Imagined Communities

The first thing that struck visitors to the old Intrepid Fox rock pub in Soho was the sign on the door: No ties, no football colours. A pretty modest dress code, as London dress codes go, and it wasn't one I was ever in danger of breaching. If they'd banned leather jackets the place would have been empty, but football scarves? No problem.

Times, however, are notorious for changing. Cycling to work today, proudly sporting the new 2010-2011 Brentford away shirt, I was basking in an irrational sense of pride. The sun was shining, I had the excellent new Invalids tunes on my iPod as I raced over the bridge, and I was wearing the colours of my local team. But why should a thirty-year-old man feel proud at the ability to pull a T-shirt over his head in the morning?

Benedict Anderson's book Imagined Communities defines a nation as a community that is dreamed by a group of people who, by and large, will never know each other personally. Membership, as it were, is "perceived". We have a common history. We remember the same things, forget the same things. We can feel proud that a writer or a band or an athlete happens to come from our particular political entity. Nationalism feeds on the irrational. As A. J. P Taylor once observed: If men were sane, there would be no history.

If men and women were sane, there would probably also be no football. In many ways football clubs, like nations, are also imagined communities. We have our "government", the people who run things on a day-to-day basis, but much of what we understand as a football club revolves around memories, rivalries and shared myths (FA Cup Quarter Final 1989, a 4-0 victory over Fulham in 1992, promotion at Peterborough the same season) that can set even the most rational of pulses racing.

Why is it that we can feel offended by the existence of rival teams, without whom the entire game would be meaningless? And why did I feel immense schadenfreude at Fulham's Europa League Final defeat in June because of my disdain for our local rivals, and yet I get on very well personally with every Fulham fan I've ever met?

This is where the tribal element comes into play. As England's nationhood was shaped by defining themselves 'against' French culture and values, football supporters, too, are fond of defining ourselves in the context of what we're not, rather more than as what we are. Even the Brentford matchday programme now bears the legend: Real Football, Real Fans. But where are the football and the fans not real? It is tempting to answer: The Premiership, that rich breeding ground for fairweather fans and glory hunters who mistake a Sky TV subscription for a season ticket. But then, I know plenty of fans at that level of the game who are much more dedicated than myself. The truth is back in that pesky grey area, and grey is a lousy colour for a football club.

"In football," said Jean-Paul Sartre, "everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team."

But as I arrived at work and got off my bike, I remembered that we're pretty damned complicated ourselves.

The Roaring Twenties

One of the surprising things about turning 30 last week was how quickly it was to look back on my twenties as an easily definable period of my life. Opened in 2000, closed in 2010, a neat and tidy decade to file away with the follies of youth. The world doesn't always work this way. For example, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm identified a long 19th century (which ended with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914) and a short 20th century (which ended with the collapse of communism in 1991). It is therefore extremely likely that many lives also cannot be conveniently divided into decades like pieces of birthday cake, but seem instead to be one sticky pile of chronological dough that refuses to take any recognisable form. A messy clump of years.

So I'm reasonably happy with this tidy, well-ordered gift to hindsight that, should I ever inflict an autobiography on this world, will neatly fit into one chapter entitled something awful like 'The Wild Years'. My first, rather modest order of business as I stare forward at this gaping, blank slate of a decade, is to yet again try to maintain this blog on a regular basis. This will range from the usual (currently extremely sporadic) output of articles and poems, to simply pasting links to news items or videos that I feel like sharing. I'll say it now publicly so that there's no reneging on this promise to myself: Anyone who visits Quality Footwear regularly will find frequent updates and new material.

Timothy Garton Ash has been a regular source of quotations on this blog so far. Presumably unwittingly, he also played a part in the course that my twenties took. It was reading his book The File in my late teens that definitively tipped the balance in favour of my later choosing, aged 20, to study in Berlin as opposed to one of the more picturesque and venerable southern German university towns like Freiburg or Heidelberg. Likewise, his writings on the Solidarity movement inspired me to attempt to learn Polish in 2001. Although I later switched to Russian, it was those long-gone snowy afternoons drinking tea by candlelight with my Polish teacher in an unrenovated, crumbling Prenzlauer Berg tenement block that cemented my passion for the strange new (or renewed) geographical and cultural entity known as Central Europe.

It is fitting, therefore, to celebrate this new decade's resolution with a video of a recent talk given by Garton Ash on his latest book, Facts are Subversive. Highly recommended if you have 27 minutes to spare. Hearing him refer to a pedantic colleague as the 'Ayatollah of fact-checking' seems to make it be worth the virtual journey alone.