This Is This

It’s firmly August, and I have that creeping dread that I get right before the beginning of the football season.

You may know I’m a big Everton fan, and for those of you who don’t know, my family have supported Everton since they were founded in the century before the last one. My grandfather was a young man when they won the cup in 1901, he fought in the First World War with other fans, in fact he enlisted at the office at 59 Everton Road on a match day in 1914. My uncle went to school in Gladwys Street. My dad took me to my first match and we walked out through the tunnel on his 70th birthday onto the pitch where he and his older brother ran around like little kids, none of us knowing it was the last time we would be together.

Don’t let the beer-swilling, cocky obsessive exterior fool you - deep underneath the surface lies a football fan.

The feeling at the beginning of the season, for me at least, is like the one I get before walking into a room full of strangers. It’s the exciting dread that says “yeah, it could be great, but there’s every chance I’ll do what I do and it’s all just going to go wrong. Remember Farnham?”

It’s a sinking realisation that the holiday may not be like the picture in the brochure.

So why am I trying to get tickets to see Everton play at Reading?

Oh, I could tell you that it’s because I want to take my seven year old son to a match in the summer. I might say because it’s a winnable game and I need the lift. I’d even ruse that I live in the Thames Valley and it’s a handy stadium to drive to, with lots of parking and a big area for away fans.

But it’s really because my dad took me to my first match (Against Portsmouth. We lost.) and I was hooked from there, become the fourth in a generation of Evertonians. So this is a big deal to us Joneses, even though Everton can be really fucking awful sometimes. They break my heart and then pleasantly surprise me. Why should I do it to him? Maybe it’s rite of passage. A Bar Shitzvah. Maybe it’s just in the blood.

I’m not one to stand much on ceremony, but this is a thing that makes me who I am, as any fan will tell you.

I’m losing my edge now and I need a break. A friend this week said I was all mouth and no trousers I disagreed straight away, saying that I was at least a quarter trousers, as my grandmother on my mother’s side was trousers.

While it’s obvious I am of mouth descent, I do have some trousers in me. I’ve said my piece.

But the point is I need a break. There will be posts but there will be no me, because I’m off.

Huh?

Come on, it’s not forever. I’ll be back.

Stop it, come on, you’ll get me going.

What?

Oh - um, me too. I mean “you too”.

I should probably go.

Have a great weekend. The song tomorrow will tell you summer’s here.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 7:20 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.