Shedders is over from California, working hard with business clients for a few weeks, then he’s back to the West Coast and all those Ss we’d like more of in the UK.

We’re sitting in a Pret A Manger in New Oxford Street. All around us are well-dressed, healthy-looking people, most with laptops or smart phones, a few with both. They’re drinking real coffee and eating sophisticated sandwiches.

Sheds and I have known each other for 37 years and always have something specific to talk about, besides just catching up. Today, I want to discuss the time we first became friends, to see what he remembers. This is for the memoir I’m writing, called ‘Subbuteo for the Soul’. I’m 20,000 words or so into it, although quite a lot so far has been written about what happened after we became friends. I then went back to the beginning of my serious table soccer journey and wrote a chapter called ‘Front Room Champ’s Bacon is Threatened by the Full English’, which you can read on this website. It’s about when I was 13 and played my first non-front room Subbuteo player, who just happened to be the English Champion. He beat me 8-0 without even concentrating much on the game. Essentially, I had to make a big decision: whether to stay as a front room champion or change everything I knew and start again.

The second serious decision I made in my table soccer journey was with Shedders, 12 years later. It was in Swansea 1975, where I lived then, before there were mobile phones or personal computers or sophisticated sandwiches. Where, instead of Pret there was Bob’s Cafe, which would never be allowed to exist today. Bob didn’t open until about ten at night, and then only let people in that he knew or liked the look of. Hippies and students were the main clientele, although there were always a few suits, too. People played chess or read books or just talked. There was no background music. If you wanted a sandwich, Bob would make you one with white Mother’s Pride bread and a slice or two of processed cheese. If you wanted a hot meal, he’d grab a pie and ram it on the steam pipe that he used to make frothy (instant) coffee, for a minute or two.

One of the reasons Bob didn’t open till late was that he and his wife spent the day removing down and outs from the gutter and taking them to their hostel where they cared for them until they could go back on the streets in a reasonably together state. Bob didn’t get government funding. No one monitored his activities or checked his finances. I think the cafe paid for the hostel, but don’t know for sure.

“I remember,” says Shedders, “you and Annie’s room. Their was a bed with a potty – ”

This is true. Annie and I shared the house with three girls, and we were on the ground floor. So I had a potty under the bed to save me going upstairs during the night. One Saturday, I got up late, put on my blue and gold-bordered night coat that barely came down to my balls, and my bright green boots,  picked up the nearly full potty and walked into the hallway, long hair and beard like a surprised bush. Which was when Brenda came in the front door with her mother. They were from a rather posh area of Amanford and Mother very much looked the part, like an uptight Mary Whitehouse. Her expression on seeing me and all my bits/gear and lightly steaming potty would have done the Amanford Parish Council Moral Investigation Committee proud.

” – a big bay window, coal fire, shelves with stacks of LPs and books, stereo next to the chimney, table football pitch in the middle of the room and a sofa along the right hand wall. That was the first time I heard ‘Born to Run’. We played it a lot while we talked about what we wanted to do with the game.”

He and I had played in the English League for a few years but this was the first time he’d been to see me socially. We’d spent the previous day on the Gower Peninsula, with a friend of mine who, like Paul, was a bird spotter. I recall the Judge, as he liked to be known, throwing stones and swearing at a guy on the cliffs at Worms Head who was stealing eggs from a nest. And on the other side of the Gower, in a wood, he’d got us to help him push over a gun hide.

The next day, I cooked a macaroni cheese with peppers and we got talking.

“We realised,” says Sheds, “that we felt the same way, that our love of the game was being smothered by the egos who’d taken it over.”

“Yes, we were both on the verge of giving up; felt frustrated by the personal agendas of some of the big names.”

“Mike Watson and his drive to brand the English Table Soccer Association, designing Rose logos and all that bollocks. Nigel Greaves and his control of everyone via the travel fund.”

“So we formed the Freemasons of English Table Soccer.”

He laughs. “Well, we didn’t really know what freemasons were. The idea was to eradicate ego and the threat of personal plans that linked to Subbuteo’s drive to kill off the flat-figure game.”

Two years after we formed our pact, I was invited by Subbuteo to a meeting in Holland, along with the other key European Secretaries, where the director of the company offered us a million pounds to stop playing table soccer and play Subbuteo instead. All the top players used flat playing figures because they span better than Subbuteo’s three-dimensional ‘OO-scale’ men. Worse still, the players made their own equipment and no longer called the game ‘Subbuteo’.

“We dropped the ‘free’,” Sheds says, “because we realised the Freemasons are all about secrecy, being select, supporting suffocating agendas.”

“And we wanted the Masons to be open to anyone who loved the game and wasn’t going to see it killed off. I seem to remember we invited three others to join us right at the start.”

“But they didn’t respond. It was like a dog whistle they couldn’t hear.”

“A shame, because it was very liberating, to make that promise to fight the egos.”

He sips his coffee. “We formed a friendship based on a purpose; it brought us alive; it was a recognition of passion and love of the game – a real Subbuteo for the soul moment; it kind of leapt out and soared.”

I smile at the softness of his tone, speaking about things that meant so much to us, and still do in many ways.

“Something precious was at risk,” I say. “We took responsibility for being its guardian.”

“Drew a line in the sand.”

Just like Bob, I think now.

I recall the equal parts thrill and fear I felt at making such a commitment. Normally, friends just sort of fall into place, sharing common interests. But Paul and I were proposing we start right out with a purpose, a mission; something we would hold ourselves too; and we did.

Later, back at the street, I go for a drink with Nige in the Ladywell Tavern.

I tell him I met an old friend today, that we talked about how we met through table soccer.

“You used to be a Subbuteo champion, didn’t you?” he says. “Christ, my knees are still dodgy from all that kneeling around the pitch on the front room carpet. Not to mention strategically kneecapping your opponent’s number nine. Those little bleeders were never the same after you’d stuck ’em back together with UHU.”

I think about the time I played in the Europa Cup in Holland in the 70s, shown on Dutch television, hundreds of supporters; beautiful hand-made tables, all the equipment made by small companies serving the players. Everybody using flat figures, not Subbuteo’s OO-scales that the company believed were more like ‘real’ footballers.

“Did I ever tell you about the time Subbuteo tried to buy the game off the players?” I say now.

“I thought they were the game.”

I wait for him to tackle one of his three last-minute pints before I reply.

“In the 70s,” I say, “the game got pretty big and Subbuteo were worried because the players weren’t using their crap equipment. Our game was based on spinning and their 3D men span about as good as a Mars Bar. They decided to buy us out before things got really out of hand. So in 1977, they flew the Secretaries of the four main European Associations to a hotel in Holland. I was there as the England secretary. Their director opened the meeting by saying, ‘We’ll give you a million pounds’.”

Nige actually breaks his own etiquette by putting down the pint before it’s completely swallowed.

“You took it, of course,” he says, fixing me with a no-joking gaze.

“But there was a price,” I say. “He told us that in return, we had to call it ‘Subbuteo’, not ‘table soccer’; had to use Subbuteo’s equipment, not our own; and we had give precedence to the junior competitions, being that little boys were their target market.”

He smiles. “And you turned the bastards down. Plonkers.”

“More like, I turned them down. The other secretaries had dollar signs spinning in their eyes. But I made this passionate speech about how our players didn’t want to use Subbuteo’s stuff and help them sell tons of it to little kids who want to believe they’re Manchester United in miniature.”

“So, what happened next?”

It’s my turn to take a long swallow of beer. “Not long after we turned them down, they got a lucky break. Our European champion turned up at the Europa Cup and played with Subbuteo’s OO-scale men.”

“The one’s that don’t spin?”

“That’s the thing: he’d thought laterally. Realised those little buggers were nice and heavy, compared with our flats. So he polished the bottoms of the bases and then just slid them in straight lines; didn’t bother even trying to spin, and their greater size and weight had advantages.”

“Don’t tell me: he won?”

“Yup. But Subbuteo still lost out. They never could keep up with the players. And they even failed to produce figures that capitalised on sliding. So the players made their own again, and still use them to this day.”

“So, no one won in the end?”

I think about this. It’s true that Subbuteo is now a spent force, obliterated largely by computer football games and their own pig-ignorance about the needs of the people who actually love the game. The players’ game thrives at an underground-ish level. Millions remember the game with affection, knees wrecked in the process.

“I reckon me and Shedders won.”

He finishes his second pint in one swallow. “How so?”

“We’re still best mates.”