My first Arsenal memory, and one of my first memories at all, was Boxing Day 1995, when my brother Reuben got our whole family tickets to see Arsenal play QPR at Highbury. I was eight years old, and my consciousness, and the way I understood reality, was coagulating around football. Nearly every day my brother and I would head down to the local astroturf pitch on Crouch Hill and he would pelt shots at me while I leapt around in goal, pretending to be David Seaman, who I was obsessed with. Which probably explains why I was wearing a pair of brand new Sondico goalkeeper gloves I got for Christmas to the game, a true Full Kit Wanker before its time. 

This was a pre-Arsene Wenger Arsenal, a club struggling to find its feet after the defensive success of George Graham, who weirdly had also just signed one of the best attacking players in the world. No, not Dennis Bergkamp, I’m of course talking about David Platt. Early on in the game, Platt shanked a shot that went out for a throw in. My dad loudly shouted ‘SEND HIM HOME’ into a stand of frosty, murmuring fans, and I guess that was my first memory of feeling cringe as well. 

In the end we won 3-0, with a goal from Ian Wright and a brace from Paul Merson, and we walked all the way back home from the ground to Crouch End. The tickets we got (centre of the pitch, at the back, partially blocked view from the terrace roof) were about a tenner each, so we got our whole family in for less than the price of one ticket  at the Emirates today. 

From then I went to Highbury a few times and I saw us start to blossom under Wenger. I saw Ian Wright return as a West Ham player, I experienced  the flair of Bergkamp, Vieira, and Overmars, with the totemic defence of Bould, Keown, Adams, Dixon and Winterburn. Then when my parents divorced I had to move out of London and stopped going to the games in person, missing out on the glory years of Thierry Henry, winning doubles, and being the best team in the world. But the love of Arsenal followed me around wherever I went. 

I can make sense of all my life’s biggest moments via my experience with Arsenal Football Club. At 16 I watched in shock as the Invincibles lost to Chelsea in the Champions League, lying in the bed of my first love. At 18 I felt the devastation of the Champions League final loss to Barcelona, a few weeks after I almost died in a car crash. At 26 I sang and danced down Holloway Road after Wenger finally broke a 3,283 day trophyless streak to win the FA Cup in injury time, the summer I decided to quit sales and become a writer full time. 

In a lovely cyclical family moment, I got to take Eden, the son of my brother Reuben, to his first Arsenal game, just how Reuben took me to mine. Even though Reuben and his family live in New Zealand and can only visit very rarely, our love of Arsenal as a family connects us from thousands of miles away. 

There is a lot of hurt in supporting something you care deeply about. Under Wenger it almost felt like a girlfriend you loved breaking your heart every weekend. You keep coming back over and over, because you love them, and you’re scared of the huge emptiness that walking away would leave in your life. Next season we’d challenge, I’d think. if we just signed a Vieira replacement, and a decent goalkeeper, and maybe another striker. And fans of other clubs would rightfully laugh at our relentless optimism, especially when we’d inevitably get tonked by Barca or Bayern, and struggle to make 4th place in the league. But to hope is to live. And yet, as the famous Arsenal fan motto goes: it’s the hope that kills you.

Now, almost 30 years after my first game, I’m lucky enough to have a season ticket with one of my best friends, which we got because a lot of fans fell off the waiting list during the time when the Emirates was haunted by a looming, unknown plague. But enough about Unai Emery’s managerial stint. 

Our routine really depends on what time the game starts. Saturday 3pm is the optimal kick off time, time to defrost in the morning if you’re hungover, get some food in, then start drinking around 1pm, enough to get you in full voice for the match. If it’s an early kick off, we head to the Hope Workers Cafe on Holloway Road for a fry up and some tinnies before heading in. If it’s a late kick off, or on a Friday night the drinking gets a little heavier. 

If it’s a midweek game then we always go to Dilara on Blackstock Road for a bowl of big plate chicken and some lamb skewers, or Xi'an Impression, just next to the roundabout outside the stadium, for the best Chinese food in north London. Whatever time the kick off, we always get at least one hastily downed pint from ‘The Che’, a Che Guevara themed pub that only seems to open for Arsenal games, and reconvene there after. 

It’s been a privilege to watch first hand how the club has grown again under Arteta. I’ve not heard an Arsenal crowd as loud as it is now every week, probably ever, even at Highbury. Wildly celebrating beating Man U or Spurs by hugging the new friends I’ve made in the stands around me, singing Oasis, for some reason it’s always Oasis, in the pub after a win, catching up with my friends over food and drink, I suddenly realise the difference between supporting from afar to supporting in person. It’s a community, a strengthening of bonds, a way of life, a reason to exist. And it’s only been a few years but I’d feel lost without it. 

I’ll be 37 just after the start of this season, so it will be roughly 32 years of my life that I’ve consciously supported Arsenal. It hasn’t always been the smoothest relationship in my life, but Arsenal has always been there, dragging me along, giving me a reason to look forward, to keep cherishing my friends and family, to keep hoping. And whenever I die, I’ll be glad I spent my life living in hope.

But who knows, maybe it will be the hope that kills me.