Single Parenthood & I: Happy New Football Year
The end of July is New Year's Eve for the football supporter, and with 2024-25 turning out to be a season that I both want to forget and can't, 2025-26 means turning over a new leaf.
It’s the last day of July, and means that the excitement is about to start. The new football season is starting to appear on the horizon, and everyone - Sheffield Wednesday and Morecambe supporters aside, I do acknowledge that - is starting to get filled with that feeling that this year could be our year after all again.
At this moment in time, I don’t quite know how I feel about it all. The 2024-25 season ended in numbness for me. Tottenham Hotspur won their first major trophy since 2008, and I didn’t feel a thing. The end of season drama came around and I was an impassive bystander, shrugging my shoulders and wondering what all the fuss was about.
Last season petered out, for me. I’d already been starting to feel more ambivalent about it all before The Crash came, and after that I felt nothing. But the summer has provided respite. I wouldn’t say that I feel better, per se, but I do feel as though my life has improved in some ways that I maybe wouldn’t even have predicted.
Financially, I’m away from the cliff face and moving towards a good position. I’ve rearranged and I can afford to do things again, although those things remain somewhat modest, for the time being. Physically, I may have never been in better condition. I even started smoking again after The Crash as a crutch, I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit, but I’ve knocked that on the head again and I’m glad to have done so.
Emotionally… well, perhaps the best I can say on that is that if I will ever remember this summer for anything beyond completely head-spinning discombobulation, it’s been a summer of self-improvement. I’ve bought better furniture for our scruffy little house. I’ve exercised to the point at which, for the first time in my life, I have the arms of an adult male rather than a malnourished 12-year-old girl. I still moisturise daily. It’s not a huge amount, but it’s a start.
Some - perhaps many - of you will have noticed that I’ve been less busy on here. Well, that will be changing. I intend to get back to posting as close to daily as I can manage on here, because it’s good for me, and because you people deserve content. Some of it will be about football, some of it won’t. Most of it will be for paying subscribers only. I’ve given away so much content free of charge over the years, and I deserve paying (especially if I’m doing this in the evenings after having flogged my guts out all day).
What I can say for certain is that your weekend matches are coming back. Well, for August, at least. Some of you will be aware that I now have a freelance position which requires me to be available for shifts, five days every week. There will be a preview again on the Friday morning and a write-up at some point on Sunday. It’s a good rhythm to get back into.
The way this works is that in the last week of the month we get sent a message asking our availability for the following month and a rota is formed. Last week, when I received this request for August, I replied by asking if I could have Saturday afternoons off. I wasn’t expecting this to come good but it has done - one of the more surprising elements of working in the football media is that Saturday afternoons are often one of the quietest times of the week - so for August at least I’m freed up to get to matches again.
I’ve been thinking long and hard about what this might look like, this season. Two years ago, when I first started this, my focus was on matches in Sussex and Surrey. I wanted to see what the game really looked and felt like in my own backyard. Last season, I had reason to decide that matches in London and Essex would be a good idea. Well, they were until they weren’t any more.
I anticipate that this season will be a hybrid of those two. I felt as though I’d come to exhausting my local area, so I will be continuing to spread my wings a little further afield. But there are also restrictions. There will almost certainly be weekends that I can’t do, when I have to work. And I will be working a lot of Saturday mornings, meaning that I’ll likely be restricted to anywhere within a couple of hours of the south coast. But it’s doable and achievable.
I’ve already started, of course. Last weekend, I had some demons to exorcise, so I schlepped all the way up to Barking for a match which… well, if I see a worse game this season, I’ll be going some. I’m going to try to get to the grounds that I feel as though I should have gone to but haven’t. And I’m starting that this weekend with one of the most surprising of all.
This weekend, unless something goes horrifically wrong, I’ll be at Clapton vs Dunmow Town in the Eastern Counties League Division One South. I feel a little guilty about not making this weekend an FA Cup weekend, but there are a couple of reasons why I’ve decided not to do so this weekend:
I looked at the 220-odd matches in this year’s Extra Preliminary Round Draw and literally nothing stood out to me.
This particular weekend last year was a day which included this round of the FA Cup, but which, for reasons which I presume are lost to every other person on this planet, I have come to see as one of the happiest of my entire life, and I honestly don’t want reminders of it. Google Photos, I’m looking at you, here - there’s one particular photo I just know you’re simply itching to show me and which I simply cannot bring myself to look at, at the moment. One day I will write that complete day up, but for now it remains too raw.
I want to keep my options on what to do with these write-ups. There’s every possibility that my life could change dramatically over the next few months - and no, I don’t know in what ways - so I want to be flexible.
So that’s the plan for this season. There’ll be a preview of Clapton vs Dunmow up tomorrow morning, and I’ll start settling into the rhythm of the new season.
Happy new football year, everybody.