Haxey Hood (Part 3): Fifty Miles From Spurn

Haxey itself didn't seem to have any real beginning or end; it was a long, thin row of redbrick buildings strung out along a high street, without any obvious centre or reason for being.

It looked like it had been designed by a Soviet planning committee as Northern People's Collective #3268, typified by the plain lettering on a drab building halfway down the high street: MEMORIAL HALL.

They might as well have labelled the rest of the town accordingly: CHURCH, CHAPEL, SHOP #1, SHOP #2, PUB #1, PUB #2, and so forth.

Why use names when labels would suffice? Titles were the bourgeois affectations of soft southerners.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, hailed from Epworth, the next town over. No wonder the locals had looked to heaven; there sure wasn't much for 'em down here on earth.

The land around Haxey—at least what you could see through the mist—was brutally flat; reclaimed marshland from the days when the area was an island, the Isle of Axholme.

The Hood took place on what the locals called a hill, but Haxey Field sure looked flat to me.

And the weather didn't help, either. Apart from the mist and patches of snow, the sky was an industrial, boiler-room grey.

A half hour before the match, just as everyone was coming out of the pub for the Fool's Speech, a freezing drizzle completed the setting.

The flat wasteland… the all-conquering mist and cold… the seemingly pointless strife: this was Sartre and Beckett territory, relocated to the North of England.

The Lord of the Hood and his Boggins

A book on the Port of Goole was called 50 Miles from Spurn—a fitting title for Haxey as well, or some kooky existentialist sketch:

A: (gloomily) "Where are we?"
B: "I don't know."
A: (joyously) "You don't know?"
B: "You know Spurn?"
A: (aghast) "Oh no. Not Spurn!"
B: "No, no—not Spurn. (Pause.) Fifty miles from it."

©J.R. Daeschner

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