Lord Levy is at the football. As I write, his team is currently playing Manchester City off the park and leading by 3 – 0. There will be much celebrating in our house when he gets home.

Until I met my husband I never really understood football. And I don’t mean the formations or the offside rule. I mean that I never understood the point of it. He took me to a couple of live games a few years back, one at Chelsea and one at Leyton Orient. Though the latter took place on the coldest day of the year, I hated the Chelsea game the most. The ridiculously long queues and that god awful song they have – ‘Chelsea Chelsea . . . and then something about making it a blue day’. Oh it was a blue day alright. And that wasn’t just the language. And all the standing up and sitting down in the right places. And which goal they’re meant to aim for . . . .

We’ve since agreed that it’s not really my thing. Now that we’ve moved back up north he goes to the games with his dad, another lifelong Forest supporter. I still don’t particularly like football but I get it now. They’ll be standing there, the two of them, in the freezing cold, rubbing their hands together and laughing and shouting and cheering. It’s a bond. Something special that they share.

Before he died, my dad told me about going back to Old Trafford. He’d always been a Manchester United supporter but hadn’t seen a live game since the stadium had been rebuilt. On the phone one night he said, ‘They call it the Theatre of Dreams and you know what? It is.’ I didn’t think anything of it at the time and probably rolled my eyes a bit.  Now when I pass the stadium I have to swallow. And when they read out the football scores, I huff and make a point of flicking noisily through a magazine. But I keep half an ear out for the Man U result.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.