Towards the end of May 1996, the sports editor of The Times asked me out to lunch, which was a bit weird. Sport was another country, as far as I was concerned. At the time, I was 41 years old, had been a columnist and TV critic on the paper for five years, and had once written a piece for it concerned specifically with women’s apathetic attitude to sport, in which I’d confessed that I routinely tipped the second section of The Times (the bit with business at the front and sport at the back) into the bin each morning as it was quite clear that the basic qualification for a reader of this section was possession of a pair of testicles.
It had never occurred to me, by the way, that by expressing this viewpoint I might hurt anybody’s feelings. It seemed like a harmless statement of fact. And, in mitigation, I did go on to explain that I was always obliged to retrieve the second section of the paper from the bin later on - with a squeal of annoyance and a pair of tongs - when I suddenly remembered that the arts pages were in there, too. Anyway, when I met sports editor David Chappell and his deputy Keith Blackmore, and they started off by helpfully reminding me of the column I’d written (Keith said one of his sub-editors was so outraged by it that he had cut it out of the paper and pinned it on a noticeboard), I didn’t know what to say. I wondered briefly whether they had been appointed by their colleagues to take me out to a public place and there strike me about the face and neck with rolled-up copies of Section Two.
Whether what subsequently happened to me was an enormous and Machiavellian Grand Revenge on Miss Hoity Toity is a question that I still ask myself. Because, as things turned out, these chaps were to control my life for the next four years and change me for ever. At the time, however, our meeting merely seemed a bit odd, as we obviously had so little to talk about, professionally speaking. For example, they asked me what I knew about the forthcoming ‘Euro 96’, and I said, cheerfully, absolutely nothing, never heard of it, but probably something in the sporting line was my present guess. They seemed pleased by my unfeigned ignorance (and helpful attitude), but they nevertheless found it hard to believe. Had I really not noticed that England was about to host football’s European Championships? That’s honestly news to me, I said; and (no offence intended) not very interesting news at that.
I then politely asked whether this Euro thing took place every year - and it was at that point that Keith rubbed his hands together and ordered another bottle. What did I know about Terry Venables, then? ‘Some sort of crook?’ I ventured. Ever heard of Alan Shearer? Nope. Although, in an effort not to sound clueless, I think I mentioned a coach company called Shearings - which might not be strictly relevant (especially as it was, um, a different name). How would I feel about going to some matches and writing about the championships from this blissfully innocent point of view, Keith said. And I said, well, I suppose I could. Journalists do all sorts of peculiar and unnatural things in the line of duty don’t they? Personally, I had once undergone colonic irrigation for Woman’s Journal. Football could hardly be worse than that.
I’m always glad that we had that conversation, those nice sports editors and I, because it fixes a moment for me perfectly: a moment when football was just a kind of noise that came from the television in other people’s houses. I knew that some of my friends were married to men whose passion for football was indulged domestically (or so I believed), but it was something that took place behind closed doors; it was easy to turn a tactful blind eye. In those far-off days, football news was rarely in the headlines, or on the front of newspapers, and mainstream television critics such as I were rarely exposed to the game as a subject on the main channels. Reviewing telly since 1991, I had probably seen three significant pieces about football: the first was a very funny drama by Andy Hamilton called Eleven Men Against Eleven (with Timothy West as a club chairman); then there was a documentary about Diego Maradona, focusing on the ‘hand of God’ incident, the significance of which seemed to me to have been absurdly over-exaggerated, given that football was only a game. The third was the now famous ‘Cutting Edge’ documentary on Channel 4 (An Impossible Job) charting Graham Taylor’s last year as England manager, with its hilarious touchline swearing, ghastly scenes of not-qualifying-for-the-1994-World-Cup, and the buffoonish and frustrated Taylor exclaiming, ‘Do I not like that!’ and ‘Can we not knock it?’
What else? I remember my female boss - the literary editor of an academic weekly - once on a Monday morning in the early 1980s saying that she had watched some foot-ball at the weekend, and that she had generally approved of what she saw. ‘You’re kidding,’ I said. (Her usual leisure activities were playing tennis at a rather exclusive North London club and practising the clarinet.) ‘No, it was quite balletic,’ she said, her eyes wide in self-amazement. Apart from that, the footballing event that had impinged most on my consciousness was the Heysel disaster in 1985 - not because I understood how truly awful it was, but because I didn’t. At this time I had a crush on a chap in the office who made a perversely big show of adoring football, especially Italian football; and for some reason I always felt that he was putting this on. I thought he carried copies of La Gazzetta dello sport around just to annoy me (or possibly - which was worse - to arouse the interest of other men). Either way, I did not respect, understand or believe in his passion for football, and I remember a couple of days after Heysel asking him why he was still depressed.
The Times’s idea of sending an agnostic, literary, 41-year-old female survivor of colonic irrigation who’d always minded her own business to cover a bit of football in 1996 has to be set in context. And it’s quite simple, looking back. In the mid-1990s, football was mounting its bid for total domination of British culture - a domination that it subsequently achieved. Nick Hornby’s 1992 book Fever Pitch was responsible for making football respectably middle-class; Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Sports channels (launched in 1990) for flogging football as a seemingly limitless source of home entertainment. Everyone could see that football was breaking out in unlikely places in the 1990s. In the London Review of Books, for example, Karl Miller (the Northcliffe Professor of English at University College London; not the German footballer) wrote a hyperbolic essay on Paul Gascoigne’s World Cup performances in Italia 90, in which he described the flawed-heroic Gazza as, ‘Fierce and comic, formidable and vulnerable…tense and upright, a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun.’ At the other end of the mythologising scale, on Friday nights from 1994 to 1996, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s laddish and brilliantly bathetic series Fantasy Football League (BBC2) placed football in the same friendly bracket as alternative comedy. Football’s traditional associations - male, tribal, anti-intellectual, hairy-kneed, working-class, violent, humourless, misogynist, foulmouthed, unfashionable - were being undermined from all directions.
Given all these signs and portents, it was naturally felt - by clever zeitgeist specialists such as Keith and David - that Euro 96 might be a tipping point. Match attendances, which had sunk to terrible lows in the 1980s (Tottenham had been playing to crowds of around 10,000) were already recovering thanks to the formation of the Premier League and the investment from television - but, basically, Après Euro 96, le deluge. In the context of all this, I believe my own small journey into football for The Times was a clever editorial decision: I would be a trundling wooden horse freighting a few new readers into the sports section. It was also, however, a deliberate and rather rash mind-altering experiment, familiar from films such as The Fly and (more recently) The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and I have sometimes wondered subsequently whether I ought to sue. No one thought about the consequences, least of all me. We merely thought: let’s connect the brain of this apathetic 41-year-old literary woman to a big lot of football, maximise the voltage and then see what happens. If she starts getting up during matches to yell, ‘Can we not knock it?’ then the conclusion is clear: football can appeal to bloody anyone. If she starts describing Gazza as a priapic monolith, however, things have probably gone too far, and it may be necessary to reverse the polarity.
But I agreed to do it, so there you are. And my first act as special know-nothing Euro 96 correspondent for The Times was to go out and get a book. I acted on the advice of a child, which seemed appropriate. ‘How should I prepare for Euro 96?’ I said. And the child said, ‘Get a sticker book.’ So I bought a special Euro 96 sticker book in W.H. Smith’s and the astonishing thing was: it was only a pound. Imagine my disappointment, however, when I took it home, shook it, and no stickers came out. Apparently you have to buy the stickers separately at considerable expense - something the child had neglected to tell me. But never mind. I was now committed to Euro 96. I had invested in it. And in the build-up to the event, I persevered with my research. I bought a magazine-sized glossy bbc guide to the championships, for example, which was packed with pictures of completely unfamiliar long-haired men doing historic things for their countries in very, very brightly coloured football shirts. Evidently, quite a few of these chaps played for English teams while artfully retaining their foreignness for international contests. I wondered how this could possibly work in practice. I also wondered, seriously, whether it ought to be allowed.
I also read every word in the supplement that came with The Times, bored to tears, and spent a long time studying the cover picture of Les Ferdinand with no shirt on, trying to memorise his chiselled features for later identification. (Since the injured Les played no part in England’s Euro 96 games, this turned out to be a waste of time.) Having nothing else to do until the games began, I pored over the results tables waiting to be filled in, speculating on their use. There were columns headed ‘W’, ‘D’ and ‘L’, for example, which I immediately deduced were abbreviations. Win, Draw and Lose was my guess. However, after ‘W’, ‘D’ and ‘L’ came columns for ‘F’ and ‘A’, and here I drew a blank. I searched the page for a key, but there wasn’t one. Damn. I couldn’t work it out. F? A? Even if it was to do with the number of goals scored - which seemed likely - how did that get to be represented as two columns? Dear, oh dear, there was so much to learn.
The good news was that the opening match (to which I would be going) was England v Switzerland. Phew. What a good idea to start things off playing a nation known not only for its keen neutrality and cleanliness, but also for its extreme tardiness in giving women the vote. In all my years of not really listening to sports news, I had never heard of England fans having particular antagonistic feelings towards the Swiss - not even for their disgraceful suffrage record. Moreover, according to my Euro 96 guide, Switzerland were not one of the great teams of the world, either, so they would probably be an utter walkover on the field, thus ensuring a nice successful opening game for the home side. At this stage, it had not occurred to me that the 15 teams competing alongside England in Euro 96 had all needed to qualify for the event - or, indeed, noticed that many, many other European countries were not represented at all. I never asked, ‘Shouldn’t Sweden be playing in this?’ or ‘Where is the Republic of Ireland?’. I just thought it was fitting that small countries with no chance at all were playing alongside big footballing nations such as Germany, England and Italy. It seemed to have been nicely thought out; someone high up in football had obviously sat down in the winter with a yellow legal pad, a sharp pencil, a cup of coffee and a biscuit, and selected this bunch of interesting countries to play against each other - a bit like planning a really big dinner party, but with less at stake if it went wrong.
Meanwhile, I waited. At the last minute, The Times supplied me with an intriguing electronic device: a special bt pager decorated with the Euro 96 logo which would, they promised, thrillingly vibrate to inform me whenever anything important happened (in case I missed it, I suppose). For the time being, however, this gadget was inert, lifeless - even when prodded. I wrote an introductory piece explaining how I had achieved my pristine ignorance of football over a lifetime of loudly running the bath, boiling kettles and singing tunelessly to the cats (‘La la la, What’s for breakfast today, La la la, Spot of Whiskas, La la la’) during the sports bit on the Today programme at 7.25 a.m. and/or 8.25 a.m. Then I finalised my preparations by asking my friend Robert to come with me to Wembley, knowing that he had an interest in football, and assuming he would snatch my arm off for a ticket. What a let-down, therefore, to discover that, while he would certainly be happy to escort me to England-Switzerland, Robert was a Sheffield Wednesday fan primarily, and not over-keen on international fixtures.
So that was it. On the fine morning of Saturday June 8, 1996, I set off for Wembley from Brighton station clutching a pair of tickets and a dormant pager, wondering whether I’d be able to recognise Les Ferdinand with his clothes on, imagining the tournament mainly in terms of social dining, and with a slightly under-excited friend in tow. Not great clues, any of them, to the fact that my world was about to be turned upside down.
I’ll mainly skip over the England-Switzerland game. All I can say is that I was jolly pleased when Alan Shearer scored the opening goal halfway through the first half, partly because it made my pager go off with a very definite buzz (wow), and partly because everyone said he’d gone 21 months without scoring for his country, which seemed like a pretty good reason for him not to be selected for the team, actually, if you were being ruthlessly practical about it. When Switzerland equalised from a penalty in the second half, it was a bit confusing for spectators in the stadium, because we had no idea what had caused it (evidently a hand-ball from Stuart Pearce was the transgression), but the final 1-1 result - while apparently a great big downer for England fans - did not feel like any sort of injustice. England had been disorganised and had run out of ideas quite quickly; after the long-drawn-out palaver of the loosely-themed opening ceremony, and the excitement of the opening goal, the afternoon sort-of fizzled out, and there were long, yawning patches of pointless play that took place amid virtual silence, as if the whole event had suddenly been submerged under water.
Not that it was restful. I learned not to get settled too comfortably at football, because you were always having to jump up when anything faintly interesting happened. I also learned that, when a corner is taken, you don’t stay standing up, but you don’t sit down either: you assume a halfway position with a lateral twist which manifests the presence of hope, but is quite a strain on the buttocks. As for the England team, on this occasion I enjoyed them most when they had their backs to me - simply because this gave me a chance of identifying them. ‘Turn round, for God’s sake, so I can see who you are,’ was my continual grumble. It was like the old days of watching The Flowerpot Men, with its teasing song, ‘Was it Bill or was it Ben?’ and the ritual infant response of, ‘Don’t know! Don’t know! They’re identical!’
But I remember that some of the players’ individual footballing contributions started to stand out even in that first game of Euro 96: it seemed to me, for example, that there was no point in Steve McManaman running quite so fast with the ball up the sides if nobody else from his team could keep up. Screeching to a halt, he would realise his lonely predicament and then have to entertain the ball all by himself in the corner, where he was in clear danger of having it taken off him by a bunch of bigger boys. I wondered: should he be instructed to look round to check occasionally, or would this put him off his (considerable) stride? Thank goodness I wasn’t in charge of the national team, with decisions like that to make. Meanwhile, I also noticed with interest that the crowd’s high expectations of Paul Gascoigne - they stood up and made approving noises suggestive of ‘This is it!’ or ‘We’re off now!’ or ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ whenever he got possession - were almost always doomed to early disappointment (groans all round, as he expertly passed to a nearby space with no one in it). Oddly, however, they never, ever learned from the experience.
I wrote a piece about the match, and I did not compare it (in any detail) to colonic irrigation, which I think was a relief to all concerned. But I did not start to love football at this moment. Over the following couple of days I watched umpteen group-stage matches on the TV, in fact, and lost the will to live. I found that I started doing other tasks at the same time as the footie - tasks which grew in complexity as the days went by. For example, during Germany v Czech Republic (on the Sunday) I did some dusting; during Romania v France (Monday) I made some curtains, and during Switzerland v The Netherlands (Thursday) I translated Kierkegaard from the Danish. It did not help that this was a particularly low-scoring tournament taking place in weirdly half-empty stadiums. Nor did it help that none of these foreign players was a household name in my particular household. When I now look at old footage of Euro 96, I see Dennis Bergkamp and the teenaged Patrick Kluivert, Luis Figo and Zinedane Zidane (with hair), Fabrizio Ravanelli and Gianfranco Zola, Jürgen Klinsmann and even Ally McCoist. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and so on. But to me in 1996, all these blokes were just talented exotics, some of them with unexplained Elastoplasts stuck across their noses.
Meanwhile, the commentators said bizarre things like, ‘That was a bread and butter ball,’ and I’d get distracted thinking about types of open sandwich. The sound from my living room had become the sound from millions of other living rooms, of the droning, ‘Here’s Grumpy…to Dopey …back to Grumpy…good run from Sleepy, oh, Bashful’s found some clearance!’ All against the repeated background crowd noise of ‘Ooh’ (indicating a shot off target). I was wondering whether I should give up footie before it was too late. After all, I had a novel coming out in a month’s time; I had a lovely regular job reviewing television; my nice boyfriend liked to see me happy but he really wasn’t interested in football; my best friend actually preferred Sheffield Wednesday to this Euro stuff. Perhaps I should call it off.
So my bosses decided to get me out of the house again. Bizarrely, they sent me to Macclesfield to watch the Germans make peace with the local community - but it was nevertheless a clever move. As a television critic I led a life that rarely required me to put on outdoor shoes: the mere idea of stepping outside my front door and shutting it behind me twice in one week was alone enough to thrill my senses. Good heavens, I would have to catch a train and then reclaim the fare; indeed, I would have to find out where Macclesfield was. It was explained to me that the German team, under coach ‘Bertie’ Vogts, had been billeted to this Cheshire market town, you see (birthplace of the Hovis loaf ), possibly as some sort of punishment for being too good at football. Naturally, they complained. In particular, they caused a local uproar by claiming that their practice pitch at the Moss Rose (nice name) had stones and bits of glass in it. By the time I got there, they had apologised for any distress caused, and the Macclesfield Express Advertiser carried the headline, ‘VOGTS BACKS DOWN IN FACE OF FAN’S FURY’ - the placing of the apostrophe suggesting, unfortunately, that Macclesfield Town FC had just the one fan.
The point of sending me, I think, was that the Germans had decided to do some open training, so the locals could watch, and I could get all excited seeing the charming and popular Klinsmann at close quarters; so it was a shame that I didn’t know what he looked like - a Macclesfield teenager eating chips on a dismal concrete terrace had to point him out as a blond-headed dot in the distance. As a pr stunt, the whole thing did lack something. ‘Are there going to be any autographs?’ asked the kids. ‘Nein,’ was the reply. As a way of deepening my interest in the tournament, the press conference (in German) wasn’t much better. They gave me a T-shirt with ‘Say no to drugs’ in German on it, but I realised I couldn’t wear it with any conviction. Drugs were starting to seem quite attractive, compared with Euro 96. I liked all this getting out and about, but the football? I watched a bunch of Germans in the distance play another bunch of Germans, with a German referee. I wondered if I was looking at the future. And the experience taught me something else: that the downside to travelling halfway up the country with a bit of footie hope in your heart is that, afterwards, you have to travel halfway down the country back again with nothing to console you for all those wasted hours.
So the only thing keeping me going, at this stage, was the BT pager, which had started off the tournament delivering quite terse and factual reports (‘England 1, Switzerland 0, Shearer 22 mins’), but by midweek was employing interesting value judgements and adjectives. It was fascinating. I loved it. I hung on its every word. It described team performances as ‘spirited’, and so on. ‘Dutch substitution de Kock for Seedorf (lucky not to be sent off )’. The worst thing was, I loved the way it went off at unexpected moments: it made me feel all connected and indispensable. I was at the checkout in Waitrose at 6.30 on the Thursday evening (packing cat food) when the balloon went up, and I had no choice: I stopped everything I was doing, grabbed the pager, and held it in front of my furrowed face, pressing its buttons. The checkout lady was impressed. She probably thought I’d be performing a kidney transplant within the hour. The message read, ‘Please keep posted for tonight’s crunch match between The Netherlands and the Swiss - goals, etc.’ Unable to pass this on, I solemnly pursed my lips and waved a hand over the groceries as if to say, ‘Well, it puts all this in perspective.’ (Which was true.)
Then came England v Scotland. This time, the paper wanted me to watch footie in a local Brighton pub - and, as I write those words, I do start to think it was all a plot to destroy me, after all. They gave me some spending money in an envelope, and suggested a small, murky pub, forgetting to tell me that I needed to start camping out in front of its giant screen on Friday night if I wanted to have any chance of a seat for the match on Saturday afternoon. Robert and I arrived 90 minutes before the match, and the bar with the TV was already crowded with professional layabouts ordering beer in enormous pitchers and crisps by the box. All the seats were taken, and most of the floor space was taken, too. It was hard to see the attraction of watching footie in a pub - especially when the match was being broadcast on terrestrial television and therefore available in one’s own home. The only interesting novelty in the experience, as far as I could tell, was the stickiness of the floor, which meant that, however roughly one was barged from the side, one could always regain the vertical. The screen was dreadful - a blurry, washed-out picture; meanwhile the half-light was a pickpockets’ charter, the crowding was ghastly, the air was full of cigarette smoke, people were already quite rowdy, and worst of all, you couldn’t hear the telly. How was I supposed to take detailed notes in these conditions? Someone really hadn’t thought this through.
But there was something behind my grumbling, I realised. Something unexpected. I was tense about the football. A match was about to take place, the outcome of which might be decisive for England’s progress through the tournament. Suddenly the previous Saturday’s 1-1 result against Switzerland looked like a wasted opportunity: why hadn’t England played better, tried harder, got more goals? Hadn’t they understood what was at stake? Hadn’t they had a couple of years to prepare for that match? With an hour to go before England v Scotland, I felt sick. The pager had sent me a message on the Friday with, ‘Pressure on England and Scotland to win tomorrow’, and I had thought this a bit superfluous, but now, as I waited grimly for kick-off at 3 p.m., I hated the fact that, yes, both teams really needed to win this if they were to survive the group stage of the competition. Scotland had only one point; England had only one point; The Netherlands had three. England was to meet The Netherlands the following Thursday at Wembley, and that was the last of the group matches. In less than a week’s time, before the knockout stage started, England might actually be out. ‘Come on, England!’ someone shouted across the pub - and this was half an hour before the match, you understand. But it didn’t seem such a banal thing to say, all of a sudden. ‘Come on, England!’ does sum up one’s feelings in this situation pretty well. I tried to unclench my jaw, but it was hopeless. I tried to take an inhalation of breath without choking, but that was hopeless, too.
It turned out to be truly a game of two halves, that Scotland game. The first half, watched from that ghastly pub, was pure, goal-less misery; by the end of the 45 minutes, I’d had enough, and so had Robert. At half time we made a dash along the sea-front - all ozone, seagulls, energy and sunlight - and threw ourselves into a light, colonially decorated bar in one of the big hotels where the screens were of a normal TV size, and awkwardly bolted to the ceiling, but at least we could sit in upholstered white wicker chairs and hear the commentary. It was here that we saw the England team score its two goals against Scotland - and David Seaman save the penalty from Gary McAllister, don’t forget, which was just as momentous (they said it was the first penalty saved by an English goalkeeper at Wembley since 1959). Gascoigne’s tremendous, genius clincher - flipping the ball over Colin Hendry’s head, dodging round him, and then volleying from some distance into the net - is one of the greatest ever moments of three-dimensional football, only slightly ruined by the way it’s followed by him lying on the ground with his mouth open for the ‘dentist’s chair’ goal celebration (a highly contrived reference to the England team’s recent drinking excesses while on tour in the Far East). I’m always disappointed by that rush of Gazza’s to assume the dentist’s chair position. All that beauty and spontaneity followed immediately by something so yobby. It perfectly encapsulated Gazza’s tragic misfortune: that the downside to having a foot like a brain is that you get a brain like a foot, to go with it.
The following Thursday, it was England v The Netherlands, the last of England’s group games. The championships had been going for only 10 days. Against all expectations (and precedent), England beat The Netherlands 4-1. It was a historic night for English football. I watched the match from an airship circling Wembley Stadium. No one ever believes me when I tell them this. They think I am making it up.
It does sound suspicious, I admit. Why did the Fuji airship people offer The Times a place on board that evening? Well, who cares? My orders were to arrive in the early afternoon at a field near Woking, bringing a fearless friend if I wanted to. My friend Susan brought a straw hat and a pair of binoculars (clever). I brought the pager and some chocolate cake. A freelance photographer joined our party - but, aside from the pilot, that was it. Nice men from Fuji’s German publicity operation met us and showed us the silvery airship as it rested in long, parched grass. A warm breeze rippled the tops of trees. All was peaceful. Susan and I asked intelligent questions about how the airship had flown here from Germany, what was its exact length, weight, age, mix of gases, pet name, number of flights, and so on - and basically tried ever so, ever so hard not to mention the Hindenburg.
In the end, sensing our English reticence, they mentioned it themselves. All thoughts of the Hindenburg were to be banished from our minds, they said; the canopy of a modern airship was emphatically non-flammable. The worst that could happen with a damaged modern airship was a very, very gentle descent, landing with a soft bump, probably somewhere open and safe and absolutely lovely like the middle of Richmond Park. Our American pilot, whose name was Corky (how marvellous), had flown airships round Superbowls hundreds of times; and so confident was he of the non-flammability of the vast, gas-filled canopy that he actually chain-smoked at the controls. The only thing we had to be prepared for, Corky said, was that being in an airship gondola was less like flying; more like sailing. Thermals made the ship both pitch and roll, especially in the full heat of a June day. He didn’t add that, at the same time, there is a deafening noise from the propeller, and no bathroom. (We would find these things out soon enough.)
At 4.30 in the afternoon, a small team of German men in white boiler suits, four on each side, shouldered the nose ropes and solemnly walked our lighter-than-air dirigible to its launch position. It was a heart-stoppingly dignified operation. I felt there should be some Bach playing, and that they should be wearing powdered wigs. Then they let go of the ropes, Corky started the engine, and we lifted off. The instruments of an airship turn out to resemble those of H.G. Wells’s time machine - a bicycle wheel for a rudder; cotton reels on bits of string for adjusting the mixture of gases; pedals for something or other (presumably not brakes). Reassuringly, however, Corky had state-of-the-art headphones with radio contact to air traffic control, and at no point took them off in order to change into a Phileas Fogg top hat.
‘Move about if you like!’ he shouted to us over the engine noise. ‘Open windows!’ I discovered that I felt instant nausea if I looked at the ropes hanging from the unseen canopy’s nose in the middle distance - so I sensibly stopped doing it. The aforementioned pitching and rolling, as we made our way north-east, then north above such landmarks as Epsom, Croydon and Wimbledon, made moving about quite difficult, but we survived quite well in the circumstances, with our stomachs knocking against our ribs. An astonishing number of houses had identically-shaped swimming pools, by the way: if you were a swimming-pool salesman with the Surrey concession, the view would have made you very proud. Anyway, Susan firmly declined the chocky cake, but was otherwise OK, as was the photographer (who found the chocky cake very acceptable). Evidently a TV puppet called Otis the Aardvark had been copiously sick on a previous flight, which we all found completely hilarious.
We could see Wembley from miles away. There is a wonderful Dickensian passage at the beginning of Patrick Hamilton’s novel The Slaves of Solitude describing wartime London as a great, breathing monster, sucking thousands of tiny people in through all the train terminals in the morning, and breathing them out again at the end of the day. This passage came to mind as we arrived over the great white stadium, which was drawing people towards it from far and wide on this light summer evening. Why doesn’t TV use more aerial shots? It’s such a missed opportunity. Of course, such shots would be easier to achieve if the airships could be stationary - which they can’t: they have to keep circling, circling, circling, circling, otherwise they die, like sharks. But the view is phenomenal: 75,000 people assembling in one place for a sporting contest is a grand sight. The grass is incredibly green. The fans are (in this case) a beautiful white and a beautiful orange. Thousands of individual camera flashes make the scene sparkle. Once play starts, the 20 free-flowing outfield players spread and converge restlessly, like droplets of mercury being tipped about on a mirror - or like droplets of mercury all in mindful pursuit of a moving ball, anyway.
We were told we were flying at around 1,000 feet, but I don’t know whether that was true. We could open the windows and lean out; we could see the players not quite well enough to identify them individually. And of course we had to keep re-orientating ourselves because of the non-stop circling. England are playing left to right. No, hang on, England are playing right to left. No, I was right the first time: England are playing left to right. But when the ball was destined to fly into the net (as it was four times for England in the course of that astonishing evening), seeing it from directly above was the best view you could possibly have.
What people tend to overlook about that generally well-remembered England-Netherlands match, actually, is how nice and varied the goals were for anyone watching from overhead. First, there was the penalty in the first half - which helpfully got us used to the sight of a white ball punching into the back of a white net and dancing there. A chap in white (Paul Ince, as it turned out) appeared to trip on the edge of the penalty box, and play was suspended. Players stood back to watch while another chap in white (Alan Shearer, as we later learned, courtesy of the pager) placed the ball on the spot. Up in the airship, we were bloody excited. Above the roar of the engine, we could hear the cheering from the stadium - but, truly, only just. It was like watching through the wrong end of a telescope. There was a run-up; the ball was smacked into the corner of the net, and the jubilant little ant-sized player ran off at top speed while we danced about in our little gondola, and Corky made his mind up to stay for the second half - which was a relief, as his instructions had been to leave Wembley at half time and get us back to Woking before dark.
The rest of the first half was highly absorbing, by which I really mean unbearable. The Dutch kept getting corners; players increasingly smacked into one another on purpose; the daylight started to give way to floodlight; cameras flashed; the score remained 1-0. Chocky cake was no longer of interest. The only thing that mattered was the puzzle of how to get that ball from one end to the other, using only white players, and finally knocking it past the chap guarding the net. Tactics were wonderfully clear from the air: you could see how a goal attempt was made; how a defence could be divided and defeated. The picture that eventually appeared with my piece, incidentally, was one of the first taken that night - about an hour before the match even started. It was in black and white, and showed the stadium half-full. The novelty was that the photographer was sending his pictures digitally from the airship via his computer and mobile phone, which was pioneer technology in 1996. The battery on his computer allowed him to send about three pictures before it ran down. It was such a shame. The picture did nothing to capture the thrill of being in a small but very airy room with a view of that glowing arena surrounded by eerily deserted - and ever-darkening - parks and gardens and streets.
The three England goals in the second half were all as fabulous from an aerial perspective as I’m sure they were from the ground. The first came from a corner: Gascoigne (it turned out) delivering a high, high ball into the thick of the English heads in front of goal, and then - bang! It was in the net. Having no access to replays, we didn’t quite believe what we’d seen; it was so very quick and efficient. But we heard the cheers, and then the pager told us it was Teddy Sheringham who’d scored, and it was now 2-0, and I explained to Susan why it was a nice thing that Sheringham had done it, as this was his first goal in the competition, and she patiently put up with this bizarre instant-expertise stuff because she could tell I was excited. By this time Corky was on borrowed time, and we knew it, but we kept very quiet as we didn’t want to jog him out of the circling - which I ought to mention had momentously reversed direction at half time.
What of the third goal? Well, it was marvellous in, again, a different way. This one was all about (yes!) getting the ball from one end of the field to the other using only white players and resisting the temptation to just knock it a long way forward and hope the right chap got to it first. It was a glorious bit of dynamic teamwork, magical to see, and it culminated in three attackers ranged in a line across the goal, with Gascoigne (as I now know) passing it immediately right to Sheringham; and then Sheringham tricking everyone by neatly side-footing it right again to Shearer, who had a clear shot at goal. Even the photographer started to get excited at this point. England had never beaten the Netherlands in any European Championships before, or in any World Cup either, apparently. The score now stood at 3-0, and we couldn’t help wondering, if you dropped a piece of chocky cake onto the pitch from this height by way of celebration, what would happen? How soon would it reach terminal velocity? Would it disintegrate? Or maybe form itself into a perfect sphere, on the same physical principle used in the manufacture of lead-shot? Or, if it landed - whump! - on Dennis Bergkamp’s head, could it possibly knock him out? After all, by the time the police could work out what had happened, we could be miles away, possibly over the Channel.
I will always be grateful to Corky that we saw the fourth England goal before we had to tear ourselves away that night. Again it was different; again it was beautiful, and somehow pre-ordained. A great surge from England culminated in the somewhat useless Darren Anderton taking a running shot at goal, which was deflected by the hapless Dutch keeper (Edwin van der Sar, whose name, at the time, meant nothing). The loose ball was picked up with lightning speed by Sheringham and there it was again - bam - back of the net, 4-0, glorious. Now we could hear the cheering, all right. But we really needed to get going, as there is a quite sensible law about flying airships over London after dark, and we had to get back to Surrey rather sharpish. Corky put on an astonishing lick of speed, shooting us back across London, across the river, over Putney Heath and Richmond Park, down the A3. We were all exhausted but extremely happy as we watched the darkening - and somewhat misty - landscape pass beneath us, and realised with a certain alarm that we were keeping pace with cars on the A3 travelling at 50 miles an hour. But it had been magical. I found myself humming ‘Lift Up Your Hearts’ for the first time since school, and waiting for the inevitable show of emotion from the pager, to see if it matched my own.
We landed back at Woking and were greeted by the chaps in boiler suits. When the engine was finally switched off, it was like having someone take a nail out of your head: for the next few days I was so sensitive to motor noise that I jumped in the air whenever the fridge started up. But what a great night to be converted - finally - to football. Three weeks earlier, I hadn’t heard of Alan Shearer. Now I wanted to have his babies. Three weeks earlier, the mind-altering experiment had seemed quite harmless and (at worst) reversible. Now the damage was done. I had learned to cheer and grumble, love and loathe. During the England-Spain quarter-final a couple of days later, I stood there at Wembley wringing my hands in misery at how badly England played. ‘Why are you passing it to Gascoigne?’ I yelled (he was on terrible, dozy form that day). ‘You might as well pass it to the cat, son! You might as well dig your own grave and jump in it!’ England survived that quarter-final, although we all knew they didn’t deserve to. But the following Wednesday, when England lost on penalties to Germany in the semi-final, I was all the more blank with grief, all the more inconsolable. I felt that I had been with our boys, in some sort of spiritual, eternal way, through the extremes of thick and thin.
It was impossible to imagine how Euro 96 might have passed entirely over my head, had I never had that lunch with Keith and David. Might I have heard the news of England’s defeat with complete unconcern? God knows. Plenty of my friends certainly took no notice of Euro 96 and were blithely unaffected by its outcome. All I know is that, on the morning after England-Germany, I slung the food into the cat bowls and went back to bed to stare at the ceiling. No light-hearted songs today, kitties. No bath-running or kettle-boiling during the sports bits at twenty-five past the hour, either. On the contrary: I turned up the volume for Garry Richardson and cried softly onto the pillow, while desperately figuring whether - if I rigged it up to the mains and stood in a bucket of water - I could use the pager to kill myself.