Three hours to go before the new season kicks off and I’m sitting in the beer garden in my new claret-and-blue Fred Perry polo shirt.
Three hours to go before the new season kicks off and I’m sitting in the beer garden in my new claret-and-blue Fred Perry polo shirt. I’ve got a credit-card-style match ticket for the East Stand Lower in one pocket, 50 quid in the other, and I’m easing my way into my first ice-cold Fosters for exactly a month. About half a dozen lifelong friends will be along at any moment. Bliss.
There’s a couple of hundred people in the beer garden already, the vast majority wearing the new replica shirt, and more replica shirts are streaming down from the Tube station at the top of the road. I like to get here early on match days because after about one o’clock the bar is permanently under siege, the bar staff are working like acrobats, and you can waste a lot of valuable drinking time queuing.
The tables fill up quickly and I’m soon elbow to elbow with a gang of blokes I don’t know and someone has started up one of those I’m Not a Racist But…conversations. I’m not following it. I’ve been budged along to the end of the bench and I’m looking into my glass and wondering whether it would be easier, the next time I go to the bar, to get two pints, or even three, to save time.
Then I notice that the bloke facing me across the table is talking to me. He’s telling me a story. Same theme, more or less, as far as I can judge: I’m Not a Racist But — we must somehow resist this dismantling of the societal values we grew up with.
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