The Theory of Relativity: West Ham 1 - 1 Fulham; 2 October

Proust got there way before Einstein.  It's over 3000 pages in the Penguin Classics translation of "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu" but he does make the point that the experience of time is subjective.

I've been at football matches where I've spent much of the match watching the stadium clock or my watch convinced that time has stood still.  At Wembley in 1980, after that Brooking header, my Dad and I were convinced that time had been stopped.  There was absolutely no enjoyment in the match until we'd won.  At Cardiff with my kids in 1996, time added on just wouldn't pass quickly enough and Lionel Scaloni couldn't hoof the ball up the pitch, he had to kick it into touch with a Liverpool player injured (who'd have thought it, West Ham borrowing a sporting Argentine international?) and the scousers had stolen our cup.  To go with the car radios and tyres, no doubt (cheap stereotype obligatory to salve the continuing hurt).

I've also been at matches so unbelievably bad, that after ten minutes you are convinced that it should be half time.  That would be most of our games under Manager Curbishley, then.

And then there are the great games that seem to flash past at warp speed.  When we were the last away team to win at Highbury when threatened with relegation (again), and followed that up next season as the first away team to win at the Emirates with the inspired Rob Green, for example.

Yossarian in "Catch-22" seeks boredom.  When he is bored, time passes so much more slowly and he will therefore, he hopes, live longer in the killing zone of an aircraftman in the Second World War.

He should get a season ticket to Upton Park.  It's nowhere near as life threatening (now that Millwall and Leeds are safely in lower divisions), but the boredom quotient can be pretty high, as the game against Fulham showed.

The referee, Andre Marriner, seemed to have lost his recollection of the laws of the game along with the final 'w' of his first name.  While we howled at the injustice of it all to West Ham, he was poor for both sides, and at least he didn't deny us an obvious penalty as he did Fulham.  But outside the area he bought every theatrical collapse as a foul.

But we were poor from the off.  Lacking energy and drive, giving the ball away needlessly and struggling to string passes together other than backwards or sideways.  Clearly, little Fulham couldn't motivate the team or the crowd like Big Club Tottenham (they're in the Champions League, you know).  It was inevitable that Fulham would score and that we would contribute to it by switching off.  Equally inevitable, given the tiresome abuse Rob Green receives from opposition supporters about that England mistake, it had to be Dempsey of the USA.  At least Green was faultless and able to respond to the abuse with a pantomime yawn.  And, yet again, he made some very good saves.

Amazingly we were able to equalise but never looked like winning - or even, to be truthful, holding on for the draw.

At the end, my son, Jack, sitting two seats away from me was of the opinion we had been the better side.  And today, Avram Grant has praised the team.  So maybe it's all relative and weren't shit, relatively speaking.  But we are still bottom of the league.