57 Varieties of Emotion

This year I have been supporting West Ham for 57 years.  In that time, what started with my Dad taking me to stand (and, in the misty-eyed way beloved of memoirs) be passed to the front of the Chicken Run, has morphed into a lifetime's defining obsession which has been passed on to my children.

In that time, to reprise Elizabeth Barret Browning, let me count the ways that West Ham has made me cry.

There have been tears of exhilarated joy on (too few) occasions.  When I were but a nipper (all of 17), we won the cup against Preston and I watched on grainy black and white telly at the Barber's shop where I worked as a Saturday boy.  No tears, but definitely moist eyes.  Then we won the European Cup-winners Cup and, of course, the World Cup - all experienced at second hand on the telly but with intense joy.

I was working abroad when we beat Fulham in the Cup and listening on the BBC World Service (when it was a proper World Service on short wave with the Lily Bolero theme tune), all alone but overjoyed.

I experienced anguish followed by joy when we beat Arsenal with Sir Trevor's (only?) headed goal and I spent the rest of the game watching the clock as much as the game.  I was there with my Dad and we floated back to our car on an uplift of delirium.  The next day, I took Jessica, Rebecca and baby Joel to see the team bus bring the cup back.

My dad and I also cried after the death of Bobby Moore at the West Ham gates.  Only Jessica remembered seeing him play but everybody was caught up in the emotion.  Jack came to his first game the Saturday following Bobby Moore's death, when Wolves fans laid tributes in the centre circle and thought that all games might be surrounded with this level of intensity.

I wept copiously when my Dad's ashes were scattered at Upton Park in a lovely ceremony by the then Chaplain (even though my Dad was a determined atheist, reserving his worship for socialism, West Ham and his family, although not necessarily in that order) which made much of West Ham being a family club.

With my children I experienced the Cardiff extremes - beaten in a play-off final one year and winning it the next while we all managed to be there, followed by the Scouse Robbery Cup Final with Joel even winging back from his job in the USA! USA! having complete faith in dad to blag a ticket.  Which I did.

And today is the latest day the West Ham have made me cry - with more than a little assistance from my son, Joel.  He presented me with a book of all my blogs from last year, printed in a fabulous design and with a cover photograph of a brick from the porch of my mum and dad's old flat (that my mum moved out of to sheltered accommodation early this year) in which  I'd gouged WHUFC and crossed Hammers when I was a kid.

I was, and am still, overcome.