There’s a particular kind of weekend that exists in cancer treatment — the last one before everything changes. The weekend before the first infusion. The weekend where you still feel like yourself, where the drugs haven’t arrived yet, where your body doesn’t know what’s coming.
That was last weekend.
Friends and family had concerns. Was I pushing it? Should I be resting? The questions came from love and I understood them. But the honest answer was I felt absolutely fine. In some ways I felt like a fraud — stage 4 melanoma, brain metastases, the whole picture — and yet there I was feeling pretty much normal. The brain seizure was over two weeks behind me. The steroids were working. The calcium had stabilised. My body had no immunotherapy in it yet, hadn’t recognised the cancer as a threat, wasn’t doing anything particularly dramatic about any of it. I was living a fairly normal life and I knew it.
So we went to London.
Saturday first — Seth’s football party. The third year running, a tournament amongst friends in the blazing heat. Normally I’d referee or coach. This year I sat and filmed instead, getting to grips with the new XBotGo Falcon camera so I’d be better prepared for Dale Park Rangers matches down the line. A nice afternoon. A sit down in the pub afterwards. I felt good. Maybe I could have done more, but I was glad I didn’t. The following days would need whatever I had left.
Sunday morning we drove to Doncaster — the same way we always travel to West Ham — and boarded the train to King’s Cross. Lucy and Florence had made a decision the night before. What had started as one Harry Potter show became two — both parts of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, 1pm and 6pm, nearly six hours of theatre. One of the last chances to see it in the two-part format. They were going. I didn’t argue.
Me and Albert took the bags and headed to Stratford.
Where I promptly checked us into the wrong Travelodge.
There are, it turns out, two Travelodges in Stratford. I had booked the other one. We discovered this upon arriving at the correct one, bags in hand, in thirty degree heat. Ten minutes walk. No early check in available. No bag storage either. We walked to Westfield — another five minutes — found the bag storage, discovered it closed before we’d be back from the match, and were redirected to the Premier Inn down the road. The Premier Inn, with whom we had no booking and no relationship whatsoever, stored our bags until midnight in exchange for a charitable donation.
Travelodge — paid customer, nothing. Premier Inn — complete strangers, absolute heroes.
We found Kate, Owen and Matt at a burger place in Westfield. I hadn’t seen Matt in maybe fifteen years. He hadn’t changed. I suspect he said the same about me, though in my case he’d be being generous. It was one of those reunions that felt like no time had passed — easy, warm, exactly as it always was. Kate and Owen I see more regularly, but having all of us together in one place, with the kids, on this particular day — it meant something I found difficult to articulate at the time.
We made our way to the London Stadium.
I should say something about the London Stadium, and about Upton Park before it, because they are not the same thing and never will be.
Upton Park was ritual. It was Saturdays travelling with Owen. It was the chicken burger beforehand, the programme, the copy of Over Land and Sea fanzine, getting in early, Bovril on cold Tuesday nights, walking back to Plaistow afterwards — twenty minutes to digest and moan about the game. It was atmosphere that came from the walls and the crowd and the history of the place.
The London Stadium is enormous and largely soulless. I remember my first game there — a Friday night, West Ham against Tottenham, we won 1-0 — and leaving thinking the atmosphere was terrible. People who’d sat together for decades were suddenly scattered around this vast bowl, not quite sure where they were or why it felt so wrong. I didn’t go back for six or seven years.
It was Albert who brought me back. West Ham means something to him now — not Upton Park, which he never knew, but the London Stadium, which is his West Ham. The same colours, the same heart, different walls. And when your ten year old wants to go, you go.
The situation was simple. We were 18th — relegated. The only escape: win, and hope Tottenham lost simultaneously. No other combination would save us. Most of us had already made our peace with the Championship. The optimism in the air was real but tongue-in-cheek, the particular brand of West Ham hope that expects the worst while quietly wishing for better.
We had good seats — aisle access, Albert beside me.
We won 3-0. Which sounds wonderful until you know that Tottenham scored before any of our goals went in. So each time we celebrated, we were celebrating while simultaneously knowing it probably wasn’t enough. Everton needed to beat Spurs. They didn’t.
We were relegated.
Anti-climactic is the right word. Not heartbreaking — we’d seen it coming for months. More of a quiet acceptance, a collective shrug, a turning toward what comes next. The Championship. Proper football. New grounds. Real atmosphere. West Ham will come back. They always do.
Twenty minutes after the final whistle, Albert was in the club shop buying a £10 kit from the sale rail.
That’s West Ham. That’s why you love it even when it breaks your heart.
We had pizza with Owen and his son Callum at Pizza Express, which felt exactly right — ordinary and warm and normal. Lucy and Florence appeared after six hours of Harry Potter, slightly dazed and entirely delighted.
Monday we played tourist. McDonald’s breakfast, bags dropped at King’s Cross, Mayfair and a Food Hall for pasta, Buckingham Palace at Albert’s request, a walk back through St James’s Park, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey. London doing what London does when you let it.
Then the train home.
Delayed. Thirty degrees outside. Air conditioning broken. Forty-five degrees inside the carriage. Two kids, Lucy, bags, heat, exhaustion. The kind of journey that exists purely to test you.
The air conditioning in the car home has never felt so good.
We got back, rested, slept.
The next morning — Tuesday — was immunotherapy.
The last weekend was over. The fight was about to begin.
