It is the late seventies. It is Saturday teatime. Vale have just lost. I am with my grandad. And the world, despite what we have just witnessed at Vale Park, is ok. Somewhere on the journey back we would stop at the chip shop and grab our consolation. A chippy tea. Fish, chips, mushy peas. Everything wrapped up for the short journey back to my nan and grandads’ house in Kidsgrove. I couldn’t describe the chip shop to you, I couldn’t tell you what was on the walls or who served us. But I can smell it. God, I can smell it. There are smells that belong to places, there are smells that belong to people, but the smell of vinegar on chip-shop chips belongs, for me, to a time. And it is magical.

We’d get back and go straight into that chippy tea ritual, that wonderful moment of unwrapping everything, releasing another cloud of chip-shop steam into the kitchen. The paper unfolded and opened, me and my nan would share a fish as she couldn’t manage a whole cod by herself. Then the chips themselves. The ones near the top still retaining a little crispness; the ones underneath softened by vinegar and steam into something else entirely. Salt had worked its way everywhere. Vinegar gathering in little pools in the corners of the paper, saturating a few chips completely. I loved those ones most.

I would sit there in my grandparents’ house in Kidsgrove, eating fish, chips and mushy peas after watching Vale lose. Then it would be some shit TV, the stuff me nan liked, Saturday primetime telly: 3-2-1 with Ted Rodgers and Dusty Bin, before we finally got to the utter joy of Starsky & Hutch and Match of the Day. Heaven. At the time it was simply part of the weekend routine, it was what we did after we’d been Vale. That’s the cruelty and beauty of childhood. You never know when you are living inside something you will spend the rest of your life trying to get back to.

And do you know what? It didn’t eat me alive when Vale lost back then. Yes, it was disappointing, but I just took it in my stride. My world didn’t come to an end. We were dreadful and defeats were expected. And, of course, whatever happened at Vale, I still had a chippy tea to look forward to. So, what’s changed?

Well, I can still have a chippy tea on a Saturday, and sometimes do, but these days I’m more likely to sit there feeling  that Vale have destroyed a little part of me, taken all my hopes and dreams and torn them into tiny pieces right before my eyes. It’s been happening on and off for the past 20-odd years. Why? Well, for a kick-off, the post-John Rudge years have offered no shortage of calamity at Vale, thankfully punctuated by just enough moments of joy to keep my heart fluttering. The current madness feels particularly soul-crushing because it is all so avoidable.

Friedrich Nietzsche was surely right when he urged us to embrace our pain and suffering: amor fati. Rather than railing against our fate, we should learn to love it and create meaning from our suffering. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. So why, when it comes to Vale, am I finding that so difficult to put into practice?

The internet. I think that’s the problem. Seriously. I think it was around 2003 when I started having a little read through the OneValeFan forum.  I never contributed to any of the discussions, I just scrolled through, taking it all in: the moans, the disappointments, the complete head-loss rants, the arguments, the relentless negativity. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it.

I got so into it that I would regularly throw sickies at work in 2005 just to keep up with the head-spinning stuff unfolding on OneValeFan. I had to. This was before smartphones, before the entire sum of human knowledge and stupidity could be carried around inside your trouser pocket. If you wanted your fix, you had to sit at home in front of a tower PC and sift through it all there. How could I possibly go to work? Some of the stuff on there was magnificent. Alliances formed, friendships ended. People claiming to be “in the know” demanding evidence from the people claiming to be in the know. It was like a soap opera, with Vale fans as the main characters, except nobody got married or murdered or returned from the dead. There was always some new crisis, some new outrage, some fresh reason why everything was apparently falling apart. There was something incredibly compelling about seeing all that profound unhappiness documented, dissected and argued over in real time.

And by the time I had weaned myself off it social media had arrived big time. Suddenly I didn’t need to go looking for everybody’s meltdowns. They came looking for me. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And I think that’s the problem. Contemporary research into football and social media has found associations between certain forms of social media engagement and anxiety, distress and poorer psychological outcomes. Now, the evidence is complex, and doesn’t establish that social media inevitably causes those effects, but there is something in there. Negativity tends to reproduce itself.

When I was a kid, a Vale defeat lasted until we got back to Kidsgrove. Vale lost, I was pissed off for a bit, and then somebody opened the chips. Back then there was no post-match autopsy waiting for me, no hundreds of opinions telling me who was useless, who didn’t care, why the manager had to go, why the owner had to go, why the club was doomed. Nobody was feeding my disappointment back to me and magnifying it.

Even up to my early 30s I could watch Vale lose, have a couple of pints and a moan afterwards, and then it would all be forgotten. That’s all changed. Now I spend days and evening looking at the reactions on Twitter and Facebook, absorbing it all. Psychologically, I never seem to leave a match, or our circumstances, behind. It’s exhausting. Not only that, I’ve started to add to it, writing this blog. I can’t just be content with everyone else’s doom and gloom, I now need to share my own misery. Even Carl Sireno liked one of my posts, that’s how bleak I’ve become. Obviously I don’t need to be constantly doom scrolling through social media, I could choose not to, but what else is there to do?

And there is something else to add to this. Sometimes, as an adult, football becomes more important to us precisely because everything else is complicated. There are enormous areas of adult life that are unresolved, ambiguous and beyond our control. Football offers us an amazingly seductive alternative. For a while all the messy uncertainty of ordinary life gets compressed into the beautifully absurd question: Can Vale put the ball into the net more times than whoever we’re playing? Which makes it escapism. But if the escape itself starts generating anxiety, we then begin to experience a peculiar betrayal. The thing you went to in order to get away from life’s worries has manufactured another one. There doesn’t seem to be any way out of this. We’re trapped.

So, anyway, nearly half a century later, I’m still obsessed with the smell of vinegar on chips. It takes me somewhere I need to be. For the briefest moment, I am back outside Vale Park with my grandad. Maybe it’s getting dark, maybe it’s raining, maybe the Vale have been shit. It doesn’t matter. We’re going back to Kidsgrove. There are warm parcels of fish and chips waiting to be unwrapped. There are mushy peas. And my Grandad is still there. The extraordinary thing about memory is this: we often imagine we preserve our childhood in photographs, old programmes and random stuff carefully kept safe somewhere. But the things that survive most powerfully are sometimes the things we could never have kept, and suddenly, without reason, someone you lost a lifetime ago is standing beside you again.

I think what I’m trying to say is this: when Vale have been atrocious, as we frequently are, and as we certainly are right now, try spending a bit of time away from the forums, and the social media, and the shit that I write. I’m going to try to not get angry about everything that’s going on at Vale at the moment. I want to be bigger than it.

Get yourself a chippy tea. Vale’s not always about what’s happening on the pitch or in the boardroom, sometimes it’s about remembering why you first went, who took you there, and finding your way back to those people, those places and those memories. They’ll always be more important than the owners, the CEO, and whoever’s the manager.

And, anyway, the world is always a better place with a chippy tea on your lap.