The Groundsman’s hoping last week’s fertiliser hasn’t kicked in yet as he’s not shown up due to apparently suffering from a Spring attack of Beri Beri. ‘It’s something I ate,’ he says in the briefest of telephone messages, clearly having not understood the medical almanac that he’s leafing through letter by letter. Why he started on ‘Y’ is anyone’s guess, though he clearly liked the sound of ‘Yellowjack’ once the car boot sales reopened a couple of weeks ago. We’re on to ‘C’ next week, so it’s pretty certain what will befall him next time he’s due at Longlevens.

The Lens, meanwhile, has been busy smiling his way through counting the proceeds from last week’s quadruple header and moaning about the avarice of the middle St Albans team’s parents in equal measure, having dismissed the memory that they’d bought hundreds of team pictures on the previous occasion they visited the Home of Football. ‘I’ve not seen nothing like it,’ he offers, using his fifteenth double negative of the morning – and he’s only been here fourteen minutes.

Bruce The Chef’s been on shift most of the night and spent much of the time pre-cooking an extra half dozen bacon rashers and an additional half-packet of premium pork sausages, though ‘premium’, like so many such words in twenty-first century Britain doesn’t necessarily mean exactly what people think it should. ‘Won’t you have cooked too much for just the two games?’ enquires The Lens, mentally calculating an upcoming loss of around 23p, give or take a Harry Smith decimal point. ‘Steve Beale’s coming,’ explains The Chef, ‘and he likes plenty of pork in his Saturday morning breakfast roll.’

The ex-Chairman makes an early appearance, buys a programme and promptly disappears. While The Groundsman, The Lens and Bruce The Chef (thankfully) don’t read these meanderings, The Ex-Chair now does as he carelessly revealed the other day, so this paragraph will end right here in order to keep our friendship pretty much intact, at least for another seven days or so.

The core of the Stadium Erection Team of University Professors (SET UP) – Father Smith, Father Dix and Father Jones – is joined today by Father Freemason, who’s decided that putting up sixty two advertising boards in the pouring rain is preferable to the annual cleaning of the buffalo horns back at The Lodge, despite Mother Freemason having spent forty quid on half a gallon of Anionic Detergent and a family-size pack of cotton wool at B & Q on Thursday afternoon.

Also joining the SET UP team today is Father Don, who’s sporting an impressive Yoko Ono-style black peaked cap that he ordered from the infamous Beatles shop in Croydon (see 12th December blog – ‘Imagine’), along with the signed John Lennon original that he hasn’t yet told Callie about. While the painting is definitely signed, we’re not exactly sure by whom (or when), while ‘Original’ is like ‘Premium’ in modern-day parlance and can mean absolutely anything at all.

Having a morning off, however, is Father Eagle, who’s taken exception to last week’s mention in these pages of his new age cut-off wellies and is spending the time giving them a good old polish ready for the Wolverhampton game on Thursday. ‘I couldn’t half do with some Anionic Detergent,’ he muses, not realising that a bucketful of the high-quality cleansing solution is a lot closer than he thinks. ‘That won’t do it no good,’ says The Lens in a comment that has absolutely nothing to do with either a pair of miniature Dukes or a set of extra large buffalo horns, but takes his tally of DNs to thirty four in half an hour flat.

A second person having a Saturday undisturbed by early-morning alarm-ringing is Father Barnard, whose fresh-faced and impressively jolly demeanour, courtesy of an extra hour and a bit in bed, takes a turn for the worse the moment he sees Father Smith’s cunning inversion of the Dee & Griffin sign down at the Houses End. Retribution, when it comes, will no doubt be extremely sweet, as they say.

The Wiltshire side announce their arrival at GL2 when Coach Beale alights from his car to reveal he’s wearing a pair of black trackie bottoms that are tucked into his Swindon-red footy socks. Clearly the ferret attack that took place on his last visit a couple of years ago has played on his mind ever since and today he’s taking no chances whatsoever with the Longlevens wildlife. The same can’t be said of his appearance at the refreshment hatch barely five minutes later though, a visit which leaves The Chef thinking that maybe he should have spent last night’s shift pre-cooking rather more premium pork than he actually did.

Gloucester start the game well, with The Freemason and Two-Foot looking dangerous down the wings and a couple of early chances go begging. Monty Don sees one free kick pass just wide of the far post and a second such effort well taken by Nandhra in the Swindon goal, before being denied by the keeper’s sprawling save.

At the other end, Hamilton-Gill crashes an effort off the crossbar, but it’s the hosts that claim a twentieth minute lead when Don fires home from eight yards following Freemason’s left-wing corner. Swindon respond positively, Marvin doing well to take a sweetly-struck effort from Evans, while Hamilton-Gill finds the woodwork for a second time with a smart header from Jones’s flag kick.

The mid-point break sees the home side attack the sweet-bearing containers with rather more relish than they do the first fifteen minutes of the second half, when the visitors are the more dominant side. Man for All Seasons is in fine fettle however and does well to largely quell the goal threat of the Swindon centre forward and with Hurricane and Black Boots Dix looking solid alongside him, direct efforts on goal are limited.

The visitors however level matters twelve minutes in when another corner from Jones finds its way directly into the net and the same player then sees his free kick bounce off the top of the bar as Swindon again go close. The final ten minutes are end to end, with Captain Cooper and Triple B urging Gloucester forward at every opportunity, while Swindon continue to break quickly, though oddly, despite both sides’ go-for-it approach, neither team creates a direct scoring chance.

With Rhodes having soldiered on despite being ill during the week, he now has little more left to give, so is moved up front where his up-and-down running will not be required to the extent it invariably is in midfield. He does conjure up one last bit of energy, however. With barely thirty seconds remaining on the clock (or 32.74 as Two-Foot rightly points out afterwards), he charges down an under-hit back pass, rounds the keeper and forces the ball home for a last-gasp winner that propels his team into the Southern Counties Cup semi finals.

‘That’s the second time I’ve been undone by a ferret,’ bemoans Swindon Coach Beale, re-tucking his left-sided trackie leg into his right-sided footy sock. ‘And they’ve both been at Longlevens.’ A proper double negative or what?

With the girls’ teams arriving for match two, Coach Delaney is replaced in the kitchen by Coaches Edwards and Bebber and refreshment sales double almost immediately. Woking are now arriving in town and Coach Gunn racks up with a pair of official-looking badged trousers that end halfway down his calves, leading a number of perplexed onlookers to debate whether they are very long shorts or very short longs.

Freemason and Captain Cooper enter into an academic discourse about planetary orbits over their premium sausage & chips afterwards, while Marvin reflects on what a difference a week makes. This time seven days ago, Freemason’s newly-styled barnet was the talk of GL2 and Tuffley Tom The Hairdresser was being heralded as the next Vidal Sassoon. Now ML’s quiff is just like everyone else’s – a mass of wet old hair, looking pretty unstyled and, at this moment in time, pretty unloved too, while Marvin himself still has a perfectly straight parting with not a single gelled follicle out of its right and proper place.

The Lens is in great form as Woking eventually triumph 3-1 in a hard-fought encounter, snapping as many parent-child pairings as possible, then selling them swiftly, using his unique, market-place, ‘Buy One, Get None Free’ banter to win over the wavering masses. ‘Funny how it goes,’ reflects the self-styled ‘People’s Snapper’ once everything’s packed away and the Woking people have climbed into their cars and set their Sat Navs for sleepy stockbroker Surrey. ‘Today I sold just about everything, while last week I didn’t sell nothing.’ And on this day of double negatives, that tells you just about everything you need to know.

Gloucester: Marvin; Hurricane, Man for All Seasons, Black Boots Dix; Two-Foot, Captain Cooper, Rhodes, Freemason; Monty Don; Triple B.