A kindly team-mate said he’d give my two sons pizza for lunch

A kindly team-mate said he’d give my two sons pizza for lunch while I struggled to the hospital; if I arrived there early enough – before the other Sunday league football injuries – all should be quiet in the accident and emergency department.I made it to A&E by 11.30am, but there was already a long queue of patients – most of them, by the look of it, casualties from the night before who had slept through their pain in various states of inebriation, and discovered their injuries only on waking. If I get to the hospital quickly, I thought, and they put on a lightweight cast, she may never notice – although I never quite worked out how I’d maintain my secret when we went to bed. My first thought in the split second before the excruciating pain registered was: “Ginny will be furious.”As I lay moaning on the turf, my mind calibrated my chances of hiding the injury. Early in the game I chased a through ball at top speed (don’t laugh) with an under-veteran-age full-back in hot pursuit; he caught me, and my right ankle buckled under the two of us. But she has declared that now I am over 40, my next injury will be taken as notice that it is time to retire from contact sports.
She had been working away from home for a few days the last time I injured myself, a year or so ago. He was not allowed to join the family for meals until he could chew properly again, and for weeks afterwards, every time he moaned, she would berate him as a silly old man who should know better than to play boys’ games – and he must have been all of 37 years old at the time Ginny may not go that far. When an acquaintance of mine shattered his jawbone in a freak accident during an innocent weekend kick-around in the park, his wife (considerably younger than him, as it happens) showed no sympathy at all.

It’s not that I have a morbid fear of some terrible, career-ending injury: nothing happens fast enough at my level to cause that amount of damage. But my wife, Ginny, has made it plain that absenteeism from domestic duties on the grounds of a sports- induced injury will not be tolerated

Women can be very hard-line on such matters. EACH TIME I lace on my boots for a game of Sunday league football, I know I could be doing it for the last time. I say goodbye and the men call after me: “Don’t forget to mention that we need more women!” But of course, I say After all, it’s such a sexy subject..

We eat a delicious tomato and rice dinner with bread pudding. The phone rings: it is the second production company from Channel Five that day. In the roundhouse there are about eight men and three children. Simon then starts writing down the names of groups who have endorsed it. You have to draw the line somewhere and that is where I drew it.The dinner bell sounds We head out into the darkness I fall over in the mud.

It is available for pounds 5 (pounds 3 unwaged) from Chapter Seven, 20 St Michael’s Road, Yeovil. I am as good as my word, so here goes: the paper is called “Defining Rural Sustainability: 15 Criteria for Sustainable Developments in the Countryside Together with Three Model Policies for Local Plans”. “We see it as a place to live and work.”Simon then takes my notebook and writes down the name of his planning paper He says it has a wonderful 18th-century subtitle. “People see the countryside as a quiet place to retire to,” says Chris Black, who has been in on Tinkers since the beginning.