‘Just try it, Gonby,’ said Billy Penk, (Gtr, Vox), ‘Come along, see what he’s got to say. He’s a cool guy – really. He’ll take you places you never knew existed.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Norman Payne (Bass & Vox), ‘He’s fab.’

I lit a Woodbine. The Gladstone, I decided, was really going downhill. Though no more than a hundred yards from the Cowshed, the football conversation was disappearing quicker than the ears of the clientele beneath their untended Beatle mops. Something was happening, and I didn’t know what it was, and neither did Mickey Jones.

‘But I want to go somewhere I know exists,’ said Mickey, not for the first time, ‘I want to go to Sydenham.’

‘The colours! The feelings! It’s beautiful….’

‘But this place is better, man! The colours! The feelings! It’s beautiful…’

‘Gold’s the only colour I need,’ said Mickey, impatiently, ‘And there’s nothing more beautiful than a ball in the back of the net. Whatever it is you lot are going on about, you can count me out.’

‘Where are you going?’ I asked him, as he put his empty glass on the bar and turned to go.

‘The Fox. I can’t be doing with all this.’

The door slammed firmly behind him. Without the cash to get down to London, he’d been hoping to persuade The Selves to drive to South London in Billy’s Mini Van. But The Selves were much more interested in pushing at the boundaries of musical genre and consciousness.

‘Do you want another pint?’

‘Ar – goo on then.’

‘What are you ‘avin, Norm?’

‘Springfield. And get some change for the fake machine, will yer?’

‘This yogi doesn’t warn against booze and snout then?’

The Selves were in the North Street area to attend an event given by the yogi Amardeep, who was gaining a reputation among the musicians and artists of the town as a kind of gatekeeper to higher consciousness, in addition to his reputation as a pleasant and conscientious porter at the Low Level station.

‘Sounds like we’ve piqued his interest, Norm.’

‘Mr Green… Mr Green…’ sang Norm, with Billy joining in on harmony, ‘Mr Green steps into the Time Machine….’

‘What the hell was that?’ I asked.

‘Never mind. We’re…’

‘Go on…’

‘We’re looking for a new sound. The boy girl thing…; we think it’s getting a bit…’

I looked at the two of them, in their flowery shirts and high waistbands, wondering briefly whether they might not be ditching the ‘boy-girl thing’ for the ‘boy-boy thing’. But no, it seemed largely an artistic search. In addition to longer hair, they were experimenting with longer songs and longer solos. Lyrically they seemed intent on making complete fools of themselves. I quite liked some of their early stuff but I wasn’t going to stand in the Ship and Anchor listening to grown men saying how they were “stuck in Horseley Fields with the Dentist Blues again.”

We finished our pints and headed to the Red Cross Street Infant School, where Yogi Amardeep was holding his class.

As the class commenced my first thought was a pale irritation that I had worn my best suit, for, while the synthetic fibres of The Selves’ sta-prest trousers had a certain amount of give in them, my three-button cotton ensemble was much less flexible. The jacket rode up during the Mermaid, and I was in danger of splitting the straight inside leg during Warrior 2. Billy and Norm maintained expressions of serenity and distance, while, for the first twenty minutes or so, I found myself getting increasingly irritated by the swami’s exhortations to incremental discomfort, and his insistence on breathing (like I wasn’t going to do that anyway). The Gladstone didn’t seem such a dump anymore, and I remembered with nostalgia the sulphurous aroma of the Springfield Bitter and the sticky texture of the lino in the public bar.

At first, I distracted myself with thoughts of tomorrow’s game. Knocker and ‘Ernie’ Hunt had been in imperious form that season, and with Wagstaffe and Wharton feeding them and McIlmoyle we looked promotion material on our day, yet all of that striving, all of that desire, and the wonderful unbeaten run during October and November might still come to nothing. Why were we even in the second division? The horrifying memories of shipping five goals at Goodison, Upton Park and the Hawthorns the previous season returned with a sickening clarity, and I feared I might be overcome by sadness.

‘Think only of your breathing,’ said the yogi, ‘You are here, now; not elsewhere..’

How was I going to get to South London? The Flying Squadron had cancelled due to the weather forecast, the Speleologist Squadron never ventured south of the Thames due to the lack of underground tunnels, and the Chapel Ash Non-Motorized Mechanical Touring Party had left early that morning, due to the constriction of Sid Dawes’ muladhara chakra.

Then the saddest of all thoughts, the second-place finish in 1960, the single point that separated Wolves from winning a hat-trick of titles and the first double of the modern era, loomed over me like the shadow of a great devil. I wanted to damn Bob Lord and….

‘Do not follow your thoughts. Watch them only.’

I opened my eyes and the yogi’s face was before me, speaking at once to the whole room and to me personally. At this distance, the kindness in the eyes and the smiling lips shone out through the bushy beard. His white turban was impeccably neat.

From then on, I began to focus less on the Wolves and the possibility of ripping my clothes, and more on the moment. My breathing became deeper, and my muscles more flexible. I didn’t once look at Billy or Norman. The sweat soaked my Double TWO shirt.

‘Now we adopt the savasana position. We lie like a corpse. Feel the blood flow through through our whole body. You are breathing. Your thoughts are happening, but your thoughts are not you. You are apart. You watch your thoughts, as you might watch motor cars pass in the street, or ducks and swans upon the canal. You are breathing.’

In, out. In, out. Air filled me. Air was released. I was conscious of the inhalation, conscious of the exhalation, but it was as if I was only a spectator. Not only. I was the breath, the inner tube that filled with the breath, the leather case that held the tube, the stitching that held the panels of the case. The air filled me, light and hard; I could rise. All around me were eyes, and arms, legs, grass…; cold air, mud, the hoarse cries and whistles of the players, officials, public, and the uninterested pedestrians of the street outside the ground. I was at one with these things, part of a single beautiful whole that contained a single moment of a game, and all the history, culture and collective learning that went into the game and its enjoyment. Within me and without me there was football.

Outside of the inner tube, the case, the stitching, my body, the assembly hall of the little school, I was rising up into the air. I could see over Birchfield Street and Molineux Street into the South Bank, then further south, to the Hawthorns, Villa Park, St Andrews, Highfield Road, the County Ground, Northampton, Kenilworth Road, Vicarage Road, Wembley, Loftus Road, Craven Cottage, Stamford Bridge, past the gasometers and power stations of South London into Selhurst Park, and I was then at once inside the stadium, a ball kicked, headed, parried and punched, feeling only the pressure of motion, no pain outside of it, a part of the universal consciousness, beyond sport, beyond emotion, beyond all of the human and animal clamour and longing, and yet part of it too, the tiniest drop of ink in the sports pages and a ball being picked out of the net by John Jackson. Everything was easy and simple. Everything was as it should be, in its place, peaceful and lovely. Nothing mattered, not even the Wolves….

I pulled myself back from the brink. ‘You all right, Gonby?’ asked Billy Penk, as I jumped up from the parquet floor and looked around me.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I said.

‘Relax,’ said the yogi, ‘Everything is peaceful.’

‘Peace? Love? What’s that all about?’ I asked, slipping my shoes back on, ‘Peace and Love ay gonna get us out the Second Division. Am you comin’ tomorrow or not, Billy?’

Positively North Street

There was some uncomfortable shuffling around the room, the sound of people’s chakras being popped and squeezed.

‘Ar, all right. But I want to stop at Denmark Street and have a look at guitars.’

‘Come round mine at eight; we’ll get the train.’

I stepped out into the cool evening air, and let the material world flow into me again. The weightlessness and detachment had been bliss for a while, but I needed a pint now, the certainty of dominoes, the mathematics of the dartboard. It wasn’t a negative feeling, but quite the contrary. I was feeling good about our chances tomorrow, and happy at my place in the bustling borough. Passing the Gladstone and heading uphill towards the Fox, you could say I felt positively North Street.