A scene from provincial life: one Saturday about twelve months ago I was sitting in the press box of a football ground in the Midlands. The game had just finished (the home side lost) and I and my fellow reptiles were scribbling away at our match reports - written as such things usually are, to deadlines of a hallucinogenic proximity - when a commotion developed. A crowd of people was barging into the press box from an adjacent part of the stand. There were about fifty of them; they were angry and drunk and they were shouting a lot.

LRB 21 November 1991 | PDF Download