Now then,

1979.

I was there and yet I was not. It happened around me and I was conscious of it happening, but I was so busy at the time, I almost missed it.

My family is Forest. The room I was born in has a view of the floodlights at the City Ground. In the 1960s I was taken to stand on the terraces in the Bridgford End. There was a wooden box that was passed down from my older brother to me then to my younger brother. It was a family tradition that the youngest had to carry it down to the ground.

Forest were outside the house where we lived as kids, then suddenly inside it. John Robertson was a frequent visitor to meet Jimmy McCann who lived with us. It was all mundane – Grummit, McKinlay, Hennesey, McKenzie. I tired of it. I tired of the terrace surges knocking me off my box. My lonely Saturday afternoon widowed mother was delighted to have my companionship as I passed the box on to my younger brother and stayed at home to watch South Pacific and listen for the crowd cheering in the back garden. I started to learn playing the piano. I suddenly had a new status – I was the arty one. I was Virgil out of the Thunderbirds.

Clough. Like a colon in the history of Forest. Like an ending and a beginning. An end to almost; a beginning of cups and Wembley and dreams.

It started as more of the same then we just about managed promotion, poor Jimmy McCann got sacked and then Robbo won a European Cup. I was so into music then. Punk had arrived in Nottingham in 1978 and I went along with it. I cut my own hair into spikes cut and wore overalls. I walked back once from a club near Trent Bridge and two blokes grabbed me and told me I was not a real punk, I was a poseur. They were just about to beat me up on Trent Boulevard when the police pulled us all over and took them both away.

There was this girl. Her name was Tina and she was having an eighteenth birthday. We had been going out with each other for about four weeks and she did not want me at her birthday party. She wanted to snog other young men. I was upset and wanted to fight, then wanted to forget it all.

Forest won the bloody league and got into Europe and beat Liverpool. What the hell was happening? Another girl. Now she was really beautiful. She lived in Roseberry Avenue. I may have got the name wrong, but I mean the tiny little road that is practically in the Main Stand. I met her at a street party there in 1977 to celebrate the Queen’s silver jubilee.

Electro-pop. Gary Numan got to number one in days when number one mattered with ‘Are Friend’s Electric’. Then the Human League played Derby Assembly Rooms with slides and synthesisers and I took my little brother without the wooden box to stand on. In honour of Gary Numan I dyed my hair canary yellow but forgot to do my eyebrows. The black children down my road laughed and pointed as I passed. They said, ‘He’s wearing a wig!’ over and over.

Roseberry Avenue. A girl called Jane. All night long and the embers jumping in the grate. Sighs meeting sighs and then her mother manically hoovering at 3am as she had taken slimming pills like speed. We went outside, I kissed Jane in the rain and we listened to David Bowie. The City Ground’s heart was beating excitedly, just a few yards away.

Cologne was ridiculous. 25th April 1979 and we go to Germany with our has-beens and kids and win. In our heads, we had secretly already written ourselves off by then. This was Cloughie’s finest moment, but only he believed we still had a chance.

The hard work had been done and the final was almost an anti-climax. Malmo, who were they? The scramble for tickets was fierce. My Mum went and she has only ever been to three games. My elder brother did not go and to this day can get very upset about it. There was no chance of Virgil Tracey going. My younger brother went and did this thing where he went missing and discussed Forest with other fans. In family folklore this is the equivalent of Jesus going to the temple aged 12.

I would have ignored the final. I wanted to be different and was living in a city obsessed with it. But I couldn’t. I realised how major an event it was. I watched it on the TV. It was a fairly dire game. Forest won which was an amazing thing. My parents had a bottle of Champagne in the front room. It had been there for years. As soon as we won, I drank it, then decided to celebrate further. I went to the international pages of the phone book. Finding Malmo in Sweden, I added random numbers. Someone answered and I said to him, ‘Nottingham Forest have won the European Cup!’

There was silence. It sounded as alien to him as it did to me, and it still sounds alien now.

I’ll see thee.

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