Re: Vertigo by John Crace Competition NOW OPEN!
I was living in Dundee, NE Scotland, in 1987. I managed to get hold of an FA Cup final ticket that year and my plan was to take the overnight coach on the Friday evening and return by coach on the Saturday evening following the game.
I finished work on the Friday and thought I'd relax for a short while before heading off to catch the bus at 10 o'clock in the town centre. When I decided it was time to go, I was horrified to find that I'd misread the 24 hour clock and the coach had left at 8 o'clock without me on it.
I rushed down to the railway station but the price of tickets was more than I wanted to pay. Hitch-hiking was my only other option, so I got a taxi to the edge of town and started waving my thumb. By now it was 10.30pm.
My first lift came surprisingly quickly. The driver was a member of an evangelic religious group and I feared I was going to be a captive audience for him as we headed towards Glasgow, an hour or so away. Thankfully, he turned out to be quite normal and my intial reseravations about hitch-hiking started to subside.
Around midnight I got my second lift. This time, the driver bore an uncanny resemblance to John Sillett, the manager of Coventry City, whose team we were due to meet in the big match in a matter of hours. For a short while I was puzzling why he was driving down the M74 when he should be tucked up with his Coventry boys in a five star hotel in leafy Surrey, but then the lift took a more sinister turn. "You must be tired", he said. "Why not get a bit of shut eye between here and Carlisle", which is where we'd agreed he'd drop me off. I was dog-tired at this point, but I pretended I was fine as there was no way I was going to go to sleep in the car of a stranger, especially a creepy John Sillet look-alike . "Go on", he repeated, "get some shut eye", and despite my protestations he flicked the switch to release the back of the seat to a horizontal position. There I was, sitting bolt-upright (due to the aforementioned absence of back support) and pretending not to be absolutely cream-crackered as we sped through the Scottish lowlands. Fear and agony in equal measure! Eventually, I did lie back, but I remained determined to keep my eyes open at all times and so lay there looking up at the roof of the car, but with my peripheral vision keeping half an eye on the driver to my right.
He woke me when we reached the motorway transport cafe just outside Carlisle, and bid me a cheery farewell. My relief at escaping molestation and almost certain death on the eve of the cup final soon dissapated as I hung around searching out my next lift. It took a couple of hours this time, but eventually a lorry driver took pity on me a drove me to Lancaster, an hour or so further down the M6.
I arrived at Lancaster railway station at 4.30am on Saturday morning. I could not bear the thought of hitching any more lifts, even if it now meant buying a not much less expensive rail ticket for the rest of the journey. I waited and waited and waited for a good two hours - it seemed a lot longer than that - for the first local train to Preston, from where I would switch for the direct train service to London town. At this point, my sprits were so low the only thing I could do was slug the entire contents of the whisky flask I'd brought along with me as company for the weekend away.
The rest of the trip was quite uneventful in comparison, although the train was packed and offered very little opportunity to catch up on my lost sleep. As a consequence, I approached Wembley in quite a zombified state and could barely keep my eyes open as my beloved team slipped to defeat. We'd just lost our first FA Cup final against a bunch of nobodies, but I just too exhausted to care at that particular moment.
After the match I had to wait around the rather unsavoury Kings Cross area until 11pm to catch the coach back to Dundee. I walked through the door of my flat at 10.30am on Sunday morning, approximately 36 hours after I'd left it. I'd had virtually no sleep, I'd endured hitch-hiker hell, I'd spent money I couldn't afford on a stupid rail ticket, I couldn't understand the 24-hour clock (b*st*rd), AND we'd lost the cup final.
If that isn't the epitome of a football-following depression, then I don't know what is. COYS !!!
