Did I really see that Jack Russell running by with half a match pie in its mouth? | OneFootball

The other week I spent the evening watching a poor England team and listening to David Seaman retell anecdotes about Euro ’96 while surrounded by twenty and thirty-somethings.

I mused over how thirty years ago I had been in that same part of London and how things change with time.

What was once rundown and an area where very few would venture, is now trendy and aspirational.

Physically, the architectural landscape has not changed, but that same architecture that remains constant, contains emotional jolts, triggers for events, social interactions, and memories of past football games.

I can recall going to games in the early seventies with my best mate and my older brothers, but as it is now almost half a century ago, the memories fade and blur.

The detail can be lost but the emotions, smells, and noise, will forever be implanted in the mind, and standing in the East stand paddock, getting in early to nab one of the yellow crush barriers, was a memory I hope I will never lose.

Through the eighties it was away games, turning up and paying in, never sure what was going to happen inside or outside the ground.

Now thirty-plus years on, means those distant awayday jollies were clouded by alcohol, and the detail is now lost.

In the eighties, living in Nottingham, it was awaydays with lads from the East Midlands, trips to London and Manchester, and trips up the road to Sheffield and Barnsley. No mobile phones back then so relying on chance and intuition to meet like-minded supporters. Being photographed and filmed by the aggressive and politically motivated South Yorkshire police, as we walked to Bramall Lane.

And so on to the drug-addled nineties. Mates coming down to London for games knowing they can crash at my gaff but doubling up their Newcastle United away day and softening their sense of despair at Newcastle United with a big session at a dodgy nightclub with all that entailed. Games in London always seemed to be warm and humid (and expensive).

I recently wrote about fat lads playing football and watching Gazza at Stoke. One commentator pulled me up saying get your facts right Greg. The scenario I was illustrating was away at Stoke I said, was a wet Wednesday night, but herein the point lies. Forty years on it wasn’t a wet Wednesday night but a Saturday, as my ticket stub tells me… but in the mind’s eye over such a period of time the memory tells you something different. Every time I have been in Stoke it has been wet, dark, and miserable, or so I believed. A pretty grim place in my experience.

Likewise watching Notts County was always a misty experience due to the geography of the area, with a feeling of otherworldliness down at the Meadows close to the Trent, with its old wooden stands from a bygone era. Or so I sort of remember, or maybe not.

I asked the psychology teacher who I work with, if there is an explanation for this linking of shared experiences to senses and other blurring of memory and historical facts. Turns out there is, and he directed me to research done in academia, but you know what, it’s not that important.

If I had only been to St James’ Park in the seventies and never since, I would associate the venue with giant floodlights burning into the cold early evening air, huge murmurations of starlings behind Gallowgate, and the smell of the breweries, cigarette smoke and damp grass, as well as a Jack Russell running by with half a match pie in its mouth.

Did I really see a Jack Russell? Or was it some image from the past that has morphed into my memory via social media and become reality, or is it just nostalgia for a time past that never did really exist?