All Manner of Things Shall be Well

Charlton 0 Watford 0


Jerome Thomas shrewdly gives Lee Mason a wide berth

One of the best-known landmarks in Glasgow is the St. Enoch Centre, which is a huge shopping area constructed on the site of the former St. Enoch station, originally the northern terminus of the Glasgow and South Western Railway. This company and the Caledonian Railway, owners of Glasgow Central station (or "Welcome to Glasgow Central", as it is now apparently called), were incorporated into the London Midland and Scottish Railway in 1923, yet the two stations continued to function side by side, not much more than a quarter of a mile distant, right through the formation of British Railways until round about 1962, when someone finally realised that all the railway traffic to and from the south of Glasgow could be catered for in one station, and St. Enoch was closed.

I was quite interested in railways at the end of the 'fifties, and occasionally went train spotting with my cousin Richard, or my friend Tony, sometimes the pair of them together, to Hellifield, the nearest station to us on the Settle and Carlisle line. Hellifield isn't a town, just a small Yorkshire village which happens to stand at the junction of two railway lines. The amount of traffic was not great, but on summer days, it was an attractive notion to spend a few hours there in congenial company watching the railway activity and waiting for the four big trains of the day. Two of these, one in either direction, were The Waverley, a train which ran between Edinburgh Waverley and London Saint Pancras. On this train you would probably get one of Leeds Holbeck shed's 19 Jubilee class engines. The other two trains were the Thames-Clyde express (called that in both directions), which linked Glasgow to Saint Pancras, and which, unlike other Glasgow expresses, which terminated at Central, ran to, and from, St. Enoch. This train used to be hauled by one of Holbeck's five Royal Scot class engines, but in early 1960, Holbeck acquired some A3 locomotives (the famous Flying Scotsman is the only surviving one) from Heaton shed in Newcastle, and they began to run through Hellifield on their way to St. Enoch.

At this time, and many years later, when I started visiting Glasgow regularly and buying things in the St. Enoch Centre, I had never given much thought as to who Saint Enoch actually was. I suppose I vaguely imagined a middle-aged saint with a moustache and a slight Birmingham accent, complaining about coloured immigration. But as I say, I didn't give it much consideration at all.

The title of the blog piece is a phrase which I keep running across everywhere nowadays, and the other day I looked it up, and found that it is attributed to one Julian of Norwich, another saint. Being the age I am, I pictured this one as being very English-looking in a fair-haired, nineteen-fifties sort of way, serious and decent minded, like the Julian in Enid Blyton's Famous Five books, going round Norwich being saintly, and coming out with this remarkably comforting statement, which I feel we can still apply to the situation at Charlton.

But it just goes to show how misleading names can be. For this summer, in a Scottish newspaper, I spotted a reference to Saint Enoch, who was not a middle-aged moustachioed saint with a Brummy accent at all, but a young girl! As is the case with most young girls, she grew up and in fact had a son, who became Saint Kentigern, aka Saint Mungo, the patron saint of Glasgow (and also the name of an A1 class locomotive, as a matter of fact).

And then I looked up Julian of Norwich, and swipe me! Julian of Norwich turns out to have been a woman too.

I mention all this because not long before Charlton's game against Watford last Saturday, I noticed that the referee was one Lee Mason, of Bolton, and I began to have a vague foreboding; one thing is that I do not care for the forename Lee very much; I haven't met very many with this name, and those I have, I have disliked, by and large. And as for the famous ones: Lee Marvin (Wandering Star alone is reason enough not be keen); Lee Harvey Oswald, well, I mean to say. And then Mr. Mason turns out to be from Bolton (like Mike Halsey, who is proud of being regularly invited to go training with Big Sam and his boys and who once pretty much single-handedly caused West Bromwich Albion to walk out of SE7 with a 4-1 victory under their belts).

So I wasn't optimistic about Lee Mason, and this time my instincts were not misplaced. OK, you might argue, as have the other Charlton bloggers, that Charlton should have despatched Watford anyway, but Charlton have lost confidence in front of goal, and the obvious penalty, and the less obvious one, might have set things moving once more in the right direction. But it wasn't to be. The Charlton bloggers who were at the game thought that Mason probably doesn't train with anyone, as he mostly remained in the centre circle and made his decisions at random, the linesmen being so bored they'd gone off into a trance.

The Observer has a decent account, and the general view of one and all is that despair should not set in yet a while, and indeed, as Mother Julian of Norwich was wont to say: "All Shall be Well, and All Shall be Well, and All Manner of Things Shall be Well". Though what Saint Enoch would have made of it all is anyone's guess.

STOP PRESS: Most of the foregoing was written on Monday, and logged as a draft while I tried to find some picture links. Since then we have won at the quiz once again, and Charlton have beaten Bolton in the League Cup, thus making Charlton Bolton's unlucky opponents for 06-07. We just need about 9 more teams to develop a similar relationship with, and All Manner of Things Shall be... well, work it out for yourselves.