The Closing Ceremony: Prizes, Paws, and One Very Large Surprise
Griselda had, naturally, produced a schedule for the ceremony three days in advance — timed to the minute, laminated against the possibility of weather, with a contingency schedule laminated behind that in case the first schedule was somehow insufficient. She distributed copies to everyone including, pointedly, Glory, who cannot read but was made to hold one anyway “for the optics.”
“Ten forty, trophy presentation,” she announced to the assembled staff at Gerbil HQ, tapping the clipboard. “Ten fifty-eight, individual awards. Eleven-fifteen, closing remarks, brief. Eleven-twenty, dispersal.” She looked around at everyone’s faces. “Any questions?”
There were none, mostly because everyone else already knew something Griselda didn’t.
The pitch had been transformed — a proper podium wheeled out for the first time all tournament, Gertrude’s medals stacked in careful rows, each one gleaming on the front and, everyone already knew from experience, faintly sunflower-flavoured on the back. Gwendoline’s programme for the day ran to four pages and had somehow used the word “GLITTERING” in four different fonts.
Ten forty, precisely. The trophy itself was wheeled out under a cloth by two gerbils who clearly considered this the single greatest responsibility of their lives so far, Griselda walking alongside it with the particular stiff-backed pride of someone who had checked its polish herself and would not be discussing how early she’d arrived to do so. When the cloth came off, the whole ground went up as one — a great deal of gold, entirely too large for practical use, topped with a tiny sculpted gerbil mid-celebration that Gertrude had spent a full week getting exactly right.
Tunnel’s captain came up the steps to lift it, the whole team crowding in behind her, and for a moment the trophy caught the light so completely that half the crowd’s photos afterward showed nothing but glare and delight in roughly equal measure. She held it aloft, the team roared beneath her, and Glory drifted directly overhead as if she’d been personally invited to hover there.
Only once the trophy had done a full, unhurried lap of the pitch in the captain’s paws — every gerbil in the ground getting close enough to touch it, Play School’s whole team included, Humpty patting it once as though checking it, too, might have a window somewhere — did Griselda allow the ceremony to move on.
The Golden Paw (top goalscorer) went to Tunnel’s late-blooming striker, the gerbil who’d spent a whole tournament in the shadow of the tunnels before stepping fully into the light in the final — three goals in the last two matches alone. She accepted it with the same quiet, startled modesty she’d shown scoring every one of them.
Best Save went to Tunnel’s keeper, for her full-stretch stop against Discworld with nothing but ordinary grass beneath her and nowhere to disappear to. She held the medal up to the crowd and then, without ceremony, immediately bit off a corner of the edible reverse, to enormous applause.
Fair Play was awarded, to gentle and prolonged laughter, to Play School — nobody present needed reminding why, and Humpty accepted on behalf of the team with the placid dignity of someone still fairly sure there’d been a window involved somewhere.
Best Newcomer went, unanimously and without debate, to Atlantis, whose whole tournament had lasted one match and had somehow still produced two goals against Magic Roundabout and a great deal of affection.
The Golden Whistle, new this year, went to the elephant shrews as a body, for surviving a tournament that had asked them to adjudicate corner flags bent by unexplained means, tackles from Death, and at least one goal nobody could fully reconstruct.
Griselda ran through each presentation exactly to schedule, checking her clipboard after every single one, visibly delighted and visibly trying not to show it.
Then, at ten fifty-eight and thirty seconds — a full ninety seconds ahead of her own itinerary, which she would later insist was “an oversight, not a pattern” — Florence stepped up to the microphone instead of Griselda.
“There’s one more award,” Florence said, “that isn’t on the schedule.”
Griselda actually looked down at her own clipboard, as if it might have betrayed her.
“For the gerbil,” Florence went on, “who ran this whole tournament from a folding table, who settled every dispute, who never once raised her voice even when Nanny Ogg’s corner kicks defied several laws of physics, and who — we happen to know — kept a single sunflower seed in her pocket the day England lost, rather than eat it, because some things you just don’t feel like celebrating alone.”
Gertrude, from the side, was already holding out a small velvet box.
“The first-ever Golden Clipboard,” Florence said, “for services to Gerbil football. Griselda — get up here.”
Griselda did not move for a full three seconds, which for a gerbil who has never once been early or late to anything in her life, constituted a kind of small earthquake.
Gwendoline’s bulletin, drafted entirely in advance for exactly this moment, went out already reading: SHE HAS NO SCHEDULE FOR THIS AND WE ARE DELIGHTED.
Griselda walked up slowly, took the little golden clipboard — solid, absurd, entirely useless for actual note-taking — and held it for a long moment without speaking. Behind her, the whole tournament’s worth of teams, real winners and real losers alike, was on its feet.
“I don’t,” she said eventually, “have anything prepared.”
“We know,” said Gwendoline, gently. “That’s rather the point.”
Griselda laughed — a real one, caught off guard, the kind she doesn’t often allow herself — and held the little clipboard up to the crowd, and the whole ground answered her back.
Greta’s line, waiting under the glass as always, had clearly been placed there days ago and simply left to wait its turn:
She kept the schedule for everyone else. Today, for once, it kept nothing back from her.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/the-closing-ceremony