Everyday life is just a series of passwords isn’t it? And what’s the main purpose of these passwords? That’s right. They exist to be forgotten. Yes, I suppose they perform some valuable function when it comes to protecting our privacy and particulars but that’s only if you can remember the ruddy things in the first instance. What was it Elvis used to sing again? I forgot to remember to forget? Now, that may have been a brooding, heart-felt lament to a lost love from the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll – or at least a melancholy reflection on the Rafael Scheidt years at Celtic - but when it comes to perplexing passwords, it’s easy to forget to remember what you were trying not to forget because you were trying so hard to remember it that you forgot what it was you were trying to remember. Got it? Oh forget it.
Many is the time, for instance, this scribe has been hunched at the laptop, my hands gently gliding over the keys like Richard Clayderman lightly fingering his crotchets as I dither on a commitment to typing in an elaborately worded password that features so many jumbled numbers and random capital letters, it’s memorable only for the fact it’s so unmemorable. The Bletchley Park codebreakers would’ve nonchalantly cracked Enigma and reeled off The Herald’s cryptic crossword by the time I’d successfully negotiated my way through the computer’s stringent security cordons.
Slumped at the office desk, my face displaying the same kind of strained rictus you’d adopt if, for some reason, you were trying to clasp a 50 pence piece between your clenched buttocks, it was clear to all and sundry that I was trying to remember my login details so one could boot up the machine and begin the daily grind. With chin resting on one hand in pondering pose, this scribe can often resemble Auguste Rodin’s chiselled creation, The Thinker. A nude man in sombre meditation, battling with a powerful internal struggle? The likeness is uncanny. Well, it was until the head of Human Resources told me to put some clothes on.
Funnily enough, Rodin popped up in a question on quick-fire intelligence-fest University Challenge recently which got me mulling over the query “which football team is the most cultured?” With the exception of the Aston Villa side of the 1990s who wore shirts sponsored by a yoghurt company (worst line in a column this year), I have decided that it still remains the Oxford United squad of the mid-1980s. Manchester United and Southampton, who contest the EFL Cup final this weekend, may have all the cash-soaked razzmatazz of the modern era but Oxford United, who won the Milk Cup as it was known back in 1986, had an unlikely air of donnish enchantment.
For a start, one of the first Panini stickers I got with a player who had a double-barrelled name was at Oxford. He was Peter Rhoades-Brown and he sounded like someone who would actually be on University Challenge. In fact, he wouldn’t just be on it, he would be sitting in the middle as captain and relentlessly buzzing in with an assured, academic abandon. “In cytogenetics, what term describes the entire chromosomal complement of a cell which may be observed during mitotic metaphase?” asks Bamber Gascoigne in a flummoxing figment of my imagination. “Oxford Oriel, Rhoades-Brown,” goes the voice-over that accompanied a knowing thump of the buzzer and a crash-zoom of the camera. “That would be Karyotype,” declares Rhoades-Brown with irreproachable authority.
Injury meant Rhoades-Brown didn’t actually play in Oxford’s 3-0 win over QPR in that League Cup final. But the equally spiffing Jeremy Charles did. There weren’t many Jeremys in the Panini ’86 album. In fact, there weren’t many Jeremys in football. Charles was the son of Mel Charles and the nephew of the great John and while he elegantly strode around the Wembley turf with a scholarly beard, he looked like he could just have easily taken to the lectern to deliver a lecture on Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology against an echoing backdrop of scribbling pencils, rustling jotters and stifled yawns.
Oxford United used to be billeted in the elegantly named Manor Ground, which sounded marginally more exotic than Boghead at Dumbarton. You half expected the home fans to ride to the stadium on horseback, through a sprawling, tree-lined estate filled with ostentatious, moss-covered statues, fountains and follies while enjoying a half-time swan and peacock pie washed down with a chalice of port and reading P G Wodehouse suggesting a 4-4-2 in the programme notes. Of course, the Manor Ground was one of the more dilapidated theatres and was eventually demolished. But that’s not really the point.
As with all things Oxford, it’s about dreaming spires. Now, there’s a password I could use? Dreaming spi … oh, fiddlesticks, I’ve forgotten it.
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