A Fox, A Hound, and A Magpie
Every (ahem) week, I write my nephew letters about sports that he mostly doesn’t read. They centre on my support for the Patriots, Yankees, Knicks, and apparently Tottenham Hotspur Newcastle United – and his love of Chelsea, LeBron James, and prop bets.
When the mess of it all kicked off, 2025 and all, I didn’t in my most psychedelic dreams see myself becoming a Newcastle United fan in Frankfurt. And that weekend in February was a psychedelic dream. It was odd to pay close to 50 euros for hard copies of GQ, The New Yorker, and a Vanity Fair … but quite delightful to smudge up the ink with my fingertips, as the German countryside floated by. I didn’t get to enjoy the window-seat but everything for once was quaint and simple. The backpack under my legs. The magazines, of course. The generous taste of a Coca-Cola when your head’s slightly discombobulated from that linear, mechanised motion. The lady who asked in exquisite French, back at Berlin Central Station, whether this was in fact the train to Paris. “Oui,” I said, with a wry smile no doubt.
I got to Frankfurt in the late afternoon. The dream-like seance persisted, except now I felt like was in some reiterated render of Berlin. The train stations have the shape of (dark) cavernous cubes, and the trains themselves are brightly coloured; perhaps have seating that reminds one to consider one’s posture. In two or three stops I was at your mother’s apartment for the fortnight – right above the Zoo, with the Central Bank, or was it the stock exchange, in the distance. Too cool to bum a smoke off all the other skyscrapers in the clouds.
On day three, which was election Sunday, I was to make sense of my own devices; while your mom took in the delights of Heidelberg, a student town which a quick search informed me was another 30 euros away. While we’d been out shopping and foraging the day before, Tottenham had beaten Ipswich comfortably in their own stadium. I looked up the remaining fixtures for the weekend, and where a discerning observer could watch them with a pint of Guinness and a plate of chips. I had all the time in the world. You have all the time in the world when you’re from out of town.
Of course Newcastle were on at 3. I could wander around the Neue Altstadt for an hour or two, perhaps grab brunch thereby, proceed to the German Film Museum but a skip off the Main River, then culminate at The Fox & Hound downtown. Dozens of positive reviews had earned it 4.5 stars, and the specific distinction of being “a proper football pub.” It was also English, which was not an export I’d heard of before then.
I thought I might carry my copy of ‘The Secret History’ by Donna Tartt, which I’m finally reading, oy vey, and if there was a quiet enough moment and a friendly enough breeze, I might rest the novel upon that breeze, and fill that moment with Ms. Tartt’s dark chocolate. But what guest does this, I relented, on an away day and with all the time (we have established) in the world?
Frankfurt’s Hauptbahnof gets a tough out, I suspect, everywhere but Frankfurt. In the lead-up to my trip, several Berliners instructed me to quicken my pace if I found myself thereabouts, to mind all the questionable gentlemen, to see Köln instead if I could fashion a way over there. But travel quickly reveals these assumptions to be classically overblown. I have since described the stop to all those counsellors as Kottbüsser Tor if Kottbüsser Tor were the size of Alexanderplatz, and hosted its level of foot traffic too. Get out of the station, let the soft sun glaze your eyelashes, pick an opportune moment in private air to glance at your map, then go where you’re going — or, refrain from eye contact. This should work in any big city in the world besides perhaps New York and London, and Johannesburg.
The streets were strangely empty, election Sunday or no, given all the action I’d politely evaded just outside the Hauptbahnof. It looked just as empty inside The Fox and Hound, which sits quietly and humbly beneath taller, glassier buildings, like a whimsicality waiting to be picked up by its parents. To my amusement, I found that The Fox and Hound was designed to look like a council flat, with faux wallpaper and wooden trimmings that (I bet) harked back to a time and place when Maggie Thatcher announced dramatic developments on the telly. I approached a friendly bartender, noticing only passingly a slight Mila Kunis thing, and asked if there was any chance I could catch the Newcastle game in there. She pointed at a screen above and to my left, in an entire living room or perhaps lounge area that for a time I would have to myself. I asked for a Guinness pretty please, because it’s the only beer whose character my tongue finds genuinely interesting. The Magpies were already down a goal to the refreshingly stubborn Nottingham Forest.
Within a few minutes the Toon had equalised, and the kind lady came round the bar pretending to pump her fist for my benefit. She asked if I was actually a Newcastle United fan, in a manner that suggested I might have been the first one ever to walk through the doors of The Fox and Hound. To keep things simple I said yes. I was from out of town, had all the time in the world, etcetera, but that didn’t mean everyone else was from out of town, had all the time in the world, etcetera, to hear me break down my Tottenham Hotspur conundrum. Far from home you can Don Draper this shit: you can be whoever the hell you want to be, even just for ninety minutes. But replying, “Yes, I am — unfortunately, ha ha,” felt wholly appropriate right then: simple and swift and clean.
My impulse around attractive women is to make immediately and explicitly clear that I have no designs on converting their basic attention into any sort of affection — partly by asking all the obvious questions. (Note to passers-by, or is it readers-by: if you’re engaging with me for the first time, and I venture a cheeky or teasing query, it’s highly likely I’m flirting with you.) How long had she lived in the city; almost a year. Where did she live before; it’s one of those idyllic spots I’ve heard about in England, but quickly presumed I can’t afford to visit or be a person of colour in. What team did she support; she said she couldn’t stand football now, working here, but her family was visiting and they were all Liverpool fans. Today, versus Manchester City, she was Liverpool again.
Her accent was tinged with some kind of Balkan magic, I thought. In a gap where she skipped away briefly to greet a new customer, a sumptuously bald man with a thick moustache accosted me as warmly as the sun had most of the weekend.
“Go Maggies, eh?”
I nodded, aware that every time I was asked this question, whether I was indeed Newcastle, the Disney spell threatened to make its effects permanent. This geezer looked at the screen I’d been designated then stepped outside with the ease and confidence of an unperturbed neutral. When he returned, he found the bartender attempting to re-engage my custom. Before I could ask her something cheeky — for example, “What’s your religion then, if not football?” — he murmured something to her and she disappeared behind the bar. I never got her name, which seems like for the best.
Slowly, The Fox and Hound began to fill up – mostly with English accents. A man in a Frankfurt jersey sat beside me, asked if I was Newcastle (“Yes, sadly.”), and introduced himself and a small band of merry men: amongst them a Port Vale fan who was just visiting the lads. They were nearly all from Birmingham, and also nearly all Nintendo employees. I forget the names now, because since returning to Berlin I have consumed an impressive amount of whiskey (once), watched another episode of The White Lotus, seen the Chalamet–Dylan movie, finally gotten the hang of College Football 25, and vacuumed the house. I’ve even seen another Newcastle game in another pub.
I talked football with my new friends, exchanged book recs with one chap, fielded queries about my homeland with the (Manchester) United fan of the lot, and he waxed poetical on what it’s like to have to fashion the display of onscreen text in video games. The first gent had by this point shuffled away towards the rugby, Italy versus France or some such, and the Port Vale fan had informed me that Robbie Earle (Wimbledon FC alum!) was that club’s most famous export. I reminisced coolly, briefly, on how much fun it had been to watch the Dons before the spectre of relegation came for a starting eleven full of Caribbean men and the red rage of Vinny Jones. I had to leave because I had to meet your mom at the apartment at 5, and I thought it was a tragedy I wouldn’t be back here in six days’ time. I should move to Frankfurt, I thought. Remember all the lads’ names, and get them right back for sponsoring my second beer. Marry the angel what poured the Guinness, and honeymoon in a castle on Tyneside.
I’m not the sort of person that says things like this with their chest, that perhaps my late father is indeed speaking to me from a pub like this one, where Bobby Robson and Glenn Roeder basically drink for free. But the Toon are on, a lot, at the same time Spurs are — and I find myself saying, fuck it. Yes. Yes, I am. Unfortunately. Sadly. Chronically.
