I later googled, and this is my own conjecture, but can it be a coincidence that a quite well-known-between-the-wars poem was written in Aberdaron (a village near Abersoch, where my own family used to go camping) in the 1920s which described Snowdonia at sunrise as “dim sierras” ? The Llyn Peninsula and Snowdonia – it certainly ticks some Blackwellian boxes. That young poet, Roy Campbell, by the way later turned out to be a massive fascist-sympathising twat, which is why he is now largely forgotten.

As for the image of “the keepers … hanging rancid in the glade”, NB57 said he was influenced in writing that by John Eastwood’s articles in the Wirral Journal (1989-1993), collected in “Wirral Born and Bred: the old life of the countryside in Wirral (1993)”. When I then got the book I read a very striking description on page 30 of a keeper’s gibbet, with the bodies of predators hanging from nails, rotting in a glade of a private wood where pheasants were bred for shooting, and where other competing species, predators and vermin were slaughtered. Very reminiscent of the descriptions of gamekeeper’s gibbets in poems like Edward Thomas’ ‘The Gallows’, which in turn influenced Ted Hughes’ ‘November’.

So NB57 has flipped the image around at least twice, and perhaps via ideas of gamekeepers hanging there in place of their victims, we now have goalkeepers surreally hanging there in the woodland glade, going rancid.

Eastwood’s book is full of tooled-up gamekeepers chasing young scallywags off land belonging to the local gentry, with descriptions of the incredible adrenalin rush that gave. Again the image is updated and so we have the stewards and police escorting away the adrenalin-rush pitch invader (who is equipped with all the gear from all the sponsors of the Champions League when that competition was first re-branded – Wampum, Motorola, Continental).

Then, as the final lines of his book on page 63, Eastwood quotes a poem by his own Uncle, another older, posher, John Eastwood, a local poem originally published in 1912, on the subject of re-reading a boyhood adventure book:
“Poring over these stained, tattered leaves, I catch back boyhood;
Reading them, I revel in an enclosed content, a havened security -
As in some secret hayloft, shot with shafts of afternoon sunlight –
With sudden upbubblings of joy, inalienable hilarities.”

Oh and I always thought that Brendan had changed his name to Fred Von Metronome. Not sure which I find funnier now!!

I can’t quite make out what he’s actually singing, but much of it sounds rather like “Arse! Cock! Cock! Cock! Arse!” over a badly played nu-metal backing track, again a parody of modern potty-mouthed Yank metal bands.