Sunday night blues
The English autumn is a very melancholy season. Even its most pleasant parts - a quiet, delicious Saturday lunch in Medcalf, the clean, warm sunshine slanting down the side streets - are tinged. Especially when tomorrow a delicious year of freedom ends and I start back at work and school, let alone when Chelsea thrash Liverpool at Anfield. There is something so inherently romantic and melancholy about Liverpool anyway - the passion in the face of adversity, the tears on the faces of hard Northern men, 'You'll Never Walk Alone" and the constant memory of a lost golden age - that makes me somewhat wish to have been born a Scouser just so I could have that in my inheritance.
But instead, I get a return to Highbury to see us beat a 10-man Birmingham not nearly as easily as we should have. Which is, indeed a great pleasure - the North Bank in the sun, the crowd and chants, the little rituals, the stress of watching the match and its battles, and Bloody Marys afterwards in the flat with chips from the Chinese-run Arsenal Fish Bar. I missed the football, for sure - it's one of the great, very London, cultural moments full of solidarity with one's fellow Londoners. But still, as the night closes in, its not enough to stop me getting those London Sunday blues...
But instead, I get a return to Highbury to see us beat a 10-man Birmingham not nearly as easily as we should have. Which is, indeed a great pleasure - the North Bank in the sun, the crowd and chants, the little rituals, the stress of watching the match and its battles, and Bloody Marys afterwards in the flat with chips from the Chinese-run Arsenal Fish Bar. I missed the football, for sure - it's one of the great, very London, cultural moments full of solidarity with one's fellow Londoners. But still, as the night closes in, its not enough to stop me getting those London Sunday blues...
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