This match report business has just got tedious, to be honest. It's got tedious because everything about Forest has become tedious - the desperate recruitment strategy, the inability of any manager to get these misfits to play as a team, the snide rumours about "trouble behind the scenes", the cyclical drift into trouble...
So we've has enough of recording defeats, and we'll devote ourselves from now on to producing Match Previews, which may occasionally make reference to football, though this is not guaranteed.
Here's the Bournemouth one.
Bournemouth is one of only two towns in the British Isles which doesn't now how to spell itself. The other is that absurd Welsh place.
The area which was to become Bournemouth was originally a deserted heathland occasionally visited by fish. Bournemouth's growth accelerated with the arrival of a train, and it became a town in 1870. Part of the historic county of Hampshire, Bournemouth joined Dorset for administrative purposes following the reorganisation of local government in 1974. Through local government changes in 1997, the town began to be administered by a unitary authority independent of Dorset County Council, although it remains part of that ceremonial county. Since April 2019 the unitary authority has been merged with that of Poole, as well as the non-metropolitan district of Christchurch to create the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole unitary authority. These days, nobody has a fucking clue who is responsible for the bins.
The town was especially rich in literary associations during the late 19th century and earlier years of the 20th century. P. C. Wren, author of Beau Geste (starring Gary Cooper, Ray Milland and Robert Preston, in a story ostensibly about sand), lived there. Beatrice Webb, later Potter, lived and worked in the town. Beatrice Potter was the one who helped found the London School of Economics and The Fabian Society, not the Beatrix Potter who left us with the immortal line: “Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were -- Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter. ”
J. R. R. Tolkien, spent 30 years taking holidays in Bournemouth, staying at the Hotel Miramar, where he would hold court in the bar making up daft stories for beer. He eventually retired to the area in the 1960s with his wife Edith, where they lived close to Rivendell. Tolkien died in September 1973 at his home in Bournemouth but was buried in the Last Homely House to the East, in Oxfordshire.
Percy Florence Shelley lived at Boscombe Manor; a house he had built for his mother, Mary Shelley, the writer and author of the Gothic horror novel, Frankenstein. Mary died before the house was completed but she was reconstituted in Bournemouth, in accordance with her wishes. The family plot in St Peter's churchyard also contains her parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the heart of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, an early Singer sewing machine manual and a packet of pins.
Author Bill Bryson worked for a time with the Bournemouth Echo newspaper and wrote about the town in his 1995 work Notes from a Small Island, a document of such stylistic dreariness it found its way almost immediately onto GCSE English comprehension papers.
How such a weird place spawned a football team of any note is a matter for debate, though it seems fitting that they should avoid the run-of-the-mill title Bournemouth F.C., and opt instead for A.F.C. Bournemouth like the enormous pseudo-European ponces they are.
Still, they were easily better than Nottingham Forest, who are beginning to go through the motions of losing with a growing degree of efficiency.
Bournemouth 2 Forest 0. More surprises to follow.
MEANWHILE, HERE'S HENRY LONGFELLOW'S NOTTINGHAM FOREST VIDEO BLOG ARCHIVE STUFF
