A similar thing happened to me and my mate Rob, but not quite, his Dad took us to watch Notts County against Bury at Meadow Lane when Tommy Lawton was the star. But we (Rob and I not his Dad who was 6’7") were handed overhead down to sit on the touchline with all the other ‘shorties’. 
It was hell on the field, especially playing Leeds 
.
He lived just up the road from us, and us brothers in turn used to deliver his newspaper.
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My new favourite writer- Elif Shafak . Finished ‘ The Island of Lost Trees ‘ about Cyprus , earlier in the year. And just finishing ‘There are rivers in the sky ‘ . An amazing writer . So lyrical. And they way she tells her stories is great. Highly recommended if you’ve never read her.
That’s quite a thing to have been in the presence of RVW
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Sorry, had hoped to raise a smile, but hopefully better luck next time.
Denis Law played for a Yorkshire team before becoming really famous and though it pains me to use a link from City’s website, here’s an explanation
https://www.mancity.com/news/mens/denis-law-luton-town-fa-cup-seven-goals-63844555
Which then presumably shortly went into his business. Wasn’t he a waste paper king?
Brief update on Bonnie Prince Charlie, have passed the decision at Derby and the awful and avoidable rout at Culloden, and am now with him dodging here and there in the Isles to avoid the enemy. I am in no way a fan but I can sympathise with the many awestruck at the cockups the Jacobites made.
‘Over The Sea to Skye’ behind us, can’t wait for the next read, especially as I have discovered that I can read my Kindle on my PC.
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Indeed he was. He started the business in the 60’s when still a player. He was a pioneer of recycling waste paper to make toilet rolls mainly.
I’m just getting to the end of “Goliath’s Curse - The History and Future of Societal Collapse” Luke Kemp (2025).
It’s taken months to read it, it’s so dense. There is some advice at the end of it, I haven’t got to that yet….
It was a review in The Guardian that put me on to it. I can’t argue with his thesis about what factors (eg what he calls lootable resources, inequality, concentrations of power, external shocks bringing it all down) ended societies, or with the idea of the global Goliath we have now.
There’s a lot about South American civilisations and the colonialists that’s new to me.
Great book, will be a classic in this genre I think.
PS
Goliath- a collection of interconnected hierarchies in which some individuals dominate others to control energy and labour
Global Goliath - a collection of interconnected hierarchies across the entire world in which some individuals dominate others to control energy and labour….
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Haven’t read your book, but my (admittedly rather hazy) understanding of the collapse of many S American civilisations, was not simply a consequence of the traditional explanations of the Conquistadors’ colonisation and introduction of previously unknown diseases, but changing environmental factors, that made some complexly integrated civilisation structures no longer tenable
Yes as you say, it wasn’t as simple as the idea of the colonialists bringing disease &c.
There was internecine warfare, for example, where the colonialists used one “tribe” to vanquish another. Also there’s history before then of some city states imploding (hierarchies, lootable resources, elites/inequality/oppression) where the ‘plebs’ seemed to have simply cleared off somewhere else, leaving the city to slowly crumble….
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cf Jared Diamond
Enjoyed ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ long ago, but not read anything by him since.
These meta-theory books come and go over the decades, but looking back, I’d probably gain more new insights by re-reading Toffler’s incredibly prescient Future Shock (1970). However, that’s not to dismiss Cat Brohannon’s much more recent Eve, which is very good and if @Vero, you’ve not read it, you’d probably greatly enjoy.
Meanwhile I’m trying to recover three chapters of my own, less ambitious contribution to this genre, the latest versions of ch’s 1, 3 and 5 are currently stranded on an inaccessible hard disk and the latest versions I can currently access are from last August.
Aaaaaargh!
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I have finished Bonnie Prince Charlie now. A very strange and in many ways, a sad life but the story produced something of very great interest.
A shame that the proof reading left something to be desired, poor spelling in some areas and an inability to recognise French terms such as ‘duc’ many many times over, Very irritating and inexcusable.
It was that which has put me off reading another book on the wider subject, ‘The Jacobins’, by the same author which, as at least one reviewer has pointed out, suffers from the same malady.
Next up, starting in a few minutes, the first of a series of 6 novels under the general title of mystery stories. I won’t read them all at once but will insert non-fiction books between each of them.
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On my list now, thank you! I’ll be interested to see how she compares with Caroline Criado-Perez (goodness my tablet has more recherché tastes than I imagined, it corrected Criado to Celadon 
).