Christmas, that grand old conjurer of memories, always pulls at my heartstrings like a fiddler on market day — and none more so than the memory of that Christmas. Mind you, I don’t need much encouragement to wallow in nostalgia; I’m as bad as an old maid sighing over her first sweetheart.
Picture, if you will, a lad of ten — a wiry scrap of a thing, with scabby knees and dreams bigger than his pocket money — utterly besotted with football. My weekly, sometimes fortnightly (the sands of time do their mischief on the details), ritual was the acquisition of Shoot magazine, which I would devour with the ferocity of a wolf set loose in a butcher’s shop. No sooner had I feasted on its words than the poor publication was mercilessly dismembered, its choicest cuts — photographs of players in heroic poses — plastered across my bedroom walls until they resembled the inside of a particularly enthusiastic football shrine.
At the very summit of this altar stood one man: Malcolm MacDonald — Supermac himself! If King Arthur had Sir Lancelot, I had Supermac: a dashing, dazzling demigod in boots. I met him in later life, and what a miserable sod he was – never meet your heroes!
But tragedy — that old hand at spoiling youthful dreams — struck one grim afternoon. Returning from a vigorous game of kerb football (a noble sport, now much lamented), I found my beloved poster defiled! Supermac’s soulful eyes were reduced to charred craters, courtesy of my sister and a pilfered cigarette. As if this sacrilege weren’t enough, poor Alan Gowling had been subjected to unspeakable graffiti of the most vulgar variety. It was a betrayal of the highest order. I mourned, wailed, threatened legal action (well, I told Mum), but to no avail.
Still, hope, like a determined weed, clung to my heart, and Christmas approached.
I knew — by heaven, I knew — that this Christmas would bring redemption in the form of a Newcastle United strip. I’d dropped hints heavier than a sack of potatoes, and overheard whispers that made my spirits soar higher than a kite in a March breeze.
Come Christmas morning, I was up like a shot, tearing into presents with all the decorum of a fox in a henhouse. And there it was — the right shape, the right weight — the holy grail itself, wrapped in crinkly paper and maternal affection.
I opened it — and the world stopped.
Middlesbrough.
Not Newcastle United.
Middlesbrough.
It was as if someone had swapped Cinderella’s slipper for a muddy wellington boot. I gazed at the red and white, my dreams lying around me like broken baubles on the lounge floor.
Yet — and here my career in amateur dramatics surely took flight — I summoned a grin so wide and bright that the angels themselves must have blinked. “Lovely!” I chirruped, my voice two octaves higher than usual.
Mum, bless her, explained — with the steely tone of someone who’d fought three shop assistants and a pensioner in the January sales — that the Newcastle kit had been impossible to find. “This one’s nice, isn’t it?” she said, as if the matter were closed.
And so I wore it.
Day after day, come rain, hail, or sideways sleet, I paraded about in my Middlesbrough colours. Friends mocked, eyebrows raised, tongues wagged. But I, like a good soldier, endured. I wore my Boro strip with a sort of defiant martyrdom, convinced that the very act was building my character in ways no Newcastle jersey ever could.
As fate — that capricious playwright — would have it, my passion for Newcastle waned. I grew older. My elder brother, a dyed-in-the-wool Sunderland man, refused to let me attend St James’ Park alone, and so, like a penitent monk, I attended match after match at Roker Park, draped in red and white (and a growing sense of fatalistic loyalty).
Nowadays, football and I are like distant cousins — still polite, but not especially close. Yet I always cast a furtive glance at the fortunes of Newcastle, Sunderland, and yes — dear old Middlesbrough. And when the scores come in, it’s Boro’s fate that tugs most fondly at my heart.
Mum’s been gone fourteen years now, God love her, but there’s not a day that passes when I don’t silently thank her for that Christmas “mistake.” For sometimes, life’s greatest gifts come not wrapped in what we asked for, but in what we needed — though heaven help me, I still tease Dad about it, with a grin as cheeky as a fox in a henhouse.
Wording 