We were crushed up against the bar in last year's pre-match pub-crawl—the pre-Sway Sway, so to speak.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was standing next to a living legend, one of the hard nuts—or were they just nuts?—who stayed in the middle all day, their hands clamped to the Hood as they fought off rivals.
'Blandie' immediately stood out.
Not because of his ginger mullet—short on top and wispy down the back—or his hooped earrings, but because of his goatee.
A half-goatee, actually, one side of his face bare and the other carpeted with red whiskers.
Was he an eccentric who re-enacted historical battles?
Or maybe a self-loathing Englishman who got kilted up like a Highland Scot on weekends?
For all I knew, he got his kicks dressing as a two-faced man-woman, with a bride on one side and a groom on the other.
I had no idea. And it's not particularly polite—or wise—to ask a stranger in a strange pub about his strange facial hair.
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| Blandie has since upgraded to a half-beard and dreadlocks |
I finally had a chance to ask him when he shouted to a friend across the room, a heavyset guy with a big H shaved into the top of his head.
So that was it—they were groomed especially for the occasion.
And they weren't the only ones. The two main officials, the Lord of the Hood and the Chief Boggin, wore black ties and red hunting jackets, as well as fetchingly floral top hats with tall pheasant feathers sticking out—for that crucial touch of fauna.
The "Fool" had a blackened face with smears of colour on it, plus a bowler hat and a suit of rags, while the ten other boggins were dressed in scarlet sweatshirts with their jeans tucked into their socks in preparation for the mother of all matches.
For the time being, though, the only projectiles in their hands were pints, and they were belting out drinking songs in boozers so crowded it was almost impossible to get to the bar.
"Just poosh on through, luv!" two pint-sized grannies told me. "That's what we do!"
Truth be told, I hadn't been very impressed with Haxey at first.
Tucked in a mist-covered corner of North Lincolnshire next to Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, it was surrounded by towns and villages with names so miserable they must have been inflicted on purpose: Scunthorpe… Scrooby… Grimsby… Goole.
Maybe the Saxons thought that if they gave them ugly names, the Vikings wouldn't bother pillaging them.
Unfortunately, it didn't work then, and now it succeeds only in scaring off tourists—anyone fancy a romantic getaway to Goole?
A promotional poster on the Tube in London declared: "Doncaster—A City in All But Name."
And what a difference a name makes.
©J.R. Daeschner
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