Boxing Day 1997
Written by Ben Tallon
I heard it said recently that you should look to frustrate your child at least once daily. The idea, of course, is that they gain early-life resilience to life’s trivialities; having to wait their turn, lose board games, endure a car journey without a tablet, and so on. I love that, and it’s something I’ve been doing since my two were born. I mean, with a twin, it’s pretty much inevitable that they’ll have to deal with roadblocks, but there are certainly times when I’ve felt the pull on my heartstrings and almost tried to smooth the way ahead, but recognised that a bigger life lesson could be taught if I step off.
While idling on Christmas day this year, I allowed myself to reminisce about Christmases gone by. Of all the gifts I was fortunate enough to receive in my younger years – a Sony Playstation, various WWE action figures, football kits – one that glows in my memory is a humble 1996/7 Leeds United yearbook. It was a basic publication – official club photos, player profiles with information I knew most of already, and a couple of interviews and foreword. Still, I’ve never been more obsessed with my chosen club of allegiance than then in a pre-internet hunt for anything to fuel the fire in my belly for football. So, I carried it around for the next week. Even outdoors, taking it on journeys. I looked at every photograph countless times and allowed my imagination to run wild. Every minute detail, from the yellow and blue band on the shirt’s arm, to the glow of the floodlight during evening fixtures. It all mattered.
Why am I telling you this? I lived a reasonably comfortable young life. My family was far from well-off; a thoroughly working-class family, but we had plenty of love, support, and community. I never went hungry, and my interests were encouraged. So I needed to get my frustration from somewhere. Football delivered. A win or loss would leave me utterly elated, or under a moody cloud respectively. Either could last for 3-4 days. I made scrapbooks from the newspapers I spent part of my £9 (paper round and allowance) income on, lovingly pasting down tedious 0-0 draws and 1-0 defeats in my scrapbook, alongside the odd, but all the more savoured win. Other than Match of the Day or the local news, I had to hunt down the physical print reports, and given my low budget, choose judiciously according to photograph quality and number of column inches afforded, heightening the pleasure of securing the goods. Then the sheer limitations meant I had to get maximum joy from the one report, seeing it from every angle, discussing it with anyone who’d listen, which meant new points of view.
That this awful season timed at the height of my 14-year-old adoration of the football club means the season glows in my nostalgic daydreams, but it made me work for every Leeds United goal, of which there were just 28. That Leeds United team is widely acknowledged as the most boring in Premier League history (9 x 0-0 draws in 38 league matches) but for me might just have been the most beautiful.
I’m grateful for my ability to take a lot of pleasure from a little. The simple pleasures. Routine frustration, even of the most trivial kind has a way of instilling this. It’s common in people who grew up without luxury of the material kind, and it’s been a bedrock in my creativity, helping me build a sustainable career with just my pencil case of pens, pencils, brushes, and a couple of inks and paints along with a scanner and laptop without ever feeling the victim. Driving it with ideas and a romanticism that characterised my football fandom in the late 1990s.
It has a lot to do with anticipation. The chase and the sense of possibility when chasing work, or nurturing queries, often amounts to an infuriating failure to deliver a commission. And yet I get back on the horse, time and time again, refusing to quit and apply for full-time employment even in the most soul-destroying dry spells. Could it be that Leeds United fandom has been an unlikely frustration coach, supporting my tolerance, patience, and ability to keep on?
The joy of the chase was enough, even if in the moments of defeat I might have argued it. I spent a tragic portion of Christmas Day 1997 imagining Boxing Day’s win at home to Coventry City. I had it all sketched out. 1-0 would do, but 2-0 or even 3-0 wasn’t unrealistic. In these days, I’d wake early on a matchday and fail to get back to sleep from buzzing anticipation, and, given I’d only just begun to go to games without my dad, most of these involved mere local radio coverage. Dreary school lessons were tolerable because I could sketch team sheets in my exercise book. 98% of my identity was pinned to the club. In high spirits that Boxing Day, I clock-watched while sitting with the family before creeping off to my room with my dad’s transistor radio, through which Radio Leeds brought me the delight of an opening Leeds goal in the 9th minute. Then, as has become the calling card of Leeds United over many decades, they capitulated and lost 1-3. I almost cried. A simmering internal rage weighed me down and left my Christmas break in ruins. But all of that build-up, that fantastising, nourished my imagination and my ability to generate a state close to bliss just by thinking the right thoughts.
You can laugh, but this kind of sitcom misery has, save for a handful of seasons in the early and late 1990s, been a constant frustration sensei. I would have shed it at a moment’s notice, given the opportunity to swap with the fortunes of then all-conquering Manchester United, but I’m delighted it was so. In the same way all of that romanticising was not lost in the wreckage, despite a torrid year of commissions scrapped at the 11th hour, often by the way of ghosting, I approach 2025 with a bag full of learned lessons from not getting access to the easy road, feeling stronger and more supple than ever before. By wringing every bit of joy and exhilarating anticipation from the chase, and sitting with the fallout of the frustrations, I add colour to my overall creative life experience.
As it goes, on Boxing Day 2024, Leeds United cantered to a one-sided 2-0 win away at Stoke City. It came easily through my streaming service. When it finished, I smiled, checked the updated league table on my smartphone without having to work for it, messaged a friend, and went to bed feeling only a small ripple of pleasure.