Living in the moment

A grey Thames, sloshing high up on the banks, under a grey sky. The rain drops rifle into the river, coming in steady, splashing back up with the dirty river water until the whole thing looks like it’s bubbling, like it’s alive. Crack open the Stella and slurp up the excess froth that tries to escape. The train chugs through the dirty black and brown of Elephant, like the colours of the tube lines that go through it, and into South, with flashes of green, rolling away from the houses and up the hills. Up to Forest Hill, down the other side to Penge. Transmitters stretching up to the clouds. They’ll be sending images of the game all over the capital, the country, the world today. But I’ll be there in person, down the front, yards from the players, rain on my face and soaking through my shoes. A part of it.

I remember reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and how he said that’s there’s nothing quite like actually being there when you’re on a bike. In the moment, with tarmac flying below you, no windscreen, no one relaying information.

You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. Actually being there, as opposed to behind a screen. 

I won’t have any instant replays or ad breaks or have a pundit telling me what to think. Just me and football. I’ve paid £40 to stand in the rain and watch my football team play another. The price leaves a sour taste, but there’s something beautiful in the simplicity of it.  

The train grinds into Thornton Heath and I finish my can hastily, the bubbles shooting up my nose as if going straight up into my brain. But it’s not just the lager, it’s the excitement, anticipation sending static shooting all over my body. I watch the light on the ticket machine flick from amber to green, barriers thumping open. Run past this set of lights while they’re red so you can get to that set of lights while they’re still green. Suck my legs up to get over that kerb and not under the van as it whistles past. Faster than I’ve moved all week after Christmas. To the ‘Spoons opposite the station. Only just through the doors and it’s rammed, packed, Old Bill not letting anyone else in. Ten deep at the bar, buy two pints per person to save yourself the trip next time. Just a sea of greys and blues and blacks. Just pin badges, familiar faces and our songs identify the pub as Chelsea. Mustard.

____

I’m wearing the big Fjällräven jacket. The one that’s a bit too Bear Grylls for football, and I know will get the piss taken out of me. I don’t mind though, because it’s bucketing down on the walk from the pub to the ground. Seeing Jay bent double in a paper thin Harrington, saturated before we get to the end of the road. The alcohol dulls the cold and heightens the exhilaration of walking through unfamiliar streets, singing songs, locals all staring at us. Laughing about how we all did the same thing the year before and will probably do the same again next year. Queue to get in and list the things to moan about. You decided to wear suede shoes. They’ve run out of programmes. Take the piss out of Croydon while you’re on their patch. All Chelsea together. Have a beer on the concourse, chat about your Christmas and your New Year. Just enough small talk to be polite. Talking nonsense, things you won’t remember the following day after a beer anyway. The song builds and you can’t hold it anymore, with a smile growing on your face, because this is what it’s all about. Throwing your head back and joining the roar. Who’s that team you call the Chelsea?

____

When Willian crashes in one of the goals of the season, it’s as if all the blood is sucked out of my head. Everything disappears. Frustrations, worries, sanity. I’ve lost Jay and the others too; God only knows where they’ve disappeared to. I’m sprinting down the aisle, fighting past bodies as they fall, jumping on top of strangers as we reach the front. Limbs all over the shop. Bruised shins and hoisting myself up, balancing on the backs of the plastic seats. I can swear I see Oscar look at me, and the Brazilian multimillionaire and I share a moment, his expression the exact same as mine. For all his money and sponsorship deals and talent, for a moment we’re on the same wavelength. Screaming back at each other; a roaring, beaming smile because Chelsea have just made the game safe. 

I search the internet for footage of me, looking to see my beige jacket bouncing up and down on Match of the Day. There’s nothing though. Just the memories of those who were there, who’ll sing the John Obi Mikel song for weeks to come. Good. I hate people who live their lives behind a screen, recording moments like that to relive over and over. It’s something the television cameras and the Youtube fan channels and Twitter will never properly encapsulate anyway. What it’s like to be Chelsea when the opposition’s net ripples and those sparks fly in your brain and you get let everything go. When all hell breaks loose. Enjoy it to the full, and then it’s over. We go on, searching for the next one. We’ll need a few more this season.

@JJReid13

Not In Service

The Hateful Eight drags on and by the time it’s finished I’ve missed the last train.

The laughter, the drinks and the evening melt away and it’s just me again. On my own. I’m stood at New Cross and watching as bus after bus goes by with Not In Service piercing the dark, the numbers on their fronts not mattering at this time of night. A whole fleet of them parked up in the depot round the corner, not a single one willing to take me home. The cold bites and makes my work trousers feel paper thin, wind whipping by.

I get on the wrong bus. Due to the last of the alcohol or something else, I’m not sure. So desperate to get out of the cold, away from the bus stop and toward something different.

Everything’s slightly unalike, like a parallel dimension. The bus has got grey poles instead of yellow, or yellow instead of grey. Just as it’s about to continue on the right road, it lurches round a corner at an obtuse angle like buses do, dragging itself through streets and up the hill faster than you can get up or say something or ring the bell or anything at all.

I’m off and I’m shouting swearwords and immediately feeling the guilt pang in case I’ve woken anyone up. Hood flung up and walking through the streets so fast I might trip over my own feet. But it’s no good. All alone with a drink inside you and your thoughts turn to her. Eyes screwed shut, hands plunged deep into pockets to lock out the cold. Get out of my head. Walking through the streets that she showed you in the first place.

It’s 1AM in Nunhead. Try to take a deep breath but can’t. Swelling in your throat and you can’t breathe in deeper than a couple of inches. Because it’s all on top of you, the weight of it all, and it’s dragging you down.

She came to represent these streets. Beautiful and mysterious and dangerous and fantastic. An adventure. Able to take the piss out of you and make you feel stupid and still leave you with a smile on your face. To let you in on a secret and show you things you never thought possible. Offering an opportunity to let yourself become something new. A secret, clandestine ideal just a bus ride from the cold, steely centre. South London.

Stand there with eyes swivelling, looking around in a wild desperation as traffic lights change for no one and foxes crash through the bins. And as shit as it sounds you just want her to be happy and you’ve no way of helping that because she wants nothing to do with you. You let yourself down and you hate yourself because of it. You want to cut that cowardly bit out of yourself and throw it away, kick the fuck out of it, until it’s spewing blood and spitting out lumps of teeth like in the Tarantino film you’ve just seen. Compromise: punch a lamppost like a div and cut your knuckles.

Jog on. By the end you’re rushing, pushing to the front door and scrambling with your key in the lock, wanting to get into bed and close your eyes put an end to the day. Set your alarm for a few hours’ time and hope tomorrow will be better, hope that your brain will decide to interpret what you put in front of it in a more positive light.

“Alright mate? You look a bit long in the boat”

“Just tired mate. ‘Night”

@JJReid13

Rootless Cosmopolitans

Porto went on general sale. This is atrocious considering how big a game it was. Fair enough Christmas games against Sunderland and West Brom don’t inspire a delirium of excitement, but a must win game against the best side in the group? Our season hanging on it? As if to highlight the severity I feel, Rich jokes in the pub beforehand that it could be the last Champions League game at this incarnation of Stamford Bridge. I take a deep glug of my pint and think about this. It’s not a very funny joke. Lose this and we’ll see plenty more games on general sale, along with those burgundy Europa League hoardings slapped up round our ground, and that doesn’t bear thinking about.

I’ve always loved European games though. They’re some of the earliest I can remember, an envelope full of tickets for the group stages in 1999. I can just remember flashes: Lazio’s yellow away kit, the Galatasaray keeper sent off for handling outside his area, Vialli with the keys to the Ferrari. That year, Arsenal were playing their ties at Wembley, already too big for their boots. They’d crash out in the group stage. Supposed minnows Chelsea would go on to take Barcelona to extra time in the Quarter Finals. 

The buzz against Porto is partly from the crowd of people that are packed in. I’d half expected to be sat next to some Portuguese, having made friends with Ukrainians for the visit of Dynamo. But no, from the gate I spy Barbour jackets and shaven heads on our row. These are proper Chels. Not worn down by the drudgery of watching the team struggle every other Saturday this season either, they watch and cheer and sing with a fresh enthusiasm. So what if they get the words to the Willian song ever so slightly wrong? Bodies tumble forward over the seats as Willian smashes the ball in at the near post, voices cracking as they scream in celebration.

Chelsea won of course. Matic was impervious in midfield, Hazard showed flashes of magic and it was suddenly apparent that the defence was comprised of the same players as last year, rather than imposters from the local pub team. So that’s it. Once again, we’re all going on a European tour. Who’s to say how many more we’ll have though? How many great stories do we have left in us? 

My dad brought me back a clearly bootleg programme from a 2004 game played in Porto, where it doesn’t seem that match day programmes are as much of a tradition. Bizarrely, near enough the exact same programme appeared a few months later in Munich, the opposition’s name changed. The content seemed to have been hastily bludgeoned together by entrepreneurial set of Portuguese/ German brothers with an eye for a quick Euro, but alas, an imperfect command of English. We still laugh about the Chelsea number 19 being named as Sott Parker. However, the undisputed highlight was the club profiles, which declared that Chelsea had “always been a team of rootless cosmopolitans”. I believe they were trying to capture the glamour, the international flavour of Abramovic’s first few years as Chelsea owner, but something was lost in translation. 

It’s not a million miles away though. Chelsea, or at least my Chelsea, epitomises that European glamour. Sexy football, geezers with silly haircuts and great goals in the San Siro. I remember queuing for the tube at Fulham Broadway after one of those 1999 European games when I was young, when the stranger next to me pointed out a low flying plane. “There you go, Frank Leboeuf, flying back to France!” I almost believed him as well. Leboeuf is a film star now, which sort of sums up what I’m trying to say. 

Where’s the fun of being an Arsenal anyway? Trudging your way to fourth every year to play Dortmund every year and go out in the last 16 every year. In order to make the revenue necessary to just about do it the year after. Wouldn’t you rather have a club in turmoil, finish bottom half in the league, and trade it all in for one last heady, glorious day in Milan in May? Anyone who’s remotely sensible has already written off our hopes for the top four this season. So perhaps this is our European swansong, just as 2012 was supposed to be. We are rootless cosmopolitans, and we’re going to Milan.

@JJReid13

Brixton and Paris

It’s Friday night and I’m in a club in Brixton. It’s called Phonox. Big boxy black speakers hang down from the ceiling over the dancefloor, leant in at such an angle that they surround you, reminiscent of bullies on a playground. Except instead of demanding your dinner money, they demand to know why you’re not dancing.

A DJ called Tessela is playing and it’s packed. It’s packed to the point where it’s daunting to fight across the room to the bar or the toilet. Once you’re on the dancefloor, you’re not going anywhere else. We move as one: the crowd a writhing mass of humanity, rocking in time to the 4/4. It’s relentless, the music spitting out of those giant speakers violently, as if grabbing you by the throat and insisting on being listened to. A celebration of life, reaching for lasers, letting out wild screams at the sky in pure joy.

It’s in the smoking area that I check my phone and see that something’s amiss. I come crashing back down to earth so hard that I almost leave an indent on the cement floor. Paris, Football, Concerts. So familiar, and yet it’s all alien, incongruous, spoilt. People out enjoying themselves on a Friday night, but it’s taken a horrific turn. I wonder who else around me knows, who else is thinking the same thing. How easily it could have been a nightclub in London instead of a concert hall in Paris.

Numbers fly back and forth, building each time, refusing to stop. I’m against the outside wall, neck cricked down as I stare into my phone, strangers' elbows still clashing against me. Laughter drifting above the crowd’s heads like the smoke from their fags. They sound distant, like they’re underwater. My friends are inches away from me, but they might as well be the other side of the world. I grit my teeth and seethe. It all irritates me: the right wingers blaming refugees, the left wingers blaming UK foreign policy, the people sending their ‘thoughts and prayers’ as if that makes an iota difference. As if anything does.

A few years ago I was sat in a lecture hall discussing how the media frames instances such as these. I was cold and rational, saying how a few ignorant religious zealots in caves were nothing compared to the Soviet Union with a full set of nukes. How the world is safer now than ever before. Smugly stating that hundreds die every day in the Middle East and we think nothing of it. That seems a long time ago now and rationality seems a long way away. I give myself into the hurt, the hatred on Twitter and Facebook. Stop fucking killing people you cunts.  

I can’t dance anymore. I go home hollow and numb.

The next evening, I go for a walk. It’s a Saturday night, but the streets seem deserted, unusually quiet. I walk and walk. I walk to the top of the hill, to Ruskin Park and look out at the city. It sprawls out and hums in front of me. I take off my woolly hat and let the cold air hit me. Breathing in deep, feeling the cold in my lungs. The London Eye is lit up in a French Tricolore. 

The pangs then hit me hard in the chest and I feel queasy, as if I’m still feeling last night’s effects. I think about the video of President Hollande I had watched before I went out. My French isn’t good enough to have followed the words, but I got “guerre”. It rolled about my head as if echoing. War. If the French define this as an act of war, the world as a whole may be about to change.

I look out at one of the great Western cities, and wonder if it’s changed already.

@JJReid13