I’m a little bit tired this week. Partly this is because I have been working without any meaningful break since Christmas. Partly it’s the ennui of continuing to plough through a global pandemic and all the guano that brings. It’s also the ongoing saga of my brachial neuritis (17 weeks yesterday and counting) and its concomitant prevention of bike-riding, which is now invading my nightly dreams, with all kinds of strange scenarios where I get back on my pride and joys.
You’re bored of all that though aren’t you? I know I certainly am. You want to hear something different. Maybe a little bit uplifting?
But whilst all those circumstances have contributed, the main cause of my mental fatigue this week is a massive come-down I’m experiencing. Back in 2018, hard to believe it was three years ago, I came back from the Cent Cols bike extravaganza in the Pyrenees and experienced the mother of all metaphysical crashes. One that plunged me into depths I’d not experienced for years, and it took me almost a year to recover. This one isn’t like that, but it is a comedown from euphoria, but I’m going to draw on the lessons of 2018-19 to make sure I look at things very differently. In fact, this time, it’s going to be a celebration.
September 25th will mark my 50th anniversary as a West Ham fan (we beat Stoke at home 2-1, I remember flashes of the game, but most of all I remember the noise!). I hope that we have a European fixture close to that date, and that if we do, I’ll get tickets to go somewhere exotic, like Bucharest or Baku. It would be a fitting way to mark the longest relationship of my life. Like any couple, we have had our ups and downs (once per decade currently, 1978, 1989, 1992, 2003 and 2011), and times when we didn’t get on very well (my late teens to mid-twenties, when politics, music and other things became more important), but through it all we’ve stuck together.
I hope (and it is always that hope that kills you) that the bad times may finally be behind us, and as I approach old age a deeper more contented relationship will supersede some of the more tempestuous phases we’ve had. I mean, if you truly love someone, you can forgive them can’t you? The 2006 Cup Final is not forgotten, but I can look back on it now and see I learned so much from it, just as I did from all those rainy and dull nights together, when I wondered if the relationship was going anywhere.
But now we have someone at the helm who may just know what he is doing. If we can keep the good things on board (Rice, Soucek, Lingard, Coufal) and maintain the wonderful togetherness and joie de vivre that has existed for many of our games this season, who knows where our love could take us. Anyway, they know I’ll never leave them, and so what would be the point about grumbling about that when it’s a choice I freely made many decades ago.
So I’m not going to be down-hearted for once, or cynical, or even pessimistic. I’m going to draw some comfort from the great times we’ve had over the last 12 months, and look forward to more of them in the years to come. I adore Somerset, and Mrs Mendip Rouleur and Junior will always get first dibs on my affection. But these boys? The ones that came before and the ones that will come after? Well, I don’t profess to understand this relationship, it’s complicated, and it’s probably inexplicable to most of you as well. But on Sunday, when I saw that green pitch again, and those colours, that song with the rest of the crowd singing it, people I don’t even know, well it finds places in my heart that no other thing or person can.
Come on you Irons!
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