Black and White

There was a time when Newcastle United was one of the most important things in my life. That probably sounds a flippant or obsessive thing to say, but having left the area when I was just four, forging a new life in the north-east of Scotland, it was an identity I grew to cling to. I wasn't a popular kid in school; though I never found myself bullied. Being English, being from Newcastle, played in my favour. Apart from Coventry (rather bizarrely) Newcastle was the only team I completed in in Panini sticker albums as I had Toon 'doubles' handed to me without the need to swap.

A slight change in priorities came about 12 years ago when, as a student in France, and happily able to pick up Radio 5 on my personal stereo (yes folks, the days before MP3) in the late evenings, I phoned my then girlfriend after (yet another) 4-3 loss to Liverpool. She couldn't understand my annoyance. Which made me more annoyed. Until I came to the conclusion that Matt Busby was wrong about this being more than life or death.

It's still important to me, much to the chagrin of Mel, and truth be told I probably enjoy watching rugby more these days, but Newcastle United isn't something you can just turn off. It still excites me. I still look for the score, get to games when I can, watch them whenever they're on terrestrial (given my intense refusal to ever give in to the evil of SKY). In the eyes of many liking football makes me a pleb, someone lacking in much class or distinction. But I can't change how it makes me feel when I see Newcastle score or (sadly, more frequently) concede. It forms too much of my background - the feeling that day when I heard Peter Beardsley had re-signed for us; watching Mirandinha and wondering, even at that young age, what he was doing playing for us; enjoying every single second of the 5-1 win against Manchester United in an English pub in Lyon that settled me down into that year of study and realising I could put up with 12 months of living there.

Sometimes I try too hard to make clear my desperately working class background - it's not the done thing for a lawyer to have grown up on a council estate and go to an overcrowded state school. My love of football perhaps encapsulates this background more completely than anything else. It's who I am and it's what I am, and no-one should be ashamed of that,