I’ve thought a lot about writing this.  My links to what happened are, to say the least, extremely tangential, and I think it’s interesting that the online press (for which you can read ‘the stuff on the guardian’s site’)  about this has attracted some comments this week which say ‘this is a story about personal loss on a massive scale, don’t try to use it to tell any other tale’.

Well.  I understand this.   I think in the end what comes to mind is the behaviour of football crowds in the aftermath of the deaths at Hillsborough – 94 people on the day, one a few days later in hospital, one after some years in a persistent vegetative state.   We are told that football crowds always respond to the request for a minute’s silence before a game ‘impeccably’.  After Hillsborough no crowds were silent for that minute, because silence is an unnatural state of affairs for a crowd, and they wanted to show their respect in their own way, so crowds everywhere spent that minute singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’,  a fact that I found, and I find now, tremendously moving’.  I will  here try to show my respect in my own way.

It’s the last Saturday of the Easter holidays and I’ve been back at University for a few days already – called back early for a funeral, Tim, my friend Tim, who died in a road accident just before Easter.  The funeral has been and gone, I’m back on my own in halls, my grant cheque has pleasingly arrived early to meet me, and I figure I can treat myself on this last weekend.  I go out on Saturday morning and buy myself something of a feast – pizza and salad and beer and chocolate cake.  I get back home around twelve with the paper and by the time I’ve read that it’s around 2pm and I can turn on the radio – Radio 2 – for the Saturday afternoon sport.  There’s 45 minutes of build up, commenters and commentators having their say, before the 3pm kick off for the two FA Cup semi-finals.  We start at the Everton game, which is a bit of a surprise, and the commentators there are afraid to have to tell us that there seems to be crowd trouble at Hillsborough, and then we go to the commentators there who say they’re not sure what exactly is going on but there is clearly trouble (it’s generally the policy of the broadcasters not to report crowd trouble until they absolutely have to, not to call attention to it, not exactly pretending it’s not there but not giving it air time).  But then after a few more minutes of the other game we’re back to be told that something more serious may be happening, and the players have been taken off, and there are people spilling over the stands onto the pitch.

And over the next hour or so it becomes clear that people, lots of people, are dying, crushed and asphyxiated in a crowd gone horribly wrong, and I sit on my own in my room and just don’t move, don’t react to anything, just listen, numb.  The commentators are quiet and serious and straightforward, and the few Liverpool fans they manage to talk to are serious and straightforward and angry.

I go out onto the campus, there are no people around, and without really thinking about it I walk to the sports centre, somewhere I would never normally go, but of course that’s where people have congregated this afternoon.  Everyone is seperate and alone and everyone is silent.  There’s a guy standing across from me, he’s a real thug of a man, somebody you’d cross the street to avoid except that would just call attention to yourself, and I’ve heard him brag in the past about his exploits in the West Ham crowd, and he’s blank and pale.

And I wander back to my room, unconsumed food and drink littering the table, the radio left on, nobody else around. And I have absolutely no idea what to do.

Hillsborough happened for a number of reasons, and we should be very clear that more than anything it happened because of the appalling decisions and practices of the police on the day – and no police were prosecuted, or even internally disciplined, following what happened, and perhaps most astonishing of all one of the senior officers on the day moved on and up through the force to become Chief Constable of Merseyside.  But if there was one other decisive factor it was the governing culture of the day that viewed football, and football supporters, with contempt.  It’s astonishingly difficult to get your head around this idea today, with football a dominant pop-cultural force.  The issue of the fanzine ‘When Saturday Comes’ which followed Hillsborough was clear and straightforward and true, there were four photographs, the police, the government, the FA and the crowd, the first three saying ‘it wasn’t our fault’ and the crowd saying ‘ah well, it must have been our fault again’.

If you want evidence of how far things were different, you can find them in the words of the head of ITV sport who in the late 1980s (and whilst ITV held the contracts for televised football, so this wasn’t just sour grapes) announced that football as a television spectacle was dead, killed by its odious followers and the controversy they created, and the future was snooker.   Rupert Fucking Murdoch’s  ‘Sun’ printed foul abusive lies about the behaviour of Liverpool supporters in the days following the disaster (and sales of The Sun on Merseyside have never recovered) but it was Rupert Fucking Murdoch’s ‘Sky TV’ which ultimately benefited from the aftermath of the disaster – Sky was losing money hand over fist and a dish on the wall carried the least aspirational connotations imaginable, but with Football  gifted to Sky by the BBC (to get one over on the real enemy of ITV sport) Sky recovered and took off.

There was a powerful docudrama showing the events of the day and the following inquest, which was a masterclass in an emotionally absent, uncaring and unconcerned judicaiary (and which stood in stark contrast to the report into the disaster itself written by the late Lord Justice Taylow which was insighful, honest, thoughtful and clear) but even more powerful, and possibly the single most astonishing piece of British TV I can think of, was the Cracker episode ‘To Be A Somebody’, with Robert Carlyle as Albie Kinsella, and the speech he gives in interrogation about the contempt he felt from society.

Hillsborough torpedoed Thatcher’s plan to force football fans to carry ID cards (which is another astonishing idea – how the fuck did things ever come to that?).  I know it’s a different club now than it was then and, well, with all due apologies to its supporters, but I can’t believe I’m the only person who had a small smile to see Luton Town relegated from the league this week – when run by vile right wing Tory MP David Evans Luton banned away supporters and viewed themselves as trailblazers for how things would be.

Everyone has something which delivers a guaranteed emotional punch – the thing that you know will immediately make your eyes start to prick, your stomach lurch.  I know what it’s always been fo rme…

The last thing I remember hearing that afternoon was from BBC Radio commentator Peter Jones, a wonderful commentator.  He’d been trying to talk about the events of the afternoon but then said ‘I’m going to have to stop broadcasting now, because a young teenage boy has just come up to us  and asked if he can use our phone to call his mum, and tell her that he’s okay.  And of course he can. Of course he can.’  The idea of the terror in that house as the phone rang not knowing what news would be on the other end, of the number of houses waiting for that news, of the calls that would never be made, of the enormity of it all..