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There are streets that take you not only to a place, but to a hazy spell in time too. I walked beneath Bootham Bar in York this week. Fingers clicked and sent me backwards, as if that old gate were a door to another, happier room: once more was it the middle third of the 1990s.
Here again was ten-to-three on a Saturday or 7.35pm on a Tuesday. With the disapproving Minster on my shoulder, I was scurrying towards a game. Onwards through cranky pavements, onwards by the birthplace of W.H. Auden; stop all the clocks/prevent the referee from blowing...
A right turn down Grosvenor Terrace, a shudder at the noise of the passing Scarborough train beneath, and then a left pivot behind dozens of scampering others. And there it was: comfy, craggy Bootham Crescent.
Soon, this place will be gone, another victim of wallet over wisdom. Those that make these wrecking decisions can never take away what now crosses my mind: wedging in with my mate Grunt and his dad for the Bury play-off in ‘93, when Swanny made old Eboracum holler and jig...
... Stockport in the clotted drizzle a year later, City so close to rising another notch; McCarthy always on tip-toes ready to skin; take ‘em on Tony Canham; Ooh Nigel Pepper with studs-up and gleaming in the winter sun; Paul Barnes, faster than a Rowntree’s delivery truck...
...Ginner left-back, Andy Mac right, Clifton Brazilians; Deano Kiely with more keeper gloves than teeth... I see them all through the gaps. Christ, I watched them beat Everton and Mancheser City here. After the Toffees game, we ran on the pitch and forgot about school tomorrow.
And so, now, snapped awake, how bleak that soon all this will be thin-walled flats where no-one will sing together.
Outside the away end, an old fella offers a hello. I return the greeting. ‘You look bloody knackered’, he says. Time travel does that.
Outside the away end, an old fella offers a hello. I return the greeting. ‘You look bloody knackered’, he says. Time travel does that.
