Punctuality, football fist fights and French cobblestones as a Walthamstow band reconsiders its approach to band discipline
Wednesday, 21 October 2026. Walthamstow, a bin shed behind a bakery, 7.07pm, which is late, and that is the point.
A Football Club Has Out-Punked Us And I Am Furious
Rehearsal was meant to start at seven. I arrived at seven-oh-seven because the 34 bus did that thing where it says Due, then says Due again, then disappears from the display like it has been raptured. When I walked into the bin shed, Moth was sitting on her kick drum holding a copy of something she had printed at the library. She looked at me. She looked at the clock. She said, read this, and you are lucky we are not a football team.
It was the report on how six Bramblewick Rovers players were suspended after a teammate arrived seven minutes late. Seven minutes. The same seven minutes as me. The poor lad’s Fiesta broke down outside a Greggs, he walked past a sausage roll, which is heroic, and his captain had replaced lateness fines with a policy of fighting a teammate. Six of them piled in. Two got arrested. The supporters noted it was the most coordinated movement the club had managed all season.
I read it twice. Then I told Moth we are not adopting the Bramblewick model, and she said she was not suggesting we adopt it, she was suggesting I respect it. There is a difference. I am not sure I understand it, but there is one.
Our Previous Disciplinary System
The Bramblewick fines were five pounds for lateness, ten for forgetting boots and twenty for criticising the captain’s haircut. Ours, until tonight, were: if you are late, you buy the chips; if you forget your lead, you buy the chips; if you criticise my fringe, you get no chips at all and you have to watch us eat them. In six years nobody has ever paid. Like the Bramblewick treasurer, our treasurer cannot count. Our treasurer is Dazzer. Dazzer thinks a fiver is a type of fish.
What I love is that the manager arrived at the emergency meeting twenty-three minutes late because he forgot which training ground they used. That is every band leader in London. I once turned up to our own gig at the wrong Wetherspoons. There are two on the same high street. They both had a quiz on. I did very well in the wrong quiz.
Proportionality, According To A Philosopher In A Bin Shed
The report brings in a moral philosopher who says the punishment exceeded the offence, though it remained more proportionate than paying four hundred thousand pounds for a striker who has scored nothing but parking fines. Kez, who did a year of philosophy at Goldsmiths before dropping out to sell vintage denim in Brick Lane, said this was textbook Kant. Then she said actually it might be Hume. Then she said it does not matter, they are both dead and neither of them could play a barre chord.
We agreed a new policy. Late arrivals now have to sing the opening of the next song a cappella while everyone else stares. That is our version of the disappointed look from somebody’s father, which, according to the report, is now an approved sanction. Dazzer said he would prefer to be punched. That is how bad his voice is.
Meanwhile In France They Have Discovered The Value Of A Paving Stone
Between songs I read Moth the piece on France’s cobblestone economy and the schools money that is permanently in transit. The French state spends over half the economy, and yet the students marching about missing teachers still have to supply their own grievances, which are the same grievances from 1968. Overcrowded classrooms were on the list then. They are on the list now. The ministry has opened a file to classify the overcrowded classroom as a historic monument.
The bit that got me was the history of the paving stones. Paris paid to lay them, paid to cover them in asphalt, and now has a third contract in tender to uncover some of them for the tourists. Kez said that is not infrastructure, that is a relationship, and I realised she had quoted the article without knowing it, which means she has read it, which means she was reading at rehearsal, which means she owes chips.
The Money Is In Transit
The ministry line that the school money exists but is currently in transit is now the official house position on everything. Where is the rent, Dazzer? In transit. Where are the strings you promised to restring, Moth? In transit. Where is our deposit from the Clapton pub? It is in transit, says the landlord, and I believe him, because I have met his bank, and it is a jar.
Mathematics Would Have Saved Bramblewick
Late in the evening Kez found a Daily Mash piece about men disappointed that not all mathematicians are hot, after one maths celebrity on telly sent blokes flocking to university departments with roses. They found a sixty-two year old in an egg stained fleece explaining vector spaces. Kez said this is the most relatable heartbreak she has ever read. She once went to a jazz night expecting Chet Baker and got a man called Leonard with a trumpet and a cold.
Moth says if Bramblewick Rovers had a maths department they would have worked out that seven minutes late, multiplied by six angry men, equals two arrests and a council task force with an eighty-five thousand pound budget. That is the most expensive seven minutes in English football. Mine cost a chip supper. I got off lightly.
The Song
Obviously, a song. It is called Seven Minutes, it lasts exactly seven minutes, which is four times longer than anything we have ever played, and Moth refuses to count it in until I arrive on time to rehearse it. So it may never be performed. In that sense it is our most French song yet. The money for it exists. It is in transit.