This Week in Fandom: Bonding with the Irons.

It was gorgeous out for Arsenal’s visit to West Ham – pity about the result.

Every (ahem) week, I write my nephew letters about sports that he mostly doesn’t read. They centre on my support for the Knicks, Yanks, 49ers, and Tottenham Hotspur – and his love of Chelsea, LeBron James, and prop bets.

The thing with London is you’ll stumble into a lovely and quaint-looking eatery thinking how bad it could be! – only to part ways with infinitely more pounds sterling than you imagined. I got this sense everywhere on a short jaunt through Marylebone, beneath a lunchtime sky the approximate colour of a space-grey MacBook.

After darkening the doorstop of Daunt Books for a short period, I stumbled into a sandwich shop called Doorstop no less, bags and all, still needing to kill three hours at least before I could make for the airport. A small collection of proper gents, I want to say all north of their 60s, enjoyed a coffee and a Monday natter. I’d stumbled into the city Alice-like on Friday evening, with a vague notification from the NYT informing me either Reform or the Green Party had pried several constituencies away from Labour.

For my last half-decent meal in the city I said I’d like the ham and cheese toastie, which was a ham and cheese toastie exactly when it arrived on a saucer: zero frills, zero hipster vegetables, and (I wager the patrons might add) zero bollocks. I was allowed to stand by the refrigerator and wash my meal down quickly with a Diet Coke, and soon left Doorstep angling my luggage about me in reverse. Like a brinks truck, I said to the proprietor, who watched this exit unfold with a curious smirk.

This is a not-so indirect metaphor for London at the moment. There are videos on Instagram about how nothing costs less than a fiver, and before midnight it feels like there’s scarcely a street you can duck into hear your own thoughts. It can be exhausting when you’re trying to locate a specific fish-and-chips shop for 30 minutes, and the Maps goddess doesn’t have the ambidexterity – any dexterity – to say, There! For the 5th time it’s that tiny cube tucked between the Mexican place and the ice-cream parlour right there.

But London is exhilarating, even drifting through the congestion around Brick Lane, even coming round the bend at The World’s End in Camden, for how many different cultures, conversations, and concerns you drift by minding your own business. Even the moments I think I’m having what the locals call a ‘mare, or about to have my legs buckle beneath me, I leave looking back on the longer days with fondness and nostalgia. This is England, I know it is, speaking to 5/6/7-year old me: a young man with no grasp just yet of social injustice, economic inequality, the delicate balance of everything at the Strait of Hormuz, and the lack of parity in the Premier League.

A simpler time, processed by a simpler me.

According to a hasty search response, West Ham United are the only club in the Premiership that will ask you for some proof of affiliation, when match tickets go on general sale. Your guess is as good as mine. Season ticket holders come first, so they have to protect lifers’ match-day experience from noisy rivals and/or quiet pacifists.

Prior to the visit of the Arsenal, I had to convince the Hammers’ ticketing office that I was visiting in good faith: that a part of me had always loved West Ham, even if I couldn’t provide pictorial evidence to that effect. Via email I basically packaged myself as a seasoned football fan who had yet to pin down a loyalty, but intended to with this first trip to the capital in some whiles – praying, of course, that my interlocutors wouldn’t google me up and happen upon this website.

For flourish, I added a short paragraph about having watched and genuinely adored the Harry Redknapp side that introduced Joe Cole, Frank Lampard, Michael Carrick, and eventually Jermaine Defoe to the football-loving world – stated on record my childhood fondness for the pitch-side antics of Paolo diCanio, who now compartmentalises as a well-meaning fascist – and the garage goodness of those fleeting Marlon Harewood/Nigel Rheo-Coker years. The tickets were released immediately. I would be an Iron for a week or so, and on Sunday especially.

Whenever I lie to enact some sort of real-world result, or to avoid some real-world consequence, I tend to feel some spiritual obligation to walk my talk — even when the coast is clear. I wasn’t sure what I wanted from this game, to be honest. A win for the Arsenal would buy Roberto De Zerbi’s resurgent Spurs an opportunity to steer further clear of the relegation zone, but it would also push the title closer towards the Gunners’ grubby hands.

I got to England reflecting on that monologue in the emails, and of course my adolescent highlights in the city, and told everyone who happened to ask that I was a West Ham fan. I told myself I was West Ham, all weekend, and that Tottenham would just have to take care of themselves (and of business) as I flew back to Berlin on Monday night. I was honoured, and I know I absolutely shouldn’t have been, by the gesture of being ‘let in’; being accepted by the claret-and-blue tribe. I felt I owed this grown-up establishment my emotions. Somewhere in all this rumination, Tubing to and fro, I had a moment-of-truth similar to my inexplicable breakdown at CitiField with the Mets last summer … I might not be a Tottenham Hotspur supporter if not for the pecking order that had mapped a talent pipeline between Upton Park and White Hart Lane.

I finally understood why West Ham particularly despise Tottenham Hotspur: it was this pre-destiny of transactions between the clubs that had swung a football fan like me towards North London. Whatever nice things West Ham couldn’t have, just because bigger clubs shopped on football’s high street, Tottenham tended to swoop and steal away.

On Saturday I saw Oh Mary! at the Trafalgar Theatre on Leicester Square. I sometimes crack jokes about Alexanderplatz being the most stressful place on earth, which I now have to adjust having experienced the strawberry riot that is Central London proper. Amongst other things Cole Escola’s play imagines Abraham Lincoln indulging in an affair with John Wilkes Booth.

Before pinching myself at the prospect of attending the biggest game of West Ham and Arsenal’s seasons, maybe even Spurs’, my eyes had to process Catherine Tate herself right there on stage as Mary Todd Lincoln. Her performance was wild, unhinged. Every scene ended on a delicious cliff-hanger, with one actor or another sharing some new revelation with the spotlight, before the theatre darkened suddenly and completely. I found this both exciting and unsettling, because it had the effect of making me think something as terrible as Lincoln’s assassination was about to happen.

More than once, in Berlin, I’d talked myself out of a raincoat that week. I couldn’t think of anything worse than getting drenched in the rain at a stadium but the weather forecast had changed multiple times – in the days prior and in the hours before kick-off, as I made the round trip back from Stevenage. I left King’s Cross/St. Pancras sat in a quartet of seats with three ladies who themselves looked forward to the day’s derby, my headphones respectfully pushed into my ears and my nose politely buried in a collection of short stories. The train’s announcer said we were coming up on Finsbury Park, and that the (ugh) Emirates Stadium was close by.

I stayed on for Stevenage, watched the city turn into open air and fields and shrubbery and trees. It was lovely seeing everybody, winding round Stevenage’s grassy maze for a precious little bit, and transporting back to good times I barely remember here; with Bree, your cousins, and Robbie, and my mother. It feels like precisely the point that I can’t place a rational finger on any of it exactly: that my intimate knowledge of the place is but an uncertain substance coursing through my bloodstream.

I got back to London and made my way East in a burgundy sweater and a blue polo, about as West Ham as my attire could be without a West Ham jersey. My heart was bobbing around my chest in excitement now, standard procedure for when I’m approaching sports cathedrals I’ve only seen on TV all my life. Google said rain was imminent so I presumed I was fucked. I’d have to turn my phone off at the Olympic Stadium, park it under my thigh, and just suffer the bath.

For whatever reason it didn’t rain that afternoon. A bashful sun emerged the moment myself and a small handful of West Ham fans, who’d hopped onto the Overheard at every stop, disembarked at Hackney Wick. On the proverbial march of honour, gradually flanked by dozens of believers, I wove between warehouses covered in graffiti, and then alongside a barge with a distinctly lemonade tinge to its surface. Food stands offered hot dogs and jerk chicken, a pub by the water pumped house music into the air, and there was a kind of symphonic unity to the good cheer of countless intersecting circles. I keep telling everyone I have never witnessed more immaculate vibes in my life. Despite the Hammers’ recent form, and the very real prospect of relegation, and the attacking resources of today’s opponents, the Irons’ faith was blind and unbreakable. This was their house, the Olympic Stadium, but this was also their city, this London; and it always would be.

I gather that whenever I attend the football, there will always be some creative and expressive individual three or fours rows above me and to my left.

On the referee not gifting West Ham many of the early decisions. “ARE WE EVEN WATCHING THE SAME GAME, YOU ABSOLUTE PILLOCK.”

On Arsenal stalwart Declan Rice’s bi-annual return to the Olympic Stadium, where he began his legend. “F*CK OFF BACK TO ISLINGTON YOU JUDAS C*NT.”

On the referee’s overall performance, at the 70-minute mark. “YOU DISGUST ME! YOU DISGUST MEEEEEEEEEE!!!”

West Ham lost 1-nil to the Arsenal after a controversial VAR decision denied them a draw. As we all marched back onto the streets, the general feeling was the Premier League would do whatever it could to keep Spurs up – since they’re theoretically worth more money globally to the tournament. For another day or so, I was with them: a tiny little part of me bleeds claret-and-blue now, and perhaps always did.