Even the local wildlife knows which team it's best to support
I saw something on the way to Spurs that I have never seen before, and yet I have walked that way for 40 years. It was in Bruce Castle Park, which I always walk through, having parked my car, on the way to Tottenham High Road and that first glorious glimpse of the gleaming tents and flags of Agincourt - sorry, I mean floodlights of White Hart Lane.
It's quite a nice little park, where kids play football or tennis, one of those hidden parklets you find all over London. Inside is the excellent Bruce Castle Museum. I used to go there quite often, in the days when I collected stamps, to look at their postal history displays. In the 19th century, it was the home of the family of Rowland Hill of Penny Black fame, who ran it as a boarding school.
The house itself is 16th century, but it is on the site of a much older building, once owned by the family of Robert the Bruce; hence its name. Not far away is Northumberland Park, named after the Duke of Northumberland. Hard to imagine today that scruffy old Tottenham once contained the London estates of two of our most historic Northern families.
Sir Henry Percy, later the Duke of Northumberland, was known as Hotspur, a name made famous by Shakespeare in Henry IV. I like to believe, though it can't be proved, that the origins of the name Tottenham Hotspur came from Harry Hotspur, who used to play on Northumberland Park.
The Hotspur comic, which when I was a lad contained some cracking football stories, must have been named after Spurs, don't you think? Who says that going to football isn't educational.
The strange sight I saw that day was a fox prowling around the back of the museum. During the five months I spent in Lakeland this summer, I saw loads of red squirrels, but never a fox. Yet here it was, in the heart of north London. We know these urban foxes are everywhere now, but it still surprised me, in daylight, with so many people around.
I talked to a local, walking his dog, and he said: "Oh, we get lots of them on match days." Not because they follow Leicester City or Carlisle United, surely? (Each has foxy connections, as you would know if you'd read your Hotspur properly.)
He wasn't sure of the connection, but on the way back from the match, I think I worked it out. You just have to look at the surrounding streets and gutters, walls and park benches after a game, at all the horrible congealed polystyrene trays of uneaten hot dogs, burgers and chips.
Foxes must wake up on match day, spot the first trickle of fans wending their way across Bruce Castle Park and think, oh goody, we'll have a good tuck-in today. I bet they can tell a match is on hours before kick off and contact relatives over on Holloway Road to say come quick, Spurs at home today, forget about the Arse.
We are living in rich times: that's the moral of this story. Just as the players are rich and bloated with their wealth, so are the fans, the ones who can afford to attend in the flesh and spend £94, top price at the Emirates, or £71, top price at Spurs. Then they stuff their greedy faces, buying more than they can consume. So the foxes get the crumbs from the rich fans' tables.
No, wrong sermon. On reflection, I think that in football we have the honest, loyal, hard-working people, such as the fans and players, in the middle, who honestly do love the great game of football, while above and below we have nasty, cunning devious animals who feed off the game and give nothing back . . .
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