Custard's Dartford FC Programme Fillers

Wikipedia tells me the following about custard:

'Custard is a family of preparations based on milk and eggs, thickened with heat. Most commonly, it refers to a dessert or dessert sauce, but custard bases are also used for quiches and other savoury foods.  As a dessert, it is made from a combination of milk or cream, egg yolks, sugar, and flavourings such as vanilla. Sometimes flour, corn starch, or gelatin are also added. In French cookery, custard—confusingly called just crème—is never thickened in this way: when starch is added, it is pastry cream crème pâtissière; when gelatin is added, it is crème anglaise collée.  Depending on how much egg or thickener is used, custard may vary in consistency from a thin pouring sauce (Crème Anglaise), to a thick blancmange like that used for vanilla slice or the pastry cream used to fill éclairs. Custard thickened with starch is a non-Newtonian fluid*  Most custard is cooked in a double boiler (bain-marie) or heated very gently on the stove in a saucepan, but custard can also be steamed or baked in the oven with or without a hot water bath.  Instant and ready-made 'custards' are also marketed, though they are not true custards if they are not thickened with egg. See Bird's Custard, for instance.'

*A Non-Newtonian Fluid is a liquid that, when you stir it slowly, feels and moves like a thick liquid. However, if you poke it hard or fast (ooer) then it feels like a solid. Something to do with large particles that can't move quickly. Quicksand is also a non-newtonian liquid, which is why if you fall into quicksand you should swim slowly out rather than struggling.

Now for the really interesting stuff. Custard it appears is also the Wolf in Sheeps clothing of the creamy dessert world.

A large object like a log has a large amount of fuel inside it but quite a small amount of surface for it to react with oxygen and burn on. Every time you chop the log in half you create more surface for it to burn on so it will burn quicker, so small twigs have much more surface and will burn more vigorously. Paper has much more surface again so burns very quickly, but the custard powder has a ridiculous surface area. The particles are about a hundredth of a mm across so a gram of custard powder has a surface area of about 600 square metres. so it can burn almost everywhere at once incredibly quickly forming an impressive fireball.

This has caused many dangerous explosions in flour mills factories etc. when a flammable powder is mixed with air and then meets a source of ignition. Because people don't think of powders as explosive they often don't consider them as dangerous with explosive results.
So it's highly volatile stuff apparently. A bit like me!

If I find anymore interesting CRFs (Custard Related Facts) I'll add them here.

Submitted for publication in February 2009 and appeared in the matchday programme for our game against Tooting and Mitcham Utd on 28th February.  Dartford won the game 3-1 with goals from Ryan "Ryno" Hayes and 2 from Rob Haworth. Tooting's goal came from a soft penalty late into the 2nd half. The game also saw the debut of striker Craig Carley who joined us from Met Police. Carley came on after 8 minutes to replace Hayes who injured himself scoring a goal of "Gazzaesque" quality.

This is simply my first attempt at a Bone Fide interview and who better to ask than Dartford's own Goalkeeping guru, John MacRae. I just hope he likes it when he sees it. For this I took the guise of a Cuban based sports journalist, Carlos Mondragon! No I don't know why either, but it seemed a good idea at the time.

In the interview we refer to "Keeper Wars". This is a goalkeeping competition that John has run along with his good friend Craig Clark, is held at Princes Park and is the only competition of its kind in the UK. I was very fortunate in 2007 to be allowed to enter the first "Keeper Wars" as the "Terrace Champion" on my 39th Birthday. I ended up training with the Dartford keepers for 6 weeks prior to the competiton and did so to raise money for the NSPCC. I now help John and Craig organise and run the competition and help liase with Charities that we try and support. We feel that the club should be seen to be helping others and this is a big part of "Keeper Wars". In 2008 it was DGS MENCAP, a Dartford based Charity and in 2009, hopefully the British Heart Foundation.

Thanks John

As you may have seen in the news recently 11 Tottenham fans including a 13 year old boy were arrested and 3 charged with indecent chanting at a football match. Their target naturally was Sol Campbell, who has been berated by Spurs fans since he left them to join arch rivals Arsenal a few seasons ago. Even though Mr Campbell has long since departed Arsenal for pastures new at Portsmouth, he is still the target for the hatred of Spurs fans.

The song in question sung by those arrested obviously cannot be printed. It is, if looked upon in a dispassionate way, a very well thought out, tight set of lyrics set to the tune of “Lord of the Dance“. Its problem is that in it there's something that would upset people from most walks of life - the mentally ill, HIV sufferers, homosexuals, women and there’s a public hanging thrown in as well. Is it racist? Well probably not, but the fact that he is also referred to as Judas is still over the top.

What exactly did he do that was so wrong? To my mind he realised that he was unlikely to be very successful at Spurs trophy wise and decided to join what was then the best team in English football, won a hatful of winners medals and cemented his place within the England squad. Which player wouldn’t want to play for a team that is challenging for trophies season upon season?

The problem Spurs fans have is not what he did but how he did it. After saying he was going to sign a new contract and turning down offers from various teams this lifelong Spurs fan left on a free transfer at the end of his contract and deprived Tottenham of a reputed £10 Million fee. They do not sing this song because of his colour or his sexual orientation, they sing it purely out of hatred. It doesn’t mean it’s right, but is it really an arrestable offence?

If this is a new edict to stamp out abuse on the terraces, how is this to be policed? The song in question has, according to a Spurs fan I work with, been sung for at least four years, so why now has it suddenly been deemed so offensive that you can be arrested for singing it? Why wasn’t this dealt with years ago? And how do you deal with people singing an offensive song when there may be as many as 3,000 people singing it as there was at Fratton Park where the incident took place? What do you do? You can’t arrest 3,000+ fans, so do you try to single out the ringleaders? Identify the guy who started the chant or try to work out who the original song-smith is and arrest them?

But what about some of the other chants that you hear sung by supporters from other teams and why are they not arrested for singing these gems? Spurs fans sing a song when they play Arsenal about Arsene Wenger, that questions whether he may or may not have had a relationship with an under-aged girl. Or that Manchester United fans are regularly reminded of the Munich air disaster, or how about the “hissing” noise made by fans of other teams when they play Tottenham as a reference to the holocaust? The fact is there will always be an element of the unsavoury at football matches. We’ve all been there heard it, shaken our heads and if not joined in occasionally allowed ourselves a rye smile, myself included at the sometimes very clever use of the English language in what is after all the fans main weapon to put off and distract the oppositions players.

The football terrace is a place where you can let off steam. People who might usually be too self conscious to sing in public can be witnessed belting out songs both innocent and on the odd occasion slightly “iffy” with gusto. A song of the type sung by those Spurs fans arrested, would never survive at this level as there would be too few fans who would be willing to sing it and those that did would be identified eventually. But in a crowd of 40,000?There’s lots of things wrong with the modern game that could be easily stamped out by the authorities. Diving, swearing at the officials, violent conduct and drugs. But instead someone has decided to try and stop something that might be un-policeable and totally un-enforceable. If they are serious about this then they are going to have to clamp down on every song, chant or insult from every fan at every game in every ground up and down the land which is ludicrous.

I don’t know who made the initial complaint, but to me the only person who’s opinion matters on this subject is Campbell’s himself, after all he is the victim here. Maybe someone should ask him?

Football fans in general aren’t stupid people and this was shown at the recent return match between Spurs and Portsmouth at White Hart Lane where there was a marked improvement in the crowds behaviour. Campbell still got stick from the Spurs fans. He was booed when he played well, cheered when he made errors and laughed at when he fell over, but no-one was heard singing that song, they hummed it instead! As the great Dean Martin once sung, “You can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking”.

Jake Sponson

Jan 2009

Hi there,

The following is a collection of short articles written as page fillers for Dartford FC's matchday programmes. The idea behind this blog was to keep all these articles in one place and for me to learn how to create and operate a website, before my 6 year old has to teach me!

Dartford FC currently plays in the Ryman Premier League. We are based at Princes Park in Dartford. It's a £6.5 Million purpose built stadium which features many environmental innovations and regularly see crowds well in access of 1,200. The stadium itself is well worth a visit so why not pop along one day?

The articles are all about aspects of the game, that aren't necessarily about the club itself, but to do with the game of football in general. Our matchday programmes are a cross between a regular programme and a fanzine. Special thanks to Delboy (our editor) for allowing me to submit these articles, and for putting them in.

Over the years I have written under many guises such as Sir Austin Tashus, Leigh Enfield, Jake Sponson, Quentin Matchlock, Carlos Mondragon and many others. The idea was simply not to make it look that I was monopolising the programme so as different people I can vary the writing style from the faintly ridiculous to the very serious. My articles cannot be any longer than a page or two in length to help with printing, but I try to be informative, entertaining and hopefully thought provoking when the topic in question demands it in the space available to me.

Unfortunately they are not in date order but if they were printed I shall refer to the matchday programme they appeared in, who we played and the result. I'll also try to give you an idea of what was happening at the club at the time when these were published.

Thanks for visiting.

Steve "Custard" Hookins

You may be wondering why Custard?

All will be revealed one day