Jonny McCambridge: The football trip which brightens the dark days

A group of men, perhaps chastened by the depth of the winter, begin to indulge in some escapism. Wouldn’t it be great, they muse, to go away together on a trip to England to watch a Premier League football match live. They are all family men and a little pulse of rebellious adventure infects the character of the conversation.

Improbably the plan begins to take hold. What started as concept becomes real and fixed. A game is selected for a date in January. Tickets, flights and accommodation are booked. The proposal deepens to include an evening visit to a curry house in the chosen city.

The day arrives. Wives and children grumble in their early morning sleep as they are kissed goodbye. As the men fasten their seat belts on the plane at Aldergrove on that frosty Saturday morning, freed of the burden of responsibility for just one day, they possibly experience a form of excitement which is almost infantile in its purity.

The trip passes too quickly. After the men fly home on the Sunday they shake hands in the airport lounge. They all agree that they should do it again the next winter before they return home.

The years roll on. What had previously bound the men together starts to unpick. One by one they all drift off into other jobs until, eventually, none are left working in the office where they all met. They have all moved on and the lines of earth they disrupt stretch out in different directions.

And perhaps that would have been the end of the tale were it not for the blossoming of a ritual. The football trip continues, surprising all with its tenacity. Every November, as the hours of daylight begin to diminish, the former colleagues scrape the rust off old acquaintances and begin a discussion on which city will host their next expedition.

The location is always different but much else stays the same. Wherever they go there will be an early morning airport arrival, a fried breakfast, a city to explore, a stadium to find, meat pies to be sampled, curry to be consumed.

And then there’s the chat. It could be described as badinage but that’s probably too lofty. It exists as an earthier form of communal joshing, an inexhaustible stream of jibes and jags that are hurled and received. Nobody is exempt from the comic interrogation. They all laugh often and with abandon.

The same old stories are told each year. For a mind that is too dimmed to retain many new concepts, there is a comfort in being gloved in something with so much precedent.

A new year begins. What once was mere fanciful suggestion has now stretched into a third decade and exists as a lamppost in all the men’s lives, brightening the darkest and harshest days of the year.

There is another match, another hotel, another curry house and more of the laughter. Like all of the trips that have passed before it, it passes too quickly.

The Sunday flight home is the most subdued part of the trip. The men, now all well advanced into middle-age, might be tired or even sobered by the imminence of a Monday morning.

One of the group, the one who knows the least amount about football, closes his eyes but finds sleep elusive on the plane. Instead he thinks about the nature of the shared experience and about how what seems primitive can cloak something much more consequential.

He considers the unwitting creation of occasion, how a January without the football trip would now seem as strange as a December without the solstice, how it has made permanent the bond between the men and how the experience is reduced for them all if any one of their number is absent.

With his eyes still closed he smiles in his seat. He thinks about what is important to him – not the football, but the friendship. But, because he is a man he would, of course, never say it.