Two Bobby Charltons For A Ralph Coates

Two Bobby Charltons For A Ralph Coates

Today, I received a wonderful present.

My friend Craig surprised and delighted me when he delivered impromptu a whole set of Manchester City football cards, which his son had collected. They were surplus to his requirements, but I didn’t care – the very feel and smell of them transported me back in time.

Marsden's sweet shop, somewhere in industrial northern England, 1970. The same shop in which Melanie Brown told the lie on me and Shorey that led to us being caned for the alleged and never-proven theft of a packet of Fruitgums – but also the central meeting place for any eight year olds worth their salt ‘n’ shake crisps.

Normally, the experience of going into Marsdens was a highly-charged one. Every lunchtime, me and Peter Scott would go home for our dinners. As I left, my mum would give me a sixpence and also one for Pete; whom I would then call for and we would in turn extort a similar sum from his mum.

Replete with our booty, we would head for Marsden’s. There was lot you could get for sixpence in those days. As beady-eyed old Mr Marsden watched my every move from over the ice-cream fridge, my sixpence would almost melt from the trauma of having to choose between the following:

6 Bazooka Joes
A quarter of Cough Candy
A Curly Wurly
A bottle of Cresta
3 giant gobstoppers
2 packets of Chipmunk crisps

...or a packet of Pannini football cards. Actually, stickers then, and certainly not as flash as the one here. Photos were often taken by amateurs - or so it seemed, due to the very poor quality of many of the images. Poses fell into two categories: tight-lipped-arms-folded-stare, and 'action shot' - usually not of the player kicking the ball because they hadn't invented electronic shutters on cameras back then.

So what you got was Franny Lee or Mick Jones running, with the ball long gone. It was a bit like Spot The Ball, the football gambling game which my dad used to let me do (just like the Bread Man and the Pop Man and the Fish Man there was the Pools Man - he'd bring the Littlewoods coupons, and also a picture with the ball somehow erased from it - way before Photoshop. You had to look at where the players' eyes were drawn to, and place an 'X' where you thought the ball was. Of course I assumed that the players would be actually looking at the ball when I did my 'X' - but it never seemed to be in the place I thought it would be.)

Anyway, the idea with the cards was that you would bring them to school, see what the other boys had, then swap yours with theirs to fill in the missing gaps in your album (at least I think there were albums then - that might have come in with stickers - it's more likely that you just kept them in a tin.)

My grandad had millions of them, being a lifetime smoker. In the 60s, as Swinging London grooved, Northern England collected coupons. It must have been a hangover from the days of rationing (I remember my mum and nannan would sing songs about rationing in the car when we'd go on journeys, as if they were actually nostalgic for it. I never did get the whole nostalgia thing - until I actually started becoming nostalgic myself. I wonder what today's cynical youth will be nostalgic for - 'Ah, Taneesha, remember the good old days of Chlamydia and Methadrone' they'll probably say as they laugh whimsically.)

Anyway, my grandad had sets of birds, cars, stately homes, scenes of rural England, biblical stories etc. The entire cohort of graphic designers which existed in the country at the time must have been kept busy by fag-smoking miners. As well as the ciggie cards, there were the Co-op stamps (Green Shield stamps) an early forerunner of the loyalty card system we have now in supermarkets. He had books and books of them, although as far as I could work out they seemed to have no value whatsoever - you could collect whole shelffulls and still only have enough to buy an egg cup.

So anyway, there I am, at school, bartering with Vaughny and Pondy et al over these football cards. It seemed as though most of the male population of the school had a collection - perhaps again, this is where the male fascination with collecting things comes from - we're all little boys at heart.

'I'll swap your Bobby Charlton for my Ralph Coates' was the playtime mantra. But what was really interesting was how, slowly over time, as more and more people bought them, the cards acquired a kind of intrinsic value - like money. The more people who played, the rarer the rare cards became. Imagine the primordial psychology among the Chro-magnon hunter-gatherer swamp dwellers which enabled the cunning to survive and prolong the existence of the human race; cunning that created money from bones or scraps of flint; money which enabled them to barter with the tribe in the next field for a leg off a Sabretooth Tiger or something - it's right there in our fights over the value of Cyril Knowles. Watch the opening scene from Kubrick's 2001:A Space Odyssey and you'll se what I mean.

So, down to the primordial swamp we duly descended. Fights broke out, satchels were looted, noses were bloodied and teeth forcibly removed over these cards. The natural order was preserved as Vaughny and his clan mugged the 'puffs' for having the sheer luck to acquire Gordon Banks from Marsdens.

And in the same spirit, did I not today receive my cards, wave them about in front of every bloke I could find (100% of whom were genuinely excited for me) to the utter bemusement of those females within hailing distance.

Then, when no-one was looking, I locked them in my drawer so no-one could nick them.

I'm buying an album tomorrow.