The Thoughts of Captain Autumn

The games which Setanta insist on describing as "historic" (i.e. ones where we lose to tiny village teams for whom playing us is a big deal) are coming thick and fast at the moment, with a trip to Farsley Celtic on Sunday. After the rich tapestry of Torquay, alas there are few threads to work with when looking in depth at the small Yorkshire town.

Farsley is about half way between Leeds and Bradford. The Reverend Samuel Marsden was born there in 1764. He emigrated to Australia and introduced the first Australian wool to England in 1808, later making a suit from it for George III. Take that Droylsden, with your "first machine-woven towel in the world".

On the other hand Farsley has four pubs - that's even less than Histon!

I think that's it. Wait a minute though... Hot on the heels of Torquay with its Fawlty Towers connection we have this:

New Pudsey railway station is between Farsley and Pudsey, providing train services towards Leeds, Bradford, Manchester Victoria and Blackpool. This station was the subject of a Monty Python sketch about a pink blancmange.

So it seems as if the spreads and preserves may have been a red herring, and the reason Oxford find themselves stumbling around in the netherworld of football is that we're part of some elaborate surreal comedy sketch. I knew there had to be an irrational explanation for it.

With less than five hours left until our televised defeat to Torquay, I'd better crack on with an exploration of the history and culture of one of the rare places in the Conference of which I've actually heard. Not only that, I've even been there. But more on that later.

Unlike some of the other locales I've investigated, there is a wealth of interesting nuggets to divulge about the heart of the English Riviera. The area comprising modern Torquay has been inhabited since paleolithic times (2,500,000 years ago). A maxilla fragment (that's the upper jaw for any Daily Mail readers who've dropped in) found in Kents Cavern may be the oldest example of a modern human in Europe. So it's not just a myth, Torquay really is full of pensioners.

Although Torquay's first major building was a monastery founded in 1196, it remained a minor settlement until the Napoleonic wars when Torbay was frequently used as a sheltered anchorage by the Channel Fleet. The population of Torquay grew rapidly from 838 in 1801 to 11,474 in 1851. (By my calculations if it kept going at that rate the current population would be over 29 million. If so, I'm guessing the match tonight will be a sell-out.) With the advent of the railways Torquay realised it could become more than just a retreat from harsh winters for the weak and infirm, and in 1902 it started to market itself to summer tourists.

During the Second World War Torquay played host to evacuees from the London area. What a wretched place it must have been then, full of old people and Cockney kids. And to make matters worse, it suffered bomb damage from planes dumping excess loads after participating in the Plymouth Blitz. It's one thing being bombed, but being bombed with leftovers? That lacks a certain dignity.

The water sport events of the 1948 Summer Olympics were held in Torquay. I'm sure there was a very good reason for this, but it does strike me that there must have been some water closer to London. Then again, it does make more sense than the equestrian events of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, which were held in Stockholm five months before the main event.

Recently Torquay has seen an increase in foreign visitors, and is now a major destination for foreign exchange students. My sympathies to you, Devonians. Maybe I'll meet a few of them tonight and we can discuss how aggravating it is trying to battle through a group of 40 Italian teenagers loitering outside McDonald's. I'm the first to acknowledge how my city would be nothing without students and tourists, but that doesn't mean there aren't countless occasions when I wish I could just whisk them all away and have the city back. Personally I think the council should issue us with Resident's Hats, which would indicate to all that we actually live here and as such have right of way in Cornmarket, can jump ahead of confused foreigners in banks, don't need to be handed fliers for city tour buses, don't care if there's a poster sale at the union... You get the idea.

As far as I can ascertain Torquay has no manufacturer of spreads or preserves, and as such the football team may have to forfeit its place in the league. It is the home of Beverage Brands, who make the "popular and controversial" (it says here) alcoholic drink WKD. You know, the one with all the adverts of cray-zee guys playing practical jokes on each other. My, the laughs I would have if only I drank alcohol. In fact I imagine that at some point one of these cray-zee guys has probably made a WKD sandwich, so they qualify after all.

Other weird and wonderful points of interest about Torquay include:

Haile Selassie visited Kents Cavern.

Agatha Christie and Peter Cook were born there.

Babbacombe Model Village. I have been here with my model wife (in the adjectival rather than nominal sense, although personally I think either fits) on our honeymoon. In case you think that's rather a sad thing to do on your honeymoon, we did have a two-year-old and a nine-month-old with us. Three days in the company of two small children is perhaps not the way most newlyweds would choose to spend their post-marital celebration. Still, that's what you get if you do everything back to front like we did.

A number of sketches for Monty Python's Flying Circus were filmed on location in and around Torquay. (As every single person in the world knows, Fawlty Towers was based on a hotel manager John Cleese encountered in the town. Mystifyingly, Torbay Council are apparently considering plans to erect a statue of characters from the show by the harbour. Classy!)

Torquay has a proud (ahem) history of furnishing the so-called glamour industry (a curious term - if you hear a woman described as glamorous you don't instantly imagine her naked and thrusting her breasts towards you) with models - Lauren Pope, Natasha Mealey and Layla Jade. I have no idea who any of these women are, but for the purposes of throughness I may do some research later.

So there you go, that's Torquay. All that and an away win at the Kassam tonight. Oxford Utd, bless them, have gone to a lot of effort to get a good crowd in - as a season ticket holder I could take a couple of friends along for a tenner. Problem is, I don't think anybody who saw us against Droylsden would accept that little to be dragged along.

"Irish balladeers Westlife return with their eagerly awaited new single 'Home'", it says here. That's an interesting use of the word "eagerly", isn't it? Surely nobody actually awaits the anodyne pap these production line bands put out with any enthusiasm? Although that said, if they are capable of producing the sort of intense ire they rouse in me, I suppose the opposite must be possible. People often claim of these groups that they are so bland that it's impossible to get irritated by them, but there's little that irks me more than music which is so devoid of identity that it could have been produced by committee.

The apotheosis of this type of music for me was the late, not lamented Lighthouse Family. When first I heard of their existence I felt a certain empathy towards them, having for many years longed to live in a lighthouse (the sole remaining romantic impulse in my being, as I'm sure my wife would testify). That, however, was before I heard any of the music. Really I should have learned from Deacon Blue, who had the presumption to name themselves after a Steely Dan song before delivering a career of endlessly uninspiring rock. However, I approached The Lighthouse Family with a naive optimism, only to discover that they perpetrated the most soulless, lifeless, sanitized bilge ever to masquerade under the name of music. Their inconsequential, image-led, corporate noodlings were purpose-built for the affluent, thirtysomething, gold FM listening automata who like inoffensive music which sits in the background to be talked over. They were to pop what Kenny G is to jazz. Their vacuous, repugnant effluent was a festering carbuncle on the rotting corpse of musical innovation.

Clearly I am not alone in my estimation - note the significant parentheses from their Wikipedia entry, where it says that "the band has not split up despite being inactive: [ominously] there is always the possibility of another Lighthouse Family album one day."

Away to Droylsden on Saturday. With apologies to its residents, I know absolutely nothing about Droylsden. I don't even know where it is. So learn with me, why don't you?

Droylsden, it turns out, is just east of Manchester. It grew as a mill town in the mid-19th century, and has a population of over 23,000. It has a strong Moravian community. (This is one of the problems with Wikipedia - in attempting to eliminate some of the vast chasms of ignorance swamping my brain, I discover new uncharted vacuity at every turn. Moravia is an historical region in the east of the Czech Republic.) Droylsden used to be referred to by Mancunians as The Silly Country (which I think is rather charming), and in 1851 it was responsible for giving us the first machine-woven towel in the world. How did the Victorians manage without them before then? The mill which produced this towel was closed in the late 1980s, and the site is now home - like roughly 40% of the rest of this country - to a branch of Tesco.

Interestingly, Robertson's Jam is a significant employer in the area. Coming hot on the heels of the revelation that Sun Pat peanut butter is manufactured in Histon, I am wondering whether this can be attributed to mere coincidence or whether Oxford United have inadvertently stumbled into the Preserves & Spreads Manufacturers League.

Anyway, here's to the fans of Droylsden FC, currently languishing at the foot of the Blue Square Premier. You have to admire someone who, when living four miles from Manchester, chooses to support Droylsden. So good luck to them. After Saturday.

Having recently touched on the difficult time when a father feels he is a disappointment to his son, I am compelled to delve deeper into the paternal-filial psyche and cover the even more challenging moment when the son disappoints the father.

My eldest has been picked for his school rugby team.

Rugby is a dreadful sport, a stomping, thumping barbarian's game played by those who compensate for their inability to cope with the guile and finesse required of the beautiful game by barging mindlessly into each other like rutting animals. I speak not of the people who play it, most of whom I would sooner spend an evening with than any professional footballer, but the sport itself. It is inherently flawed, in that it attempts to move forwards by throwing the ball backwards, and in using a ball which isn't even a ball. Furthermore, I'm always dubious about any sport which is slewed in favour of a particular physical type (basketball, anyone?) But my main issue with rugby is that it refuses to acknowledge that it is failed football. Unable to cope with the artistic demands of caressing a ball with his feet alone, William Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it. Idiot.

In my son's defence, he didn't actively try to get picked for the rugby team - he was doing it in games and the next thing he knew his name was being read out as having been selected. Even so, I am somewhat dismayed that any son of mine showed enough even inadvertent ability to stumble unknowingly into the team.

Be not alarmed though dear reader, I am still proud of him. He was already in the football team.