Our new club chaplain, the Rev John Barker, who is a lifelong Darlo fan, has agreed to write an occasional column for the official website.

John is Vicar of All Saints in Harrow Weald in North London. He can be contacted by e mail on chaplain@darlingtonfc.org

The Ramblings of Rev John

This is the first of a series of occasional columns that is intended to be a sort of football inspired Pause for Thought. However, in this first missive I will introduce myself a little bit. I regard it as an enormous privilege to be Club Chaplain. I was born in Darlington, in Greenbank Maternity Home, and have supported Darlo for as long as I can remember. I grew up on a farm a few miles out of Darlington and my Dad used to take me to the evening games whenever we were not busy with farm jobs.

The first game that I remember was at home against Gateshead in the FA Cup. It was only a year or so after Gateshead were voted out of the old Fourth Division and they came to us determined to settle a perceived injustice. Ray Simpson tells me we lost 4-1. I just remember that we were hammered from the beginning to the end of the match and that it was absolutely freezing! I guess that it is appropriate that my first match ended in defeat, preparing me well for a lifetime of supporting the Quakers.

When I moved to secondary school, I started to save my pocket money to buy a schoolboy season ticket for East Stand Standing. My preferred place was right beside the tunnel on the Polam End side, and I have a clear memory of a young John Hope standing with us when he an apprentice with the club. His sideboards inspired me to grow mine as soon as I left school, by which time he was playing in the old First Division!

For a few years after school I was playing football every Saturday for my local team Bishopton. Some of you may remember playing there for other teams from the Darlington Church and Friendly League. If you do, I apologise for all the cow muck on the pitch and for the state of the changing rooms-the pitch was on the field in front of our farm, and the cows were ours. In those days I always tried to get in from feeding the livestock in time for the football results on BBC, waiting to see how we had come on. Very often the anticipation was the best part, hoping that the result would be better than it actually turned out to be.

From 1992 onwards I started to live more and more in eastern Europe and this presented some real challenges for keeping up to date with the Darlo results. There was no internet in the early days, and I still have a clear memory of managing to find a two days old copy of a Daily Telegraph in Krakow railway station when we were involved in the playoffs and wanting to run around the station celebrating when I saw that we had made it to Wembley for the Final (this was the year we lost to Plymouth as I recall).

Since 2016 I’ve been back in England as a full time Vicar in the Church of England with a parish now in North London, All Saints Harrow Weald. I was a founder member when we had to reform; I’m also a Vice President and put as much as I am able into BTB each year, and every other appeal for that matter. So, why Darlo? Have you ever asked yourself that question? I do only very occasionally, and it is almost always after we have thrown away a certain victory, as we do from time to time. Seriously, I cannot imagine being part of a better club, because it is not just a club, I like to believe that we are a family.

That doesn’t mean that we are perfect, but it does mean that Darlo is a club that I am proud to call my team. We plan to call this column the Ramblings of Rev John because in my lifetime I have rambled all over the world. However, wherever I have been I have never forgotten my roots, and whenever I make it back, immediately I feel at home. The club’s initiative to set up the buddy scheme in the last few weeks is a wonderful example of how all of us who support Darlington can know that we are part of a family. These days are not easy, and the tough times will continue for a while yet. So, let’s stick together, watching out for each other and looking forward to getting back to Blackwell Meadows and cheering on our team.

I will finish this column by recalling an old Arabic proverb, “what is coming is better than what is gone”. Let us hope and pray that this will be true, both for ourselves and our families and for our club, the mighty Darlo.

John Barker

chaplain@darlingtonfc.org