Worcester is not just the place that strange brown sauce comes from, it was also the home of the composer Edward Elgar.

This is just a statue of him of course. The real Edward Elgar did not have pigeon shit on his head.

Elgar had little formal musical training, and initially had little success as a composer. He eked out living as a musician, teacher, and conductor of the band at the Worcester lunatic asylum. It was not until his early forties, in 1899, that his Enigma Variations, became a popular success.

A couple of years later he told a friend, “I’ve got a tune that will knock ’em – will knock ’em flat.” The result was Pomp and Circumstance March Number One, also known in the UK as Land of Hope and Glory, and in the US as The Graduation March. It’s been played at the last night of the Proms, and at every US graduation ceremony for over a hundred years now, and it still knocks ’em flat. In 1931 he personally conducted a recording of it at the newly opened Abbey Road Studios. That was back in the days of 78 rpm records, so the album was probably called Elgar’s Greatest Hit.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you about. It turns out that Elgar was a great football (US:soccer) fan. Specifically he was a follower of Wolverhampton Wanderers, devoted enough to bicycle forty miles to go and watch them. So impressed was he at a press report on a Wolves game which include the phrase, “He banged the leather for goal,” that he turned it into a song. OK, he was having an off day. It wasn’t an instant hit. So far as anyone knows, it was performed once at a charity fundraiser in 2010, and then faded back into justly deserved obscurity. But just imagine if other composers had been equally devoted sports fans. The world might have had Beethoven’s Bayern-München ist bester Fußballverein, Vivaldi’s Dò il mio cuore all’Associazione Calcio Milan, and Roderigo’s Fantasia para Futbol Club Barcelona. What a loss to humanity!

In other news we moved the boat. I had to turn it round using the entrance to a marina, and totally misjudged the turn due to a crosswind, so we had a few impacts on boats, docks, mooring posts etc. After that debacle I let Paula steer the boat into the two narrow locks we went through. This she did with grace and precision while I worked the lock gates, with a silly grin on my face, because canals.