Why this Spurs supporter (probably) won’t be doing the north London Derby

Spurs play Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium on Saturday lunchtime, but for some of us having your stomach tied into a knot is best avoided.

One of my earliest memories is of my fingers gripping onto a window sill, peering out over a dull, grey, late afternoon sky over north London, and seeing what looked to three or four-year-old me like an eerie, almost alien light. That light was actually the White Hart Lane floodlights, dyed slightly yellow by the leaded petrol of the 1970s.

I was brought up, first in Upper Edmonton, about a 15-minute walk from White Hart Lane, and then in Bush Hill Park, one of the south-easternmost extremities of the dividing line between Enfield and Edmonton.

My dad started supporting them in 1946 when his family relocated to London after the Second World War, having spent those six years in Bristol and Sussex. Older generations of my mum’s family, who moved to London from Cornwall in the 19th century, were going in the 1920s. And this leads to a feeling which seems something like having a love-hate relationship with the club.

Supporting Spurs has always felt like the colour of my eyes. There’s little point in concerning myself whether I like it or not. It just… is. I’m stuck with them, they’re stuck with me, and at 50 years old, I am at ease with that. Spurs are in my blood and there’s nothing that anyone can do about it.

I live a fair distance from north London now, but Spurs are still in my heart. For than a decade and a half I’ve been living on the south coast, but attempts to regularly watch other clubs has never really worked. It’s always felt like gatecrashing someone else’s party. And I’ve always believed that it is definitely possible to care too much about football, footballers and football clubs.

I even have a motto about the game that I’ve found easiest to live by: ‘Keep emotional investment in it at arm’s length.’

I’ve never really done local rivalries. This may be because for most of my football-supporting life, my team has been on the wrong end of most of them, and under such circumstances the reasons for employing a defence mechanism should be obvious. It may be because my absolute first love has always been non-league football, in which local rivalries are often more transient because teams get promoted and relegated all the time, sometimes shooting up or down the pyramid to such an extent that supporters can forget – or at least have to put on ice – that they ever hated this…