My T-shirts #4

Forcing nostalgia

Very few of us leave a place, especially a public place, knowing that we will never see it again. Maybe you have “done” the Pyramids or the Sydney Opera House, to use that awful, moronic, contemporary-tourist past participle, and they’re a terribly long way from home, and you can’t see yourself going back there. But perhaps your third husband, the one who is still two husbands away, has never been to Egypt. Maybe your tech-bro son, now aged eleven, will insist on flying the whole family to Australia for his thirtieth birthday. Never say never.

So the last-ever game at Highbury, the old Arsenal stadium, was a unique event for me, and remains so. It had been a big part of my life for thirty-eight years, and after that last game, it would be gone, demolished. Not completely, quite - one art-deco stand remains, and people live in it now. But everything that made Highbury Highbury - the North Bank, the Clock End, the pitch, the games - is no longer there, and the thirty-eight thousand people who attended the last game against Wigan knew for a fact that they would never be able to repeat that experience.