Tuesday, September 26, 2006

The Great Amersham Arms Disaster

Before The Match Of The Day we were going to watch Celtic play Rangers down the local. Now if I say this pub is a ciabatta free zone it will hopefully give you a rough idea of the sticky carpets, nicotine stained walls, and posters optimistically declaring it to be a Drugs Free Zone which is the Amersham Arms. It does however offer live Scottish football on The Big Screen and therefore on days when Celtic play it is crammed with ex-pats in their green and white hoops.

We were a bit late on Saturday having had an urgent appointment involving bacon and egg but arrived at the pub door dead on 12.30 but OHMIGOD!!! the football is not on. Instead of Celtic running rings around the Forces of Darkness * there is a pub full of men and apart from me, one woman (at least I think she was a woman)all staring forlonly at a TV screen displaying the message, 'Contact your engineer'. I can tell you that if there was such a thing as the power of collective thought that television would have started transmitting the football. You could see everyone was privately willing the football to appear, but to no avail. A very hot under the collar landlord was on the old mobile to said engineer, but no football was forthcoming. You could by now taste the despair in that pub. We could hear the clock ticking it was so quiet in there. Christ! Celtic could be three nil up by now - and we were all missing it.

The silence was broken by the sound of someone receiving a text message.

The match was being shown at a pub five minutes down the road.

REJOICE!(Unless you are the landlord of the Amersham Arms in which case DESPAIR!)

Never before have so many pints been downed so fast or a pub emptied quite so rapidly. If anyone was driving down the New Cross Road, London SE14, at about 12.45 last Saturday and wondered why on earth so many out of shape individuals were risking a heart attack by taking up jogging I can throw some light on that mystery.

Celtic won 2-0 so Reidski did not have an entirely disastrous day last Saturday. It was unexpectedly profitable for the Marquis of Granby too.


*copyright Reidski

6 comments:

Reidski said...

"Reidski did not have an entirely disastrous day last Saturday" - no, I certainly did not. Well, apart from events which took place between 3pm and 4.45pm .... but even some of that was funny!

J.J said...

You did have your moments didn't you? ;-)

David said...

I'm sensing a Benny Hill procession...

Anonymous said...

And there was me, at the same time, in Scotland, wondering how exactly I was going to find a pub showing the Spurs game.

(actually quite glad i didn't)

Anonymous said...

Alan:
Spurs -- I'm sick about it already & it's early on....Had big dreams with the hype over Berbatov & Mido coming back, not to mention Aaron Lennon...

J.J said...

Greavsie - spot on!

Alan- that could certainly be termed a lucky escape for a Spurs supporter. But Alan and Marc, it is early days yet and you have plenty of time to turn it round. All sides are beatable...why, even the mighty Portsmouth lost at the weekend!