my love for queens park rangers

There is a tribe of which I sometimes feel that I might be a part. 

To stand among the members of this tribe and observe the throng is to see and hear a catalogue of clues suggesting that a high proportion of their number are not members of our wider society's higher income groups. Note the cheap clothing. Witness the bad teeth. Notice the bodily manifestations of the bad diet generally associated with relative poverty in the developed world - fat families waddle by, displaying bulging guts and rippling moobs. Eavesdrop the conversations about working shifts.

These are some of the supporters of Queens Park Rangers F.C., with whom I've rubbed shoulders at the club's Loftus Road HQ in London W12 and around the grounds of England on-and-off since 1976.

Am I really a proper part of this mob? I don't know. 

If any claim to be a real QPR tribesman were to be based purely on purity of bloodline, then mine should be unchallengably strong. My father started attending matches in that same corner of west London in the early 1950s, accompanying my late grandfather, who had by then already been a supporter himself for many years.

I understand that my family's association with the football club goes back at least one more generation than that.

What else do I know about my granddad's side of my dad's family? Not much.

I know my grandfather was a compulsive whistler ('Stop that bloody whistling, Bob', my grandmother used to say) and that he could play the piano a little bit. I know that he worked as the porter in a block of mansion flats and that he often sold odd bits and pieces to friends, not long after buying the items in question and never turning a profit on his small transactions. I understand that when he expressed disbelief it was usually with the same favourite phrase 'you wouldn't credit it'. At QPR matches, I gather that he signalled his opinion of any poor passage of play by saying 'I've seen better on the Scrubs.' Whenever a player overhit a pass such that its intended recipient could not possibly run onto it, I'm told that my grandfather would say 'the greyhounds are at the White City.' I  understand his folk hailed from 'somewhere around Park Royal'. Beyond these scant bits of information, these people are a mystery to me - ghosts of past times imperfectly remembered and described.

My granddad passed away when I was barely two years old, having lived to see his club elevated to English football's top flight for the first time and having enjoyed what remains QPR's sole success in the final of a major cup competition, their League Cup win of 1967.

In the years that have followed, I've spent periods of following this strange little football club with almost fanatical devotion as well as periods of being almost totally disinterested.

Having attended my first few matches as a young child in the mid to late 1970s, trips to Loftus Road became increasingly infrequent for me in the eighties. My dad had made the transition from manual work to a white collar job and our family had relocated from north London to one of the fairly genteel cathedral cities of this England. I attended the boys' grammar school there and mixed with the sons of accountants, doctors, public sector administrators and teachers. I was taught to aspire to a university education and encouraged to think of the kids from the town's other schools as 'plebs' or 'chavs' (that term seems to have achieved national popularity more recently, but was already widely used in that part of England in the early 1980s). The county's continued use of the eleven-plus exam seemed to serve as a means of creating a form of apartheid. In my experience, those whose parents had pushed them to pass the test and gain entrance to a grammar school did not tend to mix socially with those whose parents had not. I don't know how far the commonly alleged working class distrust of education has survived the last Labour government's poorly planned push to extend the questionable benefits of university to the wider population, but in the 1980s, as I recall it at least, it was middle class folk whose offspring were overwhelmingly best represented in our town's grammar school intake. Our headmaster, with his patrician manner and pocket watch, informed us grandly how special we were. Most of us believed it to some degree and acted accordingly. The increasingly confused state of my own identity was such that I could somehow reconcile living entirely on the middle class grammar school side of this social divide with being an avowed socialist and sworn enemy of all things Tory.

I do dimly remember owning a QPR sports bag and I never stopped describing myself as a QPR fan should anybody ask which football team I favoured. The association with the football club, though, was growing weaker all the time. There had, perhaps, never been a very binding closeness to QPR in the first place. I'd probably been too young to have become properly indoctrinated into a state of fanatical devotion. What shaky connection there was grew weaker still as other interests multiplied and took precedence: comic books and novels; trying to find desperately edgy music to pretend to enjoy; rebellious posturing; compulsive bullshitting; girls with large breasts; drinking to a state of inebriation; the aching coolness of being one of my peer group's early adopters of cannabis.

As the decade drew to a close, I was the possessor of three poor A Level passes. This was all that was needed to gain access to the politics degree course of one of the polytechnics which has since been rebranded as a university.

Though my acceptance into one of our country's less presitigious seats of learning may not sound wonderfully impressive to some, I had been the first member of my family even to begin a course of study leading to a degree. I had barely started that course when I dropped out.

My parents' disappointment at my squandering the opportunity was, of course, justified as well as understandable. So I had a bit to do in order to make up for the damage this and my behaviour generally had done to their view of me.

A lot of the much-needed bridge building between father and son was done in the Ellerslie Road stand of the cramped little Loftus Road ground.

My dad and I watched decent QPR sides get some good results and it was enjoyable. The inaugural season of the Premier League was especially good. Again and again, 'Sir' Les Ferdinand rose in the air to find a telling cross from the left, delivered nicely by Andy Sinton. David Bardsley and Clive Wilson were magnificent fullbacks and Alan McDonald was a brick wall with blonde highlights at the heart of the defence.

At that ground, as in a number of nightclubs and at house music events up and down the country, I found myself enjoying what I took to be elements of a white working class culture from which I'd become separated during my childhood and teenage years away from London. I started to feel connected to something in both settings.

Of course, the house music of the early 90s was an ephemeral thing with which to establish a connection. Club nights came and went, venues changed names and disappeared. The crowds changed fast, fragmenting and scattering as tastes and friendships shifted. I do  still know people that have remained close friends with large numbers of their old pals from the packed dance floors of nearly two decades ago. But until Facebook enabled me to reestablish contact with such folk, I'd not seen any of them for many years.

The connection that did last, though, was with QPR. Although the club did flirt dangerously with bankruptcy and oblivion during the first decade of the twenty-first century, it has continued to exist and is, of course, a more solid thing to hang onto than confused and sketchy memories of a certain time in the history of dance music.

It continued to exist when I spent a few years abroad doing more interesting work than I had a chance to get here in England. It was still there when I returned to scratch the itch to complete unfinished business by proving to myself that I had the staying power to get a university degree. It was still there when I settled into office life in London and started to build some sort of grown up career.

The club was there for me and, when it staggered from one crisis to another, I was there for the club.

I was on the sponsored walk to Griffin Park in February 2004, when Rangers fans were raising money to keep the club alive, and around that time I was routinely chucking paper money in collection buckets for the same purpose. Through those difficult years for the club, the fighting spirit of the players and the passion of the supporters was often inspiring. I loved Ian Holloway and was delighted when his words of congratulation were read out on my wedding day. I appreciated the obvious pleasure that lifelong QPR fan Marc Bircham took from having the chance to play in the famous blue-and-white hoops. I marvelled as the previously uninspiring Paul Furlong was revitalised as a dependable goal machine. I danced for joy at Hillsbrough and later that evening on the Goldhawk Road the day that QPR finally climbed out of football's third tier.

But I continued to worry about the long-term sustainability of a club that seemed constantly vulnerable to its next financial crisis.

Around the time that Formula 1 moghuls Bernie Ecclestone and Flavio Briatore put money into the club, I had been conspiring with a couple of supporters to bring QPR's parlous finances to the attention of a certain high net worth individual whom I was able to access through a work connection. I think all three of us were relieved that our efforts (which looked to have been in vain anyway) turned out not to be necessary. We felt that a bright future for the club was assured. Onwards and upwards.

So, other than Loftus Road being where I started to repair my dented relationship with my dad, why did I fall so deeply in love with this always-quirky football club?

I think it's about identity.

I am not religious and neither side of my family has any strong religious affiliation. Basic C of E by default. I can't look for any elements of my identity in a church.

In common with most Anglo-Saxon Englishmen, I do not practise folk dancing, sing folk songs, perform re-enactments of historical battles or otherwise do anything to celebrate my national identity in a very overt way. I am also mindful of there appearing to be some very widespread confusion about what an English national identity really is or what it should be.

The political party for which I campaigned in the general elections of 1987 and 1992 has been reinvented so comprehensively that I do not recognise it anymore. I can't find any part of my sense of self there either.

Careers, marriages, divorces and opportunities beyond these shores have scattered my friends to all sorts of different places. Net result: there is no discrete or concrete group of pals to whom I can look for my sense of who I am. I've lived for the past seven years in a commuter dormitory in which I've not had the inclination to build up a replacement social network.

I'm English. I was born to working class parents who lived a working class life until I was about seven years of age. When I speak with middle-class people I feel that I don't have the same accent as them and that this is noticeable. When I speak with working-class people, including my own relatives, I feel that I don't have the same accent as them and that this is noticeable. I refuse to buy the bullshit which was peddled by both John Major and Tony Blair about a classless society or about us ALL being middle-class. Utter, utter nonsense. The English class system is alive and well. I just don't really know or understand my place in it. Exactly what my identity is in the context of that system I couldn't really say.

One label, however, has been demonstrably true for years now. I've been a QPR supporter and hugged fellow QPR supporters whose names I didn't know at times of triumph. I've had a million things to talk about with fellow QPR fans. I've worried when they've worried and celebrated when they've celebrated. Sometimes football supporters are asked whether they'd prefer to see their club side win something significant or England win the World Cup. For me, it's been an easy question to answer: QPR first every time.

That said, there are times when I suspect that something about how I speak, dress or act would have some fellow QPR fans assume I'm some sort of middle-class newcomer. Not dyed-in-the-wool 'proper' Rangers. This suspicion could well be misplaced. It might have a lot more to do with poor mental health and a fragile sense of self worth on my part. Who knows? This mind shit is complicated. Sometimes I feel like a proper part of the tribe and sometimes I don't. That's just me, I suppose. I think too much.

Quite how I ended up loving and caring about this football club so much is something I could debate endlessly with myself. That love, however, is now really being tested like never before, which might seem strange given that the R's have just been promoted to the Premier League after a fifteen year absence.

More on that later. The next part of this two-part ramble will be entitled 'Why I Might be Falling out of Love with QPR'.