Two fried eggs and a kebab | OneFootball

A good friend from Newcastle was down in London the other weekend and we had a few beers together.

First bar in, he is joking and laughing with the barman, who is friendly but mildly shocked by his familiarity and joviality. Geordies eh?

I recently sent into The Mag, mine and my daft lad’s answers to questions for Newcastle United fans from the Editor for pre season build up.

It got me thinking about one of the questions.

Roughly it (the question)  was, when did you start supporting Newcastle and is it better now than then?

A great question and one with potentially multiple answers as the timescale for so many supporters my age and older.

There has been peaks and troughs of supporting Newcastle United over time.

Iam McFaul (sack the board), Jim Smith (match boycotts), Post-Keegan and the Ashley years. All of that in my supporting life.

We still support but there are dark feelings over some episodes.

Thousands of Newcastle United fans ditching their season tickets because they could not take any more disgraceful abuse of their club from Mike Ashley (and others in the past).

They never stopped supporting the club. How does it feel to jack in your season ticket? Fortunately, something I have never experienced.

I had an article published recently retelling a tale of paying into the Shed after escaping a Chelsea boozer.

Well, the early 90s were fuelled by Britpop and Rave and illegal substances. A post-punk awakening for me. It also melded perfectly with the Entertainers.

Exactly at this time I was rubbing shoulders in London with artists who would become known as the YBAs (Young British Artists). There were several who would not become famous after briefly having their flames burn brightly, before being dropped by a once all powerful Art baron and friend of the Tory party, who literally made or broke young artists on a whim. Just as some talented footballers suddenly find themselves out of favour with a manager and have no way back no matter the talent. However, back then the arts and footie scene for me was buzzing.

Lads would come down regularly from Tyneside, visit me for away games and double up with a night out in London. Not the West End, but the crumbling rundown areas of East London, that housed the Artist studios and illegal raves in the pre-gentrified Shoreditch area.

My working class mates would entertain the Artists with their shenanigans, mainly in the Golden Hart Pub and then moving on to the 333 Club on Old Street.

Some of the artists were painfully middle class public school educated but found hanging out with “real” working class lads (Newcastle United fans) novel and enlightening in the extreme and an eye opener no doubt. All of this I would say was shocking to the supposed Enfant Terribles of the art world, that the tabloid press would later hail and ridicule in equal measure (‘Two fried eggs and a kebab’ by Sarah Lucas).

These are the same Geordie lads who I still drink with when in Newcastle and on their now rare visits to London.

They can recall amazing and often hilarious stories from this period in our football and cultural history and which they tell with great verbosity. All of this Dadaism viewed through the bottom of a pint glass.

I have encouraged the lads to put their words down, as this is social history at its best and needs to be recorded (no camera phones back then). All to no avail though. Working class lads stepping back and allowing the middle class to control the narrative.

And so back to the original question.

When did you start supporting Newcastle United and is it better now than then?

The answer is simply times change, society develops. When did we ever not support and when were we ever not working class Geordies ready for a beer and a good laugh?