Our local vicar, before he died of antiquity (he lived to ninety-odd, which is testimony to the parochial life of belief, corona cigars and a fondness for cream sherry, very strong tea with three sugars and the sort of iced biscuits guaranteed to create clutchers in anyone else over sixty) once told me that football was not a God. I think it was after choir practice one Wednesday eve, in the early 1980's as I'd have been about eight.
Choir practice was every Wednesday at 6pm. This was a good time, as our local choir contained mostly the retired and the very young. Anyone aged in between would have had something better to do. It was taken by the euphemistically-named 'Choir Master', a man of sixty-something who smelt of a mix of beeswax polish and old leather. He owned a vintage Rover, which he took great pride in. He used to be seen polishing and waxing it on his drive when he wasn't doing something for the church. A typical bachelor of the age, he always seemed very remote from us kids, a throwback to the 1940's, the type who'd have been taking tea in the background of a Noel Coward black'n'white film while Celia Johnson had something gently fished from her eye by Trevor Howard.
He was about as musical as I was quiet. That wasn't very much. When we went carolling in early December, we gathered at his house at the start and kids were served very diluted cheap orange squash and the sort of biscuits they unearth intact out of Belgian fields from the First World War.
1982 was the year we got into Panini stickers. They used to be our currency. Pocket money, newspaper delivery money, the odd pound note meant for the junior savings account given by elderly relatives (if you were lucky), it all got wasted on Panini stickers. The best bit was completing a whole team, foil club badge and all. So it was that us lads, chastened by an hour of murdering "All things bright and beautiful" and getting clips round the ear from the old bat who stood behind us for singing in 'Pistol-esque' Estuary English or changing words for rude ones, gathered in the ante-room to change out of surplices and wasted no time in swopsies. Swopsies was what we called swapping stickers we'd got for ones we hadn't. It involved more diplomatic exchange than anything the foreign secretary would manage. It would, of course, be a great introduction to the later drug scene.
So we started our Swopsies, and then the Vicar came back to discover the source of the noise and caught me trading my Coventry City club badge, Cyril Regis and Norman Whiteside for a QPR club badge, Luther Blisset and the Oldham Athletic team sticker. And he sighed and lamented the spiritual abstinence of the young as he confiscated Cyril and Norman (fortunately, I'd had the foresight to pocket the Coventry badge before he laid eyes on it) and told me, gravely, that I could have them back on Sunday after service but that "Football is not God, my boy".
And yet it has been. I'm sorry if you're a regular church-goer and a committed Christian, and so my words offend in any way, but football has been my God. Church became a bore as I got older. I left the choir in controversial circumstances when I was ten because it was dull. I told my mum and dad I was joining the scouts but, in reality, I'd nip round my friend David's house and listen to his dad's King Crimson and Kid Creole and Odyssey LP's and we'd talk football. The Panini's were passe by then. It was Nintendo hand-held games catching parachutists in a boat from shark-infested seas.
I'm telling you this because we've made a brilliant start, the best for 30-odd years, and yesterday's result at Accrington, usually the destroyer of Super-Blue dreams and the sort of 'Back to Earth' experience we usually inflict upon the optimists amongst us, was a case in point. I'm firmly of the belief that we've all been punished for some unknown crime these last twenty years, with the highs of Joe Royle and early Mick mere interludes in otherwise mundanity. It may be my punishment for leaving the church choir by dint of starting the short-lived craze amongst my peers of loudly breaking wind during quiet bits of songs. We drove the old bat behind us crazy and she died a few years later. Perhaps this was my albatross?
In a week when Terry has been absent in Braintree and hasn't texted, and Paula has been working and so reflection has become easy, this was my lot as I strolled down to the estuary at Cattawade and fed the birds on the stale bread from our bread bin. It's in my nature as a Town fan to see the trouble ahead. Much like Kieron's post-match comments about "Not won anything yet, not getting carried away", I share the fragile dream that we'll still be unbeaten come December and will stretch far in front, the rest a mere blot on the horizon, winning beautifully, garnering praise from unlikely sources. It's not true. It could be true. It won't be true. That's the dilemma we all face.
No Friday night shenanigans with Tel then. Not this week, although he's back later today and I'm off next week so we're planning a session in the pub to watch the Arsenal Man Utd game at 4.30. Instead, Paula and I ordered take-away from the local chippy and ate it watching some crap on the telly, out of the paper bags, the salt'n'vinegar strong enough to sting eyes momentarily as well as tastebuds. Then, the washing-up non-existent and the vodka bottle and little red bull cans littering the coffee table, we kissed and cuddled and then went to bed at eleven, her bringing the peachy-coloured remnants of her last VRB, me with a hard-on like a saucepan handle.
It's true that I was a noisy child by the way. Loud, brash and opinionated, all the things you love. Prone to long moments of anarchical behaviour and immodesty. But then I grew up, sort of. But some things never left. I'm still loud. I still get looks when I sing at PR. True, they're not the same hymns I used to be required to sing, but they are hymns of their kind. They'll never leave.
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