Andrew Thomas

The View from the Afternoon "Alreet mate? Been up to much?" Fourteen weeks. Ninety-eight days. A World Cup came and went. There's a new Prime Minister. The country had the hottest summer it's ever had and every one of us developed our own coping techniques. Boxer shorts in the freezer, for the win. "Na not much pal, you?" "Fairly quiet like, just the usual." That's it. That's the summer recap sorted. Eleven words, and now we're onto whose round it is. Nobody's lying, mind. That's the odd part. Something will have happened to every single one of them since May. A job gone, an important scan at the hospital, an issue with the missus. Go round that table and ask properly and you'd find a full year of life sat there. Nobody asks properly. That isn't the problem. That's what the group is for. Because there's plenty to talk about that isn't any of that. Like that lad, in a pub I won't name just in case, who comes in on his walking sticks. Always gets his preferred seat. Sympathy is a powerful thing at a busy match day pub. Then when it's time to go, he marches past the lot of us on the way up, sticks tucked under his arm like a rolled-up newspaper, only for them to become absolutely crucial to his mobility again at precisely the point he reaches the top of the hill. And crucial again to get his cushty seat in the ground. We'd all be furious if we weren't so fucking impressed with the cheek of it. That's the level. That's what fills the space where the life updates would be, and none of us would swap it. Then up the hill. That hill with the cathedral at the top, where the hopes and the dreams and the prayers get filed and very rarely answered. In front of you, a lad in an Asprilla shirt. Number 11. Too young to have seen him play. Nobody clocks it as strange, because on this walk it isn't. Half the shirts going up that hill belong to seasons that finished before the lads wearing them could walk. It's the one place in the country where turning up dressed as 1997 is completely normal. Say all of this out loud to someone who doesn't go and they'd think it was a bit sad. Grown men, twenty-odd years of knowing each other, and the deepest it gets is a running joke about a lad and his sticks. They might have a point. I'm not going to pretend they haven't. But here's what they've got wrong. Everywhere else, somebody wants an update. How's work, how's the family, how are you doing really. The pub before the match is the only place left where nobody needs to ask, and that's the beauty of it. You get four hours where you're not the sum of what's happened to you since May. You're just the lad whose round it is. And it beats being dragged round fucking Ikea on a Sunday afternoon. "Aye, canny mate... Anyway, your round wasn't it?" #nufc