Fever Pitch

It may sound typical that a human with such an obvious propensity for negging as my self has found himself feeling slightly down during this sequence of gross weather. Furthermore one of my dearest friends is about to embark on on an overseas adventure, a trend that has claimed a plethora of my best mates in recent months. This devastating cocktail of rain, sadness and jealousy would usually be a potent catalyst for a serious neg spiral. However ever since the Dragons took the premiership I have not even come close to the depths that I know that I am capable of, like I can shrug off these little hurdles like the trivial matters they are. Rather than losing my mind and not being able to interact with humans properly for a few days. 

Some people find it hard to comprehend, that some dudes fanging around throwing a ball could have this affect on a man like me. I have tried to verbalise the way I feel on numerous occasion but always come to some feeble half baked conclusion. Read the excerpt from Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby and you may be able to come a little closer to comprehending the weight that has been lifted from my soul

It was the second of three or four lifetime football moments where my delirium was such that I had no idea what I was doing, where everything went blank for a few moments. I know that an old man behind me grabbed me around my neck and wouldn't let go, and that when I returned to a state approaching normal consciousness the rest of the stadium was empty save for a few Tottenham fans who stood watching us,too stunned and sick to move (in my mind I see white faces, but we were too far away to be able to detect shock-induced pallor), and the Arsenal players were cavorting beneath us, as overjoyed and probably as baffled by their win as we were.

We were all still in the stadium twenty minutes after the final whistle, and then we roared out on to the street, and Pete and I drove back to the Arsenal Tavern, where we were locked in after closing time so that we could watch the highlights of the game on the big TV screen, and so that I could drink much too much.

The depression that I had been living with for the best part of the 1980's packed up and started to leave that night, and within a month I was better. Inevitably part of me wishes that it had been something else that effected the sure- the love of a good woman, or a minor literary triumph, or a transcendent realisation during something like Live Aid that my life was blessed and worth living- something worthy and real and meaningful. It embarrassed me to confess that a decade-long downer lifte because Arsenal won at Spurs in the Littlewoods Cup (I would be slightly less embarrassed if it had been an FA Cup win, But the Littlewoods!), and I have often tried to work out why it happened like this. The win meant a lot to all Arsenal fans, of course: for seven years our team hadn't even come very close to winning a semi-final, and the decline had begun to look terminal. And there might be even a medical explanation. It could be that the monstrous surge of adrenalin released by a last-minute winner at tottenham in a semi-final when you were one down with seven minutes left, all hope abandoned, maybe this surge corrects some kind of chemical imbalance in the brain or something.

The only convincing explanation I can come up with, however, is that I stopped feeling unlucky that night, and that the log-jam that had provoked such despair just over a year before had been sorted, not by me, predictably, but by Arsenal; and so I jumped on the shoulders of the team and they carried me into the light that had suddenly emerged shone down on all of us.