“Celery! Celery!
If she don’t come
I’ll tickle her up the bum
With a stick of celery!”
There are times when you cannot help but shit yourself with laughter. And when Chelsea came to call, usually the cue to run away in fear of your life, we spent more time watching the terrace hi-jinx than the match itself. Y’see, the Chels had this new chant. It was about celery. And to illustrate the words, they brought celery to the ground. Tons of it, hidden inside jackets like illicit clubs and flick knives, to be thrown onto the pitch and at each other as soon as the singing started.
With tears running down my face, we all joined in with the celery song, as the Reading goalkeeper ran for cover under a shower of salad. The following week, there were dire warnings in the local press and the match programme about the consequences of bringing greens to the match. But we did anyway, smuggling it into the ground down the trousers, like a scene out of Spinal Tap.
There were, however, people who got it horribly, horribly wrong. As the celery song started, I was clubbed in the back of the head by a Tesco’s cucumber portion, closely followed by a handful of spring onions. You just can’t trust anybody to get anything right.
The police crushed the celery craze ruthlessly, saying (and I kid you not) that a stick of celery might actually take some’s eye out. They punished transgressors as if they were plotting the downfall of the monarchy. They would wade into the terrace mob-handed, returning to their posts proudly clutching enough salad to start a small picnic, while the rest of the crowd was still lobbing the stuff around like there was no tomorrow.
http://www.geocities.com/coleman66uk/life/inflatables.html 
