Beautiful Idiots & Brilliant Lunatics: Exploring London and Beyond in 2024/25

London is a city of 9 million people, with a both thriving and diverse football culture. It will, therefore, be the theme of this year's Saturday match write-ups.

It says something for the mystery of London that nobody even seems able to truly determine where it begins and where it ends. There seem to be as many ways of defining this as there are people, and every single one of them seems to have at least fundamental flaw to it.

Is it anywhere with an underground station? Try telling that to the good people of Chesham, which is definitely in Buckinghamshire, or Watford, which is definitely in Hertfordshire. Is it anywhere with a London phone number? If it is, the residents of Borehamwood might want a word. Is it anywhere within the M25? Try that line on someone who lives in Chertsey or Theydon Bois. How about red buses? Hooo boy. Dorking gets them, and that town’s on a similar latitude to Maidstone and Aldershot. Dorking is definitely not London. The one thing that you can guarantee when you broach this thorny subject is that everybody will have a different answer, and that everybody who you ask will be absolutely certain that they and they alone are right.

So… it’s confusing, and that’s partly a function of the city having changed so much over the last century. In 1939, the estimated population of the (inner and outer) city was 8.6m. By 1981 this number had declined to 6.8m, and it took until the 2021 census for that population to get back to a point of parity compared to when the Second World War began. London took, in total, almost eighty years to recover from the damage inflicted by the six years of war which followed that 1939 declaration, in terms of population.

It’s also a matter of the governmental decisions of the post-war years. The formation of the Greater London Council in 1965 forced an answer to the question of “London vs Not London” as the 32 boroughs which formed that council. Perhaps the fairest way of determining what’s London and what isn’t is to ask the question of whether a place has the right to call itself a “London Borough of”, while the rest of us can argue between ourselves. At least there’s something that you could consider an ‘official’ version, even if my own parents’ generation will be able to remember when market towns like Enfield were connected to the big city by country lanes. Such is the pace of progress.

I was born in London. Due the accidental location of my place of birth, I even have the right to describe myself as a “Cockney” (and a technicality it is; Islington was within the sound of Bow Bells in 1972 but isn’t in 2024, thanks to noise pollution, and neither is it really particularly close to either the East End or the City), even though I have never once eaten a jellied eel or worn a pearly suit.

Once again for the unfamiliar, “Bow bells” refers to St Mary-le-Bow Church in Cheapside area of the City of London rather than anything in the district of Bow, in East London. Regular readers of this site will already be familiar with my - extremely first world - complaint that a life of relative rootlessness has left me with somewhere between zero and five ‘home towns’, but if I draw back my lens as far as possible, ‘from London’ is essentially the truth about me. So how come I feel as though I barely know the place?

It’s a serious question. I’ve seen plenty of it. Football - and in particular non-league football - does that to you. But for all that, the essence of the city somehow escapes me. Does its sprawling size make it unknowable? Perhaps there’s no single essence, more an amalgam of different cultures which combine to make something that is recognisable without being easily definable? What if I’ve just answered my own questions, before a ball has even been kicked?

Last season was my first as a weirdo football nomad, making a point attending matches of little to no consequence for the amusement of others. There was no particular theme to any of this, but by the end of the season I was running on fumes, a little. I’d almost rinsed the twin counties of Sussex dry, with occasional trips to Hampshire and Surrey added too, and by the end of it all I was starting to wonder what the point of all this might actually be. I saw some terrific games and the effects of taking Saturday out to just do this seemed to have been extremely beneficial.

But this season there will be a theme. I’m going to get to know the city in which I was born a little better. There will be more to it than this, of course. Much as I was born in London, I was half-raised in the Home Counties, so rather than limiting myself to whatever boundary of the city might be, I’ll also be taking in some of those as well. At least Hertfordshire, Essex and Buckinghamshire - at least! - will all get their turn.

As ever, I’ll pick my weekend games with care, and I’ll be working to my traditional matchday maxim: the journey to and from the match is always better than the match itself. And in addition to this, I’ll be writing a preview or accompanying piece for each match, each week, to be put into the public domain for paying subscribers every Friday morning. This week’s will be on Fisher FC, a club who’ve been through a very familiar pathway of death and rebirth and who have now found their place, on the Rotherhithe peninsula.

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And while I’m about it, I’ve got a little repurposing to do. I’ve spent the last decade viewing Instagram through a gimlet eye, but with Twitter’s descent towards full hellscape status apparently now accelerating with each passing day and the majority of users having not made the jump to Bluesky (and I promise I am waiting for enough of you to make that jump so I can jack old Emerald Nonce’s place in myself), I figured it was time to have another go at that.

So, with a couple of light changes (including the profile picture to a shot of Kermit the Frog kissing John Inman, because how could you not love that meeting of minds?), it’s kinda ready so feel free to gawp at decade-old pictures of me while it fills up with the sort of material you really want. (If decade-old pictures of me are what you really want, then I would recommend seeing, in this order, an optician, an opthamlogist and a psychologist.)