We couldn’t stand to continue logging onto our own website and seeing Mick Beale’s face at the top of it any more, so we commissioned Jeremy Clarkson to write the latest Awaydays travelogue of the semi-recent trips to Bristol, Sheffield and Luton.

Jeans and jacket combo

Some people were born to drive, others were meant to be driven. Some of us belong on the train.

In the car, whether you’ve got hold of the steering wheel or not, you’re at the mercy of the decision making of every idiot out there, spending hours at a time crawling along dual carriageways behind one lorry doing 54mph overtaking another one doing 53.7mph, making progress for only as long as it takes Jemima Puddington-Taylor to come and sit in the road with her hi-vis jacket and placard, and for this you pay up to £2 for a litre of petrol, road tax, car insurance, the cost of the bloody car itself… On the train you can lean back, drink as much beer as you like, read a book or a newspaper, watch a film or a boxset, and rattle along at 125mph — all of which, it turns out, are very much frowned upon when you’re driving a car.

Like any teenage boy, when I first passed my driving test I absolutely revelled in the freedom it brought. Mwaha, look how quickly I can get away from the shithole I live in and all the twats who reside there now. With a September birthday I was the first one in my year group to do it, and it was amazing how many people who had treated my like shite for the previous five years were suddenly very keen on me indeed. I took great delight in driving their girlfriends to the McDonald’s drive-thru without them. How do you like them apples? In a piping hot turnover as it turns out.

For a while I had a brand new, bright red, three-door Seat Ibiza (shut up, I was young), with sports tyres half an inch thick, and a two-litre petrol injection engine on a car that weighed about as much as one of those weird little single beds they sometimes sling in the corner of your room at the Travelodge. It needed no encouragement to go like absolute stink, and I gave it plenty of that — the Sheffield R’s of the time were infamously back in our local in time for last orders after a midweek 1-1 draw away at Newcastle. Having thrashed the arse out of the pocket rocket for three years it came time to exchange the poor thing. The bloke at the garage poked around under the bonnet for five minutes, declared he’d “never seen anything like it in a car of this age”. Having stormed off with my baby for a second opinion the next bloke gave an even more dire assessment of the state of the engine than the first, declaring it “effectively a write off”. This meant the replacement had to be done on the sort of budget QPR are now shopping for a new manager with and I ended up with a five-door, (very) used Vauxhall Corsa that had a one-litre engine stolen from an old council lawnmower and weighed as much as a Russian ball-bearing factory. It could, in calm weather conditions, with no passengers or luggage, on a straight and empty piece of motorway, angled slightly downhill, just about make it to 70 mph if you sat with the accelerator flat to the floor for an uninterrupted period of around 20 minutes while jiggling up and down in the driver’s seat to try and egg it on a bit scowling “come on for fuck’s sake” under your breath. When I moved to London the tax, insurance and resident’s parking thingy all came up for renewal at the same time and as I was only taking the hulking waste of steel out once a fortnight to go to the big Sainsbury’s and back I decided to give it to We Buy Any Car (never before has that mantra been tested so thoroughly) for £5,000 which was about £4,995 more than the fucking heap was worth. I’ve been one of those “why do you need a car in London?” twats ever since.

It has, however, been clear since the very first minute of the very first morning of this season, when our trip to Blackburn coincided with the collapse of the Avanti West Coast franchise in its entirety (a collapse that remains almost total today nearly six months on, and for which they’ve just been punished with an extension of their franchise by the government), that 2022/23 would not be the year for football fans who like to travel by train. Sure enough, although we’d bobbed and dodged and weaved and lost only one trip to Sunderland through to October, the strike storm finally nabbed us properly in month three — Bristol City and Sheffield United, two of our favourite trips, two of the best ones you can do by rail, lost with a fortnight’s notice.

First job: getting our money back. GWR tell us this won’t be a problem for the Bristol trip, one click is all it will need on this big red button in the email. In actual fact the big red button plunges me into a month-long holding pattern, while the money remains in their account earning interest for them rather than in my account buying me food, waiting for somebody in the call centre to hit the button that says “refund the poor bastard” once, rather than the button that says “send the stupid fucker another email apologising for how long it’s taking” on nine separate occasions.

EMR is, somehow, even worse.

They too have a button to press for a refund, but in their case it simply goes to a page that says our tickets are not eligible for a refund. An email address is provided if we disagree which, needless to say, we do. The first reply arrives almost immediately from “Sagar” who starts by saying he/she “hopes my family are doing well”. They’re mostly dead, but I’m not sure it’s relevant so decide to let it slide. Sagar “understands my concern about disruption” and “is here for my assistances”, which I’m pleased about. Sagar then requests to see “my notification regarding the disruption” for which I point him/her back to his/her own website which has a huge banner headline on the front-page notifying people regarding the disruption.

Sagar takes this away and allows it to percolate a while and then comes back with: “Thank you for your response. I am really sorry you were not able to travel…” (journey still a week away at this point) “…as your train was cancelled due to STORM”. There’s then a paragraph explaining that our advance purchase tickets offer the best value for money but are non-refundable. There’s then a third paragraph saying the £136.50 will be back in my account the following day, as long as I reply confirming this will be ok. I reply confirming this will be ok.

Another email arrives. This time it’s from “Jhanvi”. Jhanvi thanks me for my confirmation for the refund they’ve agreed to give me, but he/she has checked the National Rail Enquiries website and can confirm that my trains to and from Sheffield are running and are not affected by strike (or STORM), and wishes me a safe and pleasant journey. This is, of course, not true. At this point, I’m not going to lie, I get a little bit aggy. I’m paraphrasing, but something about coming to the East Midlands Railway call centre and executing hostages through the medium of ripping out their rectums with my bare hands and leaving them to bleed out in front of colleagues unless I get my £136.50 back right away. Jhanvi comes back, it’s a remarkably similar email to one of Sagar’s, talking about how my ticket offers great value for money, but is non-refundable, but they’re going to give me a refund if I reply to confirm I’d like one, which does at least make me think I’ve been dealing with some weird AI system rather than there being actual people out there in society who are quite this fucking thick. I reply confirming I’d like that very much. Despite it all, the money is back in my account before the GWR cheque cashes.

Second job, find a car. The other half agrees to a loan of a bright orange Mini Cooper as long as “none of your football friends are going to break wind in it”. The back seat has enough space for, at best, one small, domesticated house cat. In the Crown & Sceptre the week before we agree to take Young Samuel, who is 6ft 4ins tall. This is a very silly idea.

Third job, drive to the fucking matches. And, my God, if you have to drive regularly for or to work, I feel like I should come around and shake each of you by the hand and offer condolences, like at the end of a funeral. Actually, no, I wish I was the one in the box. Draw those curtains, move that little conveyer belt, don’t even check if I’m dead first, let the fire take me to a better place, so as I never have to go through this again.

Since I was last doing this regularly “smart motorways” have infested and crawled all over the country like Japanese knotweed. The principal being, rather than spend money widening the road to cope with the level of traffic, or something even more radical like making the railways affordable and reliable so the level of traffic on the roads is reduced, you can simply do away with the hard-shoulder. Genius. Now, we have four lanes of traffic, where previously there were three. Drawback - if some poor old Dorris on the way home from her office cleaning job breaks down in the dark of night she just has to sit there in her Nissan Micra, in the inside lane where all the lorries drive, and hope some hairy-arsed Polish trucker hasn’t nodded off or found something particularly amusing on the CB radio at that point. All the stands between her and oblivion is a succession of gantries that keep the traffic moving by aggressively slowing it down. None of this sounded very smart to me to begin with and, lo and behold, in January this year a “pausing” of the roll out of more of this shit was announced while we await “more safety data”, which is being collected in the form of piles of dead motorists.

In the meantime, there we all sit. Trundling along, staring up at the gantry that tells us what we can do for the next 300 yards, never daring to deviate from it slightly under pain of a £90 fine, three points on the licence to drive the insurance premium still higher, or worse still an afternoon in a Zoom meeting with some drone hectoring on about stopping distances. On the way to Bristol we spend a thick hour stationary going past Swindon because the gantry says all three lanes are closed, everybody needs to go onto the hard shoulder and get off at the next junction. Everybody duly does as they’re told, creating a biblical traffic jam. An entire episode of Fighting Talk is consumed in the time it takes us to move the length of a Robert Green goal kick. When we eventually arrive at the next junction, it’s a lie. The motorway is open after all.

It’s pretty late in the evening when we head home after our post-match curry at the always excellent 4,500 Miles from Delhi, so the M4 is almost entirely empty. Nevertheless, the gantries steadfastly show 60 across the board. So, there we sit again, in the middle of the night, on an empty motorway, doing 60 in the inside lane, by ourselves. One rebellious heathen cruises past us a little after Reading at something that must have been approaching nearly 74 or 75mph — FLASH, the camera grabs him immediately, and his condemnation is absolute. What a horrible, evil cunt that guy must be. Seventy four on an empty motorway? Straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect £200. Stick him on the nonse wing, see how he gets on in there. All he’s good for. Every now and again, for no good reason at all, one of the gantries suddenly says 50 instead of 60. Occasionally this is justified with an additional “obstruction in the road” message, but no obstruction ever materialises, it’s another lie. FLASH, somebody daring not to pay attention has gone under one of the 50 boards at 60. Another bastard, no doubt. Confiscate his keys, make him walk the rest. Call the social services, go round for his kids before he gets home to kiss them goodbye a final time. We sit through 50 miles of this on the way back from Bristol, and to Sheffield on Tuesday there’s more of the M1 configured like this than not now. As ever with Twitter, there’s a helpful know-all, no doubt with buck front teeth and back acne, on hand to tell me that “actually it’s to do with air pollution”. Air pollution. From one Mini, on the M4, in the middle of the night, by itself, going past the Fucking. Runway. At. Heathrow. Airport. Into the sea with you.

Do you think if anybody, anywhere, in any position of remote power in this country, gave a single shiny shite about air pollution, our railways would look like they do? We’re going to tackle air pollution by making the railway unusable but making all the cars drive 10mph slower. Terrific. I’ll tell you what this is about, all of it, this is about rinsing people for every penny they can scrape from them. Decent, hardworking people trying to go about their day and earn an honest coin to continue existing in this festering shithole for another week. In Bristol we leave the thing in a multi-story car park, in a space so narrow that, even from the mini, at one point it looks like Young Samuel will have to exit via the boot. We leave it there for eight hours, and when we return the bill is £37. Thirty seven pounds. Extrapolate that out and you’re renting a space no bigger than your average floor rug, in a car park so tight we burn the clutch out trying to get in the thing, for £3,441 a month — or this four bedroom detached house with garden in Mill Hill. It’s a racket, plain and simple. The whole thing. When you’re ostensibly engaging in the noble green cause of discouraging road travel to reduce pollution, but at the same time destroying the most viable alternative to it, then it looks like a racket, it quacks like a racket, and it is indeed a fucking racket.

We used to get angry in this country. We used to protest. I remember when petrol went over 70p a litre for the first time we blockaded the oil refineries and shut the country down, for weeks. They stuck a speed camera up on a straight, safe piece of road I used to commute down and people used to go along with fireworks and blow the thing up — couple of times a month you’d drive past and it would just be a smouldering wreck on the end of a stick, and we all clapped and cheered and rejoiced. Now we just take it. We just take all of it, right up the bum, every day, and do nothing about it. And I feel like this after three days and two journeys back behind the wheel. How are the rest of you taking this with such calm resignation? Yeh, ok, smart motorways, they’re fine I guess. Not fine. Not fine at all. The farthest thing from fine.

And it’s not even the worst bit. Do you know what the worst bit was? Prior to Bristol City we go in The Old Fish Market, one of my absolute favourite pubs on the whole Championship awayday circuit. We nuzzle into some comfy chairs there and have lunch while watching Arsenal v Spurs. But, of course, as designated driver, two beers later it’s time to switch drinks and for the first time in my life it’s time to try a non-alcoholic bottle of Peroni.

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It's sad. It’s sad to see good ingredients treated that way. I thought the gluten-free version was bad enough but fuck me dead. The problem I have in general is I urinate an alcohol content of about 3.8%, so the driving lagers like Carling and Fosters actually sober me up because it’s literally weaker than what I’m emptying out into the bog. I’ve never sunk as low as to actually drink my own piss, but it cannot possibly be worse than an alcohol free Peroni. It just can’t. I’m going to fridge a bottle up and take it with me next time we have to do this which is, checks notes, fucking Preston. Jesus wept.

Mick Lynch is a problem for politicians in this country. These days, the way media works, the way people are able to be manipulated by online content, it’s as much the delivery of the message as the message itself that matters most. The union’s front man used to be Bob Crowe, a big angry Millwall man who used to snarl into the camera that he basically didn’t give a fuck about what anybody thought. He’d call multiple strikes every time one of his members had been sacked for knocking one out in the break room, at a time when train drivers were mostly very handsomely paid relative to the rest of us. The Daily Mail would run its “greedy bastards” headlines and we’d stand there on the platform and go “yeh, greedy bastards”.

Now you’ve got Mick Lynch, who’s not only saying what a lot of people are thinking and feeling at the moment but also making them wish they had somebody representing their interests in the same way. Whether you agree with that, or him, or his economic principals, or not, what he is also doing is delivering it all in beautifully clipable, succinct and to-the-point 60-second answers. Watch him, he’s a master at it: he answers the question that is asked of him directly and eruditely in a normal person’s voice and accent (immediately setting him apart from every politician on the circuit currently and every guest on catastrophes like Question Time), he makes his point intelligently and thoughtfully, he rips the piss out of the publication or channel the question has come from, he makes the journalist asking it look like a berk, and he does it in 60-90 seconds every single time. Because he knows that’s how a message spreads now — in videos and soundbites you can clip and put on Twitter and social media to go viral. He’s battling politicians who spread their message by going into TV studios and telling such obvious lies and so obviously dodging questions with things like “I think what people are really interested in is…” that you even start to side with somebody as dislikeable as Kay Burley. It’s a losing battle, and they’d be foolish to let him continue to wipe the floor with them like this much longer, because the “greedy bastards” line doesn’t cut through to people in this economy, and when they try and clutch pearls about “how will people get to the Commonwealth Games” passengers simply point out the railway is an expensive, unusable shambles every day of the week anyway, Commonwealth Games or not, strike or no strike.

Solidarity only goes so far mind, and I reckon that so-far for me is one more bottle of alcohol-free beer. Come on Mick, we’ve all had a drink. Or, at least, we wish we had.

Those were the good old days

The utter ball ache of getting to Bristol, and Sheffield, and back, inside four days, pales into a distant memory when set alongside the QPR performances that awaited us there.

I like Bristol more and more with each passing visit. It’s a solid place, built of stone and time and Aardman plasticine, with spectacular landmarks and scenery and a portfolio of pubs and restaurants I’m still discovering every year. The walk along the harbourside to Ashton Gate on a sunny afternoon is the best approach to a ground we make all season. The Robins have taken the sound and shrewd approach of redeveloping the stadium they already own, rather than moving out of this beautiful city into some identikit monstrosity next to a giant Tesco, and it’s now a terrific place to watch football — or, at least, it would be with the addition of one seagull-targeting bird of prey. Of course I’m always going to be well disposed to a place where QPR have now taken nine points from three visits — City show extended highlights of a previous meeting on the big screen prior to kick off, but rather pettily only a game they’ve won which now means they're starting to wear the tape out of the 2019 trip, and even that was lost only thanks to a scandalous injury time penalty decision against Darnell Furlong — but I’ve been back on a non-football weekend during the World Cup break and I love the place. I’ve now added Bristol to the list of places in the UK I can see myself living other than London which currently numbers Bristol.

Sheffield used to be on said list, and I did indeed live there for a good six years, but the economic downturn has not been kind to the place. John Lewis has packed up and left town, taking most of the top half of the city centre with it. The other half does at least have its units taken up, although how one place can sustain quite so manger Greggs in one place is lost even on me as a northerner. Between 2014 and 2018 the Labour council here signed and enforced a disgraceful, corrupt PFI contract with Amey and the Department of Transport, and then repeatedly publicly redacted (and denied the existance of) the clause in it that incentivised and encouraged the company to remove 17,500 of the city's street trees, changing this from one of the greenest cities in the country into a characterless hellscape. Protesters were locked up. It always strikes me when we visit these places how incredibly difficult it is to get anything by way of something to eat after 9pm besides the obligatory curry, but on a recent business trip back to the Steel City the very idea that there might be a restaurant open and serving dinner at any point on a Monday brings several people out in incredulous laughter. Of course not, idiot. Shame, great place, wonderful people. The nightclub at the bottom end of The Moor offering Sheffield’s premier gay night until 4am and then a cooked breakfast from 8am, in case you’ve worked up an appetite, joyfully, does remain. Mamas and Leonies never disappoints for a pre-match meal either, and delivers for the few LFWers making this midweek trip once again.

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Both trips this time, for a change, are all about the football. QPR’s performance in the first half at Bristol City, which sees them take a 2-0 lead into half time that could and should be double that, is as well as they’ve played away from home anywhere in years. City’s defence is scared witless of Chair, Willock and Roberts and can do nothing with any of them. Kal Naismith turns in his now typically inept performance against us. Stefan Johansen is a man possessed. Given all that, it’s rather a shame that we shut up shop and started engaging in gamesmanship and clock running quite as early and prolifically as we did in the second half. No need, no need for it at all, just go on and win the game 4-0, 5-0 as is so blatantly available to us as a possibility. Still, first world problems I guess. It’s not enough to make us think we’ll get anything from Bramall Lane on the Tuesday — Sheff Utd with four wins and a draw from their home games to this point, which is pretty formidable even with key man Anel Ahmedhodzic missing for our game. This time the performance is a complete 90 minutes — far less goal threat, admittedly, but also much less worry at the other end bar one spectacular Seny Dieng save from Olly Norwood. Chris Willock’s goal secures another deserved three points and puts the R’s firmly on the radar of the rest of the division.

With what’s transpired since, starting in the very next game at Luton, it’s sadly difficult to shake the feeling that we might have peaked for the season in that week. QPR’s is a good starting 11, with very little depth beyond that. Willock’s second half hamstring injury in S2 is treated collectively by the Rangers fans like a death in the family. The win is achieved with him missing for most of the second half, and without Stefan Johansen completely, but the Norwegian was a different class at Ashton Gate and Rangers are palpably reliant on the ongoing fitness of those two players — both of whom have persistent injury problems. A new manager, six new signings, a new system, and the influence of two excellent new full backs (Laird and Paal are magnificent across the 180 minutes of these games) was always going to catch the division a little cold, but by the time we arrive at Kenilworth Road there’s a foreboding sense that the opposition scouts around the Championship have had their videos, done their visits, filed their reports, and there’ll be no more rampaging of Paal and/or Laird any more. Bastards.

In 2015/16 Chris Ramsey’s QPR won away at Wolves and Huddersfield and 4-2 at home to Rotherham early doors. When anticipated departures of Matt Phillips, Charlie Austin, Leroy Fer and others didn’t transpire on deadline day, optimism went through the roof. Rangers won two of the next 12, four of the next 24, and vanished beneath the waves of managerial change. The following season, Jimmy Floyd-Hasselbaink’s side beat up Leeds at home on day one, and posted swift away wins at Cardiff and Wigan. At the always immaculately timed fans forum the Dutchman was asked about play-offs, and how he’d go about a summer transfer window if we were promoted — Rangers won three of the next 19, and Hasselbaink was sacked. Ian Holloway won his first three home games in 2017/18, and when the eventual top two (Wolves and Sheff Utd) were beaten in four days in October it felt like we were going places — that, again, was the peak of the season, three wins from the next 15. Next year, same thing, Steve McClaren in charge, Reading, Ipswich, Sheff Wed, Villa and Brentford beaten in seven memorable matches through October. Rangers only won another seven league games in the next seven months. Mark Warburton, September/October, Wigan, Sheff Wed, Luton, Millwall, Blackburn, Hull defeated to put a QPR team with an attack of Bright Osayi-Samuel, Ebere Eze, Ilias Chair, Nahki Wells and My Chemical Hugill firmly in the play-off spots — two wins in the next 13, four wins in the next 20. The run was longer and better sustained in the second half of 2020/21, but unfortunately hamstrung by four wins in the whole first half of the campaign. Likewise in 2021/22, the R’s looked capable of pushing for second right through to the end of January, but the performances and results from February onwards spiralled so hard the team whistled through the air as it travelled.

The challenge for whoever replaces Mick Beale is to make sure we’re not looking back in May at yet another glorious false dawn in September and October.

Good price, wouldn’t cheatya

We’ve done Luton before, we’ll do Luton again, for we are seemingly forever forsaken to be intertwined with the Hatters. Even when they were as low as the Conference, it felt like they never truly went away. Ooooh look the turnstiles are part of somebody’s house. Yawn. I enjoyed this year’s trip about as much as I imagine I would having my spleen removed under a local anaesthetic, but I did want to just quickly mention the deal below, spotted on the Dunstable High Road. I don’t know lads, feels like a hell of a price for a sheep to me…

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Scores on the doors

Bristol City: On the pitch >>> QPR performance 8/10 >>> Bristol City performance 5/10 >>> Referee performance 5/10 Off the pitch >>> QPR support 8/10 >>> Home support 7/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 7/10 >>>> Stadium 8/10 >>>> Police and stewards 7/10 In the pub >>> Pubs 8/10 >>> Atmosphere 8/10 >>> Food 8/10 >>>> Cost 7/10 On the train (I wish) >>> Journey 2/10 >>> Cost 2/10

Sheff Utd: On the pitch >>> QPR performance 8/10 >>> Sheff Utd performance 6/10 >>> Referee performance 7/10 Off the pitch >>> QPR support 7/10 >>> Home support 6/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 6/10 >>>> Stadium 9/10 >>>> Police and stewards 6/10 In the pub >>> Pubs 7/10 >>> Atmosphere 7/10 >>> Food 8/10 >>>> Cost 8/10 On the train (stop it) >>> Journey 2/10 >>> Cost 2/10

Luton: On the pitch >>> QPR performance 4/10 >>> Luton performance 8/10 >>> Referee performance 6/10 Off the pitch >>> QPR support 6/10 >>> Home support 7/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 7/10 >>>> Stadium 2/10 >>>> Police and stewards 3/10 In the pub >>> Pubs 4/10 >>> Atmosphere 4/10 >>> Food 5/10 >>>> Cost 3/10 On the train >>> Journey 5/10 >>> Cost 6/10

Totals, Bristol City 89/140, Sheff Utd 89/140, Luton 70/140

2022/23 >>> Blackburn/Sunderland/Charlton >>> Watford/Swansea/Millwall

2021/22 >>> Hull/Boro 21/22 >>> Reading/Bournemouth >>> Fulham/Peterborough >>> Cardiff/Blackpool >>> Bristol/Birmingham >>> Peterborough/Coventry/Millwall >>> Barnsley/Blackburn >>> Luton/Nottingham >>> Sheffield/Preston/Huddersfield

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