OPEN LETTER TO A PAIR OF FOOTBALL BOOTS
(With acknowledgments to Mr. C. B. Fry in the "Daily Express")
Dear old Pals,—I want to speak to you seriously and as man to man, because you're not mere dead hide, are you? No, no, you are intelligent, sentient soles, and to be treated as such by every player.
Ah! booties, booties, you little beauties, what a lot you mean to us, don't you? and how hardly we use you.
I've known men to take you off after a game, hurl you—as Jove hurled his thunderbolts—into a corner of the pav. and there leave you till you are next required.
Ah! old men, that's not right, is it? How would we great machines of bone, muscle, and nerve-centre (ah! those nerve-centres, what tricky things they are!), how would we be for the next match if we were treated like that? Pretty stiff and stale, eh, old booties?
Now, look here, when we come in after a hard, slogging game, our bodies and the grey matter in our brains thoroughly exhausted, immediately we've had our bath, our rub-down, and our cup of steaming hot Hercubos (I find Hercubos the finest thing to keep fit on during a hard season) we must turn our attention to you, booties.
First, out from our little bag must come our piece of clean, sweet selvyt. With it all that nasty black slime that gets into your pores and makes you crack must be wiped off. Now, before a good blazing fire of coal—not coke, mind, the fumes of a coke fire pale and de-oxygenate the red corpuscles of our blood, you know—we must carefully warm you till you are ripe to receive a real good dousing of our Porpo (I find Porpo the finest thing for keeping boots soft and pliable).