going to hell in a hand cart I tell you…
