Happy Summer, Football's over

And so, once again, the plucky sparrow of English footballing hope flies into the patio door of mediocrity.

And that's it. The football season is over. Today's dress code for the "Hear Comes the Summer" service is white - for cricket, tennis and flouncing around the garden in the sunshine, drinking a quick Pimms before dinner. There will no bad coffee after this morning's Occasion: instead we shall be drinking Earl Grey from bone china tea sets and limbering up for a quick round of croquet. Boaters will be worn.*

I am hoping that, this summer, we can conduct ourselves as befits English gentlemen and ladies. The pints of ale of winter will be laid aside for the gin and splash of soda. And while the lower ranks of Beaker Folk will sing the traditional songs of Lark Rise and Candleford, and feed the threshing machine with whatever it is poor people used to be required to put into threshing machines (some kind of cereal-based product, I would think), we will gather together the last of the corn straw to make dollies.

And a gentler, more skilful sport awaits.  Willow will hit leather - or leather hit ash, if the guile or pace of the bowler exceeds the skill of what Alec Stewart so vulgarly calls the "batter". Poets will lounge around the boundary, blades of grass in their mouths and daisy-chains round their next. Evening walks will meander into the eternal twilight of even as late as 11 o'clock on a good day. The punts will be launched, and the clink of ice will be heard in the land.

It's about three weeks until Fulham kick off in the Europa League, in case anyone was missing football already.

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* In the Marquee, if wet. Or do I mean the Marquis? I can never remember which is which.