Tunstall. Crack of dawn. Streets half-lit and half-forgotten. Furlong Road stands quiet, like it’s waiting for something to happen. Sitting on the doorstep with a Sterling red and a coffee. The town’s still asleep but the day’s ready to tell its stories. London calling. 7:10am train to catch. Vale away at Wimbledon. Time to move.

Stepping out of Euston Station – 8:55am – straight into the hustle and bustle, London already halfway through its third coffee of the morning. I love it. I love the busyness, the sheer size of the place, the noise, the smell, the people, the buildings. I know there are those who are scared of London – it’s just too much for them – too big, too loud, too full of strangers. For me, though, it’s the joy of getting lost in it all for a few hours, headphones on, the world tuned out, Adidas pounding the streets, memories of the mad times I’ve had here, the Spiral Tribe nights way back – 91/92 – the music, people, drugs and dancing – the six months spent living in Sanford Walk, 1994, sharing space with artists, musicians and hippies. Anarchists, druggies and drop-outs. The book that was never published. Deep in Millwall territory. Homesick for Goldenhill and oatcakes, Wrights Pies and Lobby. Every single memory is beautiful and messy and wonderful.

Walking south from Euston – past the British Library, down Gower Street, through Bloomsbury, through The Strand. And finally, Waterloo Bridge. I love the view here. The Thames and the skyline, cranes and cathedrals, concrete and glass. Watching the river flow, the city behind me, the match ahead, a few hours of escape and belonging. 10:00am. Time to eat.

The Breakfast Club, a café tucked closer London Bridge than Waterloo Bridge. A little bit hip and a little bit smug. A café leaning a little too hard into the retro diner look, but it cooks up a decent breakfast and that’s what I’m here for. It’s also a prime spot for people-watching, for checking out the fashion – great big glasses, tiny little moustaches, hillbilly mullets – 80s American incel chic might not be doing much business in Tunstall, but here, here it is everywhere. Practically a uniform. Anyway, breakfast is done and dusted. Phone hovers over machine. Transaction approved. Time to move south.

Waterloo Station. Tribes are gathering.

SW19 and you can smell the privilege and the panic around here. Ducking into The Crooked Billet for a quick couple of pints and a smile at the locals – Wimbledon Village, gentrified,  all tweed jackets and espresso shots, Portillo trousers and slip-on shoes, arrogance and entitlement. Off-shore accounts and tax avoidance. Range Rovers parked like they own the Earth. Wellies for no reason. Snidey posh side-eyes at a Potteries accent. The privileged. Look at them. Clinging on for dear life to their England, an England that most of us are excluded from. Petrified that someone or something is going to come along and take it all away. They’re odd. I can never quite put my finger on it. There’s just something about these people. Something weird. But that’s not why I’m here. SW17, down the hill, that’s where the story is. AFC Wimbledon.

AFC Wimbledon. Born not from boardroom deals but from the blood and sweat of fans who said no — no to franchising, no to Milton Keynes, no to losing the soul of the game. They built it back brick by brick, pint by pint, chant by chant. You’ve got to have respect for AFC Wimbledon, I have loads, absolute shedloads of respect for them. It’s football as resistance, football as poetry, football as the long road back.

Plough Lane. Rebuilt and reborn. Now the Cherry Red Records Stadium — a name that conjures up vinyl dreams and smoky flats, the Malvern-born record label, fiercely independent, fiercely ambitious. Dead Kennedys, Felt, Eyeless in Gaza, The Fall, Everything But The Girl. Music I have loved. A sanctuary for the strange and the soulful.  A label that never chased fashion, just feeling. A label that said yes to the misfits, the poets, the ones who didn’t fit the mould.

And who can forget our last visit here? Saturday 26 April 2025.  Vale on the brink. Promotion within reach. First-half stalemate. Then — boom — Jaheim Headley floats a free-kick like a prayer into the box. Jayden Stockley rises like a prophet, grace that makes you believe in fate. Three minutes later, Headley again — this time the scalpel. A George Byers through-ball so precise it almost made me cry. Headley latches on, lashes home. The away end erupts like a punk gig in ’77. Promotion sealed. More London memories made.

Wimbledon, of course, also made the jump into League 1. At the expense of Walsall. At Wembley. How can we not be friends with them?

1:15pm. An Uber on its way to get me out of here. I’m leaving affluence behind. Pressing the ‘publish’ button. Putting my phone away. Rolling on to those pubs in SW17, the pubs that will hum with pre-match poetry, pints clinking like cymbals. Legends, stories, songs. Our sacred rituals. Our madness. The moments that make us feel alive.

Time to move.