Cod Almighty | Article

by Stu Morton

13 October 2003

When the literary genii who reside at CA Towers asked me to write a piece about supporting Town and living in France, I knew I couldn't compete with the quality of writing they manage to produce on a daily basis. So, to dress my efforts up a bit, I thought I'd stick a couple of quotes in. "It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations", said Winston Churchill, and how right he was!

So: living abroad, supporting Town... now, what kind of quote can help me here? Ah yes. "The past is a foreign country," wrote LP Hartley. "They do things differently there." That will do nicely.

It has everything. It has notions of "a foreign country", which is where I live, and it talks about doing things differently, which is what they do here. It also talks about the past, and I did a few things differently in the past - supporting Town being a prime example. Mixing metaphors? Or rather getting mixed up in a metaphor? Absolutely, but give me a minute, and I'll try to explain...

So, how does living on "the continent", in a foreign country, change the way you support Town? And why has the past become a foreign country now I've, erm, moved to a foreign country?

Well, before the foreign country bit, let's look at the past.

I started going to BP when I was young-ish, tagging along to games and slowly becoming addicted to the odd form of self-punishment that is supporting Town. It's quite a school of life, is Blundell Park - character-forming, to say the least. I often wonder how I would have turned out if I'd had the misfortune to support one of those 'big' clubs.

Growing up supporting Town helped you understand that life was not a stroll in the park, that there is some sort of perverse satisfaction in doing things the hard way. It somehow makes you a stronger person. If you don't expect to win, then losing isn't any easier to swallow, but winning is so much better. Imagine supporting a team that you expect to win regularly.

So I was brought up on Town, got addicted young, and haven't been able to stop. There are no nico-patches for this addiction, no clinics or cures. When I lived in the UK, it tended to fade in and fade out from year to year, depending on where I was and what I was doing, but even when my attention strayed for a while, it was always there in the background. And like all addictions, it seemed to get worse when supply was cut off. It's like running out of fags, when all the shops are closed, and rummaging through every coat pocket and drawer, but still not finding one. Either the withdrawal symptoms set in or you end up smoking teabags.

When I moved to the south of France, the information stream was cut off. From one day to the next. You couldn't support Town in the same way living on Avenue de Toulouse as when you lived on Hainton Avenue. Too far to walk. Too far to drive. Too far to take the train. Too expensive to fly back once a week to see a game. There are no cheap flights to anywhere closer than London or Manchester. You want a direct flight? Try taking out a bank loan to buy a direct flight to East Midlands, or even worse, a double whammy via Amsterdam to Humberside International. There was briefly a direct from Paris into Humberside, run by Air France, but it got scrapped. Quelle surprise!

You couldn't listen to the match on the radio, unless you fancied spending a couple of hours straining for a brief mention of Town through a static-charged reception of the World Service. You couldn't talk about Town down your local, firstly because we didn't have a local, and secondly because even if we'd had one, nobody would have wanted to talk about it. In fact, in that hypothetical local, nobody would know, or care, that Town exist, that Grimsby exists, or even that North East Lincolnshire exists. Invariably, when I tell someone that I'm from the north-easternish bit of England, they hazard a guess that it's near Manchester. Not even close. I try to look on the bright side: at least they don't think it's in Yorkshire.

Even at work there's never been any banter with colleagues about footy. I do have one Brit colleague, but he's from Devon and enjoys egg chasing. Enough said!

The others just don't care. They're French. Anything outside of PSG, Lyon and Marseille is "amateur", all other French clubs included. Auxerre get a mention, but only for the Guy Roux sympathy vote. The second division? Deuxième quoi? They don't even know it exists! They don't 'do' lower divisions here. If you think that in England the media coverage on the Premiership takes all the attention away from the lower leagues, think again. In France, anything below the top division might as well be Sunday league pub football.

So, in the face of such isolation, you might think interest in Town would have quickly dropped off, like a leper's wotsit.

Well, no, actually. And that's the strange thing. Your interest, or anything else for that matter, doesn't drop off at all. It grows. It develops. It changes. It blossoms. It transforms. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder," and fonder it grows. Anything would do. Family would send me weeks-old newspapers, fanzines, and programmes. I'd thrive on dodgy radio receptions, driving for miles up mountains and building all sorts of reception-enhancing contraptions. The less I got, the more I needed, or so I thought.

But then the information problem cleared up. First of all, the internet happened. All of a sudden, there were others out there, all sharing the same addiction. It was like joining an online Townaholics Anonymous group. Mail lists became websites; websites led to messageboards; and match days were spent in chat rooms rather than driving around France with a collection of coat hangers stuck on the car roof. Now we've even got live commentary on Radio Humberside over the net. Compare that to Town's first live 'commentaries' - typed into a chat room by Martin Handsley - brilliant!

And there are more sources of info on Town than there is news to report. Even Sky television is available to ex-pats if you know a dodgy geezer back home who can set it up for you. Home from home. You can even spend loads of money on Town without leaving your front room.

So, you might think, with all this electronic access to Town, with all these new possibilities for a bit of virtual supporting, the withdrawal symptoms might go away, and the interest might fade.

Wrong. It doesn't work like that. It's not about access to information. Moving away coincided with getting cut off from daily doses of Town news, but that was not the root of the problem. It doesn't explain why, even in this age of information technology, the 'exiled' supporter becomes equally or even more passionate than those who have chosen to stay in North East Lincolnshire.

Why is this? Maybe it's about being different. Vive la difference! No-one else around here supports Town. No-one else I know around here spends part of his week in front of a computer, in a football shirt, shouting obscenities. When you stick your Town shirt on, you can be pretty sure that you're not going to bump into anyone else on the Champs Elysée doing his weekly shop in the same gear. You might see the odd loud Italian in a Juventus shirt, but that's as close as it gets. And it doesn't stop there. Even the kids get to be a bit different. No-one else at their school is walking around advertising Dixon or Jarvis.

But that's not it either. You don't have to go to all the trouble of supporting Town to be different. There are easier ways that don't eat up half your social life. You can dye your hair green, or paint your house pink, or buy a Skoda. Being different is easy.

No indeed - it's not about being different; it's about being yourself. I've realised that now. It's about identity, about roots. Wherever you go, wherever you end up in life, you can't lose your roots. You can't just forget. It's about your home town, your childhood, your family, all those ingredients that were thrown into the mixer that eventually churned you out. It's about a way of thinking, a philosophy, if you like.

It's that 'love of hopeless causes'. It's about walking uphill with your head held high and a bloody great smile on your face while the Premiership coaches speed by and spew exhaust fumes into your face.

It's about looking back on relegation years with a wry smile, and remembering promotion years with a mad grin. It's about looking out across half of Wembley filled with black and white, singing Town fans, and wondering if you are dreaming. It's about not expecting much, and still having faith that things will turn out all right.

Supporting Town is about all that and more. People back home take these things for granted - we exiles look on through a black and white screen.

Right, enough philosophy. It's time to go off and eat some snails, or some other "if it moves, eat it" French culinary delight. Another quote to finish up. This one's by Stephen Ambrose, an American historian, who was responsible for that Band of Brothers crap. Let's not hold that against him, and read what he has to say about supporting GTFC:

"The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future."

Sums it up pretty well, I'd say. A la prochaine.