As a bluenose who saw United win the cup 10 days after City’s 1983 relegation my instinct was to feel affinity to

As a bluenose who saw United win the cup 10 days after City’s 1983 relegation, my instinct was to feel affinity to the underdogs. How little I understood.Years later, I opted to learn Spanish at school. As a child in Manchester, I knew a boy who owned a rather interesting football shirt. Its colours were neither sky blue or red, and he was a Liverpool supporter anyway, so I had no idea what this partly wine-coloured jersey wrapped round his ribs was. When he said it was from Barcelona, I thought nothing of it because, like most eight-year-old Mancunians, I had no idea where Barcelona was.

My first exposure to Barca as a playing side was after my football-supporting nemesis had waltzed into school after he had seen Manchester United trounce Barca.
One of the Barca team my 10-year-old self hadn’t heard of His name? Diego Maradona This appeared to mean something to my red-nosed colleague. But as sleeping giants know only too well, no club has that divine right any more, and in Pompey’s case it’s First Division safety that’s the goal. The cry must surely be not play up Pompey, but wake up Pompey.. Twenty-five years ago, the then chairman John Deacon talked about restoring the club to its rightful place among the elite. As I walked along, those old familiar suburban smells of creosote and conifer hedges hit me once again. There was Number 39, with its neat little front garden full of orange marigolds and its semi-detached front freshly pebbledashed.

And suddenly I realised that the suburbs were growing on me – that they have a character that is cruelly overlooked. After all, if stucco is quite acceptable on New Mexico pueblos, why is pebbledash so derided? If cobblestones and sash windows are OK in Coronation Street, why can’t UPVC and pink concrete brick-effect paving be admired in Acacia Avenue?And then, as I trekked on down Chastillian Road to Wentworth Primary School, where the Glimmer Twins first met as five-year-olds, the answer to my question presented itself. In the Seventies, it was the place where Mick’s ex-girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, spent seven months trying to cure her drug addiction. In fact, this hospital features twice in the Rolling Stones story. It is because pebbledash, plastic windows and concrete blocks are innately, irrefutably horrible.The suburbs were beginning to get to me, as they got to Mick and Keith. But before I fled I had to pay homage at one last location – Bexley Hospital, just across the A2 in old Bexley Lane. Keith lived in a flat above a now-empty shop at 33 Chastillian Road, across the street from a pub called The Dart – referring, if its sign is to be believed, to a river rather than the game of arrows – and a gift shop called Grott, presumably in homage to Reggie Perrin.First left is Denver Road, where Mick lived at number 39, and in the garden of which, each morning, he went through a daily regime of physical exercise instilled in him by his fitness instructor father Oh, how the neighbours must have laughed.