Somewhere on my bookshelf back home in the States sits a copy of Stuart Maconie’s Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North. It’s not necessarily a masterpiece but it’s an enjoyable, brisk and affectionate travelogue through England’s northern counties, and years down the line from reading it, I clearly remember how the former music journalist and established radio broadcaster concluded that, whatever else you can say about the people of northern England (of which Maconie is one, as am I by birth), they know how to have a good time.
Stereotypes are dangerous, of course, quickly leading to caricatures and, as per Maconie’s book title, prejudice, but the essence of this home truth was wonderfully tangible from the moment that Paula, my American partner, and myself stepped on the train from my birth town of Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire last Saturday March 30th, headed to Nottingham for her first and my several hundredth (but first in two seasons) Crystal Palace football match.
Good cheer was evident immediately in the seven blokes roughly my age (i.e. not young!), who occupied the couple of tables just in front of us, one of them proudly wearing shorts and tee-shirt despite the complete lack of sunshine in the Yorkshire forecast, presumably because doing so better displayed his all-body tattoos, These blokes - and there is no better word to describe them - cheerfully discussed football, rugby and American football in broad East Riding accents on the short journey to the nearest Big City (Hull), and though I couldn’t discern their exact plans for the day, it may have been nothing more than to have a few beers and a good laugh with it.
The pervasive sense of good nature was equally apparent as we gathered steam towards Sheffield and groups of young people stood around chatting and texting enthusiastically as they sipped on their mid-morning cans of cocktails. To our surprise, they did not get off at Sheffield itself, our first train’s final stop and one of the major nothern Cities, choosing to alight instead at a place called Meadowhall, where we could only presume there was some kind of American-style shopping mall experience awaiting them. (Apparently not, says a Sheffield-based friend, who insists on calling the place “Meadowhell” and is baffled as to why it proves so popular.)
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That weekend optimism was further tangible amongst those Sheffield United football fans who did get off at the final stop, evidently intent on reaching their own club’s home ground or its nearest watering hole early enough for several pre-match pints. And it was properly visceral when the dad of a kid wearing the Blades shirt (football clubs have nicknames, Sheffield United are named for their home city’s role in the steel industry) spotted our own Palace scarves and, dad being a Man United fan, engaged me in a fond reminiscence down the 1990 FA Cup Final Memory Lane. Then he and young son set off to Sheffield Utd’s home ground of Bramall Lane insistent that the Blades were still somehow capable of avoiding an immediate drop out of the Premier League despite all apparent evidence to the contrary.
And this cheerful hubbub was especially vibrant as the Nottingham Forest fans piled on board our second train in scores as we came ever closer to that city’s main station, many sipping from cans of beers already. Inevitably, a couple of them, seeing my scarf, engaged in good-natured banter with me, suggesting I was on the wrong train. To her credit, Paula knew enough from my terrace-misbehavior past to have asked in advance if it would be safe to wear her own red-and-blue scarf, which she acquired soon after she started watching the matches on TV with me; I’d I assured her that as respectable middle-agers we had nothing to fear, and for good measure, I had a retro claret-and-blue Palace baseball cap on as well as my own contemporary red-and-blue Palace scarf.
Sure enough, it was all good vibes, at least until the match itself: Forest are suddenly staring relegation in the face themselves having just been docked four points for financial irregularities, and with a storied history (twice European Cup winners in the 1970s under Brian Clough) and their long-overdue EPL status only recently re-secured, were clearly out in numbers and matching loud voices to ensure us nominal South Londoners left suitably impressed and hopefully defeated.
The city of Nottingham, you could rightly insist, is in the Midlands and not the North, and Southerners have fun too, and sure, I’m more than happy to gather all of this positive lifestyle post under the title of that Undertones song subsequently snagged by the first proper modern football fanzine: When Saturday Comes. But we’d spent the previous Saturday in London and for all that its palaces, galleries, museums, parks and landmarks can impress even the most jaded of returning citizens (like me), London doesn’t echo to the sound of laughter the way our train journeys did a week later. If the copy of the Big Issue I purchased in Beverley this last few days was correct in stating that an astonishing 46% of Brits have less than £1000 in savings (c. $1250), it’s worth falling back on another cliché – that happiness is not something that can be counted out in hard currency, and that people who work hard all week have a right to live it up at the weekend, even if it does stop them putting too much of that hard-earned money aside for a rainy day. (After all, there’s only about seven of those a week in the British spring-time.)
For my own part, it’s years since I’d done a proper Awayday like this. Sure, I’ve been to Palace away matches at Fulham and Southampton in recent – actually, pre-pandemic - years, but in part due to modes of transport and one of them from seating as well, neither experience recalled my misspent childhood sojourning round some of the lower league’s less salubrious grounds on disposable British Rail “rolling stock,” or smoke-filled supporters’ coaches, in awe of the older lads who would drink, fight, sing and occasionally cause physical mayhem too as part of that era’s football hooliganism one-upmanship. The rolling stock has disappeared (thank God!); driving to games in groups is generally preferred to supporters’ buses; and what with the all-seated stadiums, the CCTV, the overdue replacement of provocative police with harmless stewards and the general pricing out of the working class, whatever fighting and physical mayhem still exists is largely (and oddly?) confined to the less-policed lower leagues. But the drinking and the singing… that’s not going anywhere.
Accordingly, upon alighting at Nottingham, we took the two-minute walk down the archetypally titled Sheriff’s Way to the equally well-named Vat and Fiddle, conveniently attached to the long-standing Castle Rock Brewery, where we met Palace podcast Five Year Plan’s host Jim Daly to get our tickets. The pub was everything you’d ask for (and not expect) in a city centre: spacious, hospitable, with plenty of outdoor seating, a positively social(ist?) attitude, and proudly serving up not only those typically British lightweightbut imperial IPAs (a single pint of the local from cask at just 3.7% did us nicely, thank you) and guest ales besides, but also, on the food menu, “chip cobs.”
A chip cob, I had to explain to Paula once I got clarification myself (“Bloody ‘ell, you’ve been living down south too long” the punky barman cheerfully teased me when I asked; I didn’t have the ego to tell him I’d actually been living in New York too long), are the local equivalent of a “chip butty” or a “chip sarnie,” the type of traditional cuisine that just this month had the French still placing British food in 60th place out of 60th countries. For my non-British readers (don’t worry, you are the majority on my Substack), it’s nothing more elaborate – or desirable - than French Fries sandwiches, sometimes served with an additional heart-clogging slab of butter.
Demurring, we sat outside with a table of very quiet Palace fans who, in that reserved way that I sometimes assume to be typically British but on reflection is more of an aloof Southern thing, did not introduce themselves. Because it was Paula’s first match and even the single lunchtime pint suggested we were very much out of sorts with our normal weekend behavior, we soon left them to it and took an early walk to the ground. A gang of already tipsy middle-aged Forest fans ahead of us kept chanting “Oh Larry Larry Larry, Larry Larry Larry Larry” something; closer to kick-off we grasped that one of the Forest Clough-era legends, Larry Lloyd, had just passed, was given a full minute’s applause by all fans and players ahead of kick-off, a much better option than the hopelessly impossible traditional minute of silence.
In the meantime, though, there was the pleasure of crossing the Trent River and being subjected to a stupendous first impression of the City Ground, lined with waterview pubs and with three of its four stands rising high, proud and ultra-modern. This was followed by the wondrous moment of walking into the Away end concourse and being subjected to an immediate cacophony of rowdy singalongs, as the younger Palace fans worked on building up vocal volume in direct ration to their beer intake. As I queued up for vegan pies – yes, you can keep your chip cobs, the modern football ground serves vegan pies – Paula was befriended by a group of these lads, with a more sober dad in town apparently, who insisted on buying her a pint in honor of it being her first match. Paula wisely insisted on desisting, but she was clearly delighted to be in the midst of throngs previously witnessed only on television.
Pies in hand, we took our seats behind the goal, the ground filled up, the outnumbered Palace fans did their best to out-sing the locals as is the long-standing away fans tradition, and as that sense of expectation grew and the volume with it, and the sun threatened to put its hat on despite everything, I realized just how much I miss all of this. Of course, attending away football matches is an expensive outing (we were £100 down on train and tickets alone), but it’s an expense worth engaging in every now and then, because, frankly, there is nothing like it. And when the teams came out and Forest fans in every direction and seemingly from every seat stood to sing and wave scarves that suddenly emerged as if from thin air, it was hard not to choke back a tear of nostalgia for hundreds of prior awaydays in my youth, those not misspent in the company of the older kids often enjoyed in the company of my mother whose dementia has long since eroded some of the happiest days of her life.
For Paula, this thrill was all novel. “They’re real!” she exclaimed of the Palace players. “Look, that’s my Jordan Ayew.” Though she was being somewhat facetious, I knew what she meant. These days, footballers are such models of athleticism, and so elevated from normal society, that at times when watching on TV, you’re not sure if you’re watching the real people or their doppelgangers on FIFA 2024. But there he was indeed: the Nigerian Messi (as Palace fans referenced him for about a week after an amazing Boxing Day goal at home to West Ham United about five years ago, which I watched in person from almost right alongside), shuffling around with his distinctive gait of someone who has just got out of a swimming pool having accidentally shat in their pants.
And then, the match. They say it’s the hope that kills you. And such hope only lasts until one team scores. Fortunately for us, it was Palace took the lead after barely 11 minutes, and the noise and celebrations that followed were such that I had to film them, per below. There was also a sense of relief that we got to witness a Palace goal at all, which has been far from guaranteed this season.
But there was still most of a full match to play and inevitably, given the way Palace’s injury-plagued, manager-changing season has been going, Forest equalized somewhere round the hour mark. Although a draw was a fair result, it meant both sets of fans left mildly unhappy that they hadn’t made the most of their few chances – which is exactly the sort of regular occurrence that sees Palace, to some extent, and Forest, especially after their 4-points deduction, a long way safe from relegation.
Once on the station platform, a garrulous Manchester-based expat Palace fan proved determined to engage us in incessant conversation, and we consciously left him to board first and find other people to whom he could bore for England. Tired out from all the walking, the chanting, the standing – I had neglected/forgotten to warn Paula that away fans stand throughout, which is way more tiring than being on the pitch, if you ask this runner – and additionally so given that I’d taken an early morning 5k on the Beverley Westwood, we dozed off on our second train. We were awoken as we pulled into Hull, by a bloke cheerfully asking us in that brilliant broad East Riding accent what colours we were wearing, stating that he and his mates had been trying to figure us out for ages. We were, admittedly, a long way from Selhurst Park, or AFC Richmond’s Dog Track, let alone the Camp Nou, but he could have just looked at my cap, emblazoned with the words “Crystal Palace FC.” It only occurred to me as he and most of the train disembarked at Hull that this could well have been his amenable way of waking us to ensure we weren’t intending to get off at the local big city as would have been a fair enough assumption. In fact, I’m pretty sure of it and if so, it’s another nod to the north’s niceness.
Should you actually want to see what all the fuss is about, the highlights, at least from the Palace perspective, are above.
But there’s another stereotype about northern England: It’s Grim Up North. (The saying is sufficiently familiar, usually espoused by southerners and dating back to the days of the Industrial Revolution, that it has been snagged itself for a song title by the KLF and by a South Yorkshire running club.) On Easter Monday, my brother, who was visiting from his own expat home in Sweden for our mother’s 90th, took the steering wheel of his rented car on a journey south of the Humber River so that the three of us to try and locate our father’s first family abodes, recently unearthed by my sleuth of an amateur genealogist girlfriend.
In-between our two destinations (Louth and Barton-upon-Humber) sits the city of Grimsby, almost directly across the Humber from Hull, but a place I had never knowingly visited and which I have become sufficiently fascinated by as to request a detour. Sure enough, it lived down/up to expectations, at least around the largely decayed docklands. The city has never been wealthy, and it has always unfortunately started with the noun “grim” but it was once at least busy. Decimated by a long decline in fishing and the ravages of Thatcherism, it was largely finished off by the calamity of Brexit - which the locals had mistakenly supported, in the understandable hope that something had to be better than what they were already being subjected to. (This New York Times article focused on the latter back in 2018.)
In this part of the City just off the A180 – and I offer that qualification because I’m assuming there must be some form of respectable housing and retail in Grimsby – the shops were either of the fast food/cheap groceries type or boarded up completely. The houses were mostly one-ups, one downs, and those people who were walking around looked many years older, more worn, malnourished and, and yes I know it’s easy and cheap but grim, than I suspect that their actual ages should suggest. Britain, it has to be said, has little to be proud of these days when it comes to the economy and/or looking after its citizens. And while you don’t have to venture to “the north” for evidence of poverty, if you want it guaranteed, parts of Grimsby have the stats to prove they lead the way.
But then we took a side-turn down a perilously narrow one-way street towards what claims to be Cleethorpes beach, though it was certainly not accessible from this part of the estuary… and there, tucked so tightly into the surrounding houses that you did wonder how a players’ coach ever makes it to the equally tiny carpark, stood Blundell Park, home to Grimsby Town FC since 1899. It’s a hell of a ramshackle ground compared to that of Forest, Palace, or any of the other EPL clubs, with a couple of wooden stands that I find hard to believe are up to fire code, and it seats only 8,777. But those seats are regularly filled, and the ground and club has got a storied history all its own, as befits a team that considers it the most successful in Lincolnshire. (Allowing that its rivals are Scunthorpe and Lincoln City, this is not exactly a Battle of the Titans.)
Indeed, it was only last season that Grimsby found themselves in the Quarter-Final of the FA Cup, the plucky “underdog” success story every football fan loves. Yet now, just a year later, they are fighting for Football League survival, only three places off the ignominy automatic demotion to the lower leagues – which for Grimsby, would be the third time such a fate has befallen them this Century alone.
But When Saturday Comes, and the Mariners – as Grimsby Town are nicknamed - are at home, the fans will converge nonetheless, in whatever pubs and working mens’ clubs are still functioning nearby these days, and perhaps, if the weather obliges here at the mouth of the perilous Humber, also at the tucked-away outdoor mural-painted Fan-zone.
And when the teams take to the field, the faithful from both sides, away-dayers included, will raise their scarves, lift their voices, and wait for the hope to kill them. It won’t be the no-spare-seat 30,000 crowd of an impressive City Ground Premier League match, but it won’t be any the less for it. And you know what? I wouldn’t mind being a part of it.
King's College Hospital, just off Tottenham Ct. Rd. - but basically grew up in Kent. When I started paying attention...I just liked Spurs!
Ah...that old rolling stock; Spurs away days of my youth- London coppers, crews, kids and old ladies all shying away from the train windows as bricks came hurtling down from every bridge we went under on our way out of the “away” city. Nice one, Tony.