Guest Post by Paul Hickin
My wife and I moved into our new home in November. It’s a four bedroom house after having lived in a flat for the past eight years. It was inevitable, really. We wanted a bigger place so we could grow and start a family, but as a result compromises had to be made. The bigger place has its flaws and just isn’t how we like it yet. After all, the old flat was ‘home’. What it lacked in size it made up for in intimacy and character. I can remember that first night we got the keys to our new abode: the musty smoked-stained walls in the living room, an old fashioned ugly wall unit and the large empty space created its own eerie silence. My wife said we had made a mistake and was crestfallen. I wasn’t sure what to say or how to respond as I wasn’t sold either. But, ever the optimist, I said once we get our furniture in there, change the décor and start living in the place we would come to love it as our new home. After several months now I can smugly (or rather with relief) say “I told you so” as we both feel comfortable and happy even though there is part of both of us that still misses our previous gaff.
There are certainly some obvious parallels with our team’s recent relocation. And as an optimist I do feel it is slowly becoming our home. Yes it is lacking soul and there is a longer way to go in this process than my quasi-parable suggests. But the older you get the more you look backwards than forwards, distilling the good times in a glass half full, with the nostalgia slowly becoming the tie that binds. I am certainly guilty of it to some extent. My music taste has little evolved from my teens and twenties and now I listen to what are classics than embrace progress or modernity. Book snobbery stems from being stuck in the mindset of “the old ones are the best”. But we will make new memories here. We will have special times, hopefully and probably more special. And it will allow us to grow the West Ham Family. Maybe we should have cremated Upton Park so we could grieve properly and move on rather than still have that wonderful last game against Man Utd seared into our memories. Scratch that, I never want to forget that evening, but you get the gist. Yes I like seeing bands in small music venues like Camden Underworld rather than Wembley Stadium but I am happy if the band makes it a success even if it’s to the detriment of my own viewing pleasure, lost and detached in the bigger arena. Then again, I’m sure Barcelona fans weren’t moaning at the view and lack of character as they unfairly but dramatically came back from the dead the other night.
Like the West Ham fans next to me who shout “get rid of it” when our defence starts to dilly-dally (aka attempt to play it out) and were the same ones telling Big Sam “we play on the floor”, there is a tension between the desire for success and the importance to hold on to what West Ham means and stands for. The stadium represents that dilemma in microcosm, or indeed, macrocosm. It could be said that success is transient and not our raison d’etre but it could also be said that identity is not fixed and evolves over time. It’s only the narrative we tell ourselves that allows it to have any sort of meaning. Time for us to a create a new story at the London Stadium and it is in our hands.