I missed my first game at the Boleyn this season last week. Work commitments saw me miss out on the Watford game – but it meant a lot for my mother to be able to go instead and savour her last match in E13, having dyed her shoes claret and blue for the trip to Wembley in 1965.
As that last game on 10 May gets ever closer, I find myself at a loss with not only how to feel about it but what to even do when that day comes. Part of me feels like I’ve wasted my previous trips: perhaps I should have I arrived earlier some days or even stayed later after a game, sat down and savoured the sight, the smells and the sounds.
My routine has changed so much down the years. When I had my first season ticket at the age of nine, we used to go to my grandmother’s house on Samson Street before the game, have something to eat and then walk to Priory Road for the match. Come full time, we’d make the ten-minute journey back, grandma would open the door and know the result either from the look on my face or whether she could hear any cheers from the Boleyn from her back garden. A cup of tea, Grandstand and then the trip back home. It was a wonderfully reassuring routine and one that I have missed greatly since my grandmother passed in 2001 – and with it, the family house of old was sold.
Perhaps on 10 May, a weekday that I booked off from work the minute I knew of the rescheduling, I will venture back to Samson Street to see my grandmother’s old house. I pass it now and then, its front door modernised and its side garage altered – a small sign of how everything around those parts has changed and moved on. Nothing shows that modernisation more than Plaistow Hospital on the same street, long since closed down and turned into flats. I don’t know if they’re affordable – as a Londoner, I assume not – but they certainly smack of the uniformity of modern London. Character ransacked; dullness in abundance.
So what to do on that final Tuesday – and what has everyone else got planned? How early is too early to go to Ken’s? Some friends of mine like to go to Ken’s, some others to the Boleyn – so perhaps that last Tuesday is the perfect time to do both. And then after the game, regardless of the result, whether to run down to the East Stand Lower and get close to the hallowed turf? I always wanted to take my seat with me and am incredibly grateful that season ticket holders will indeed be able to purchase their own seat. But aside from that? How long can we wait in the stands and soak it all up? And will there ever be a moment or a time when it’ll feel right to turn my back, walk down those steps and out onto Priory Road for the last time?
Whatever happens, I am someone who will always think I didn’t plan out the day right or didn’t do something in a particular way and that’s why, superstitiously, we didn’t win a match. And whatever happens, it won’t be enough to stop the tears or stop the overwhelming wish to want to have just one my game or one more season at our beloved Boleyn.