The Big Smoke

What's the price of love? According to Bryan Ferry it's 'a debt you pay in tears and pain', but according to the Home Office, love costs £2,087 (non-refundable, and subject to checking). This is the sum total my New Zealand-born wife and I have had to find over the past three years so that she can live and work freely in the UK – and remain in a family with me and our 10-month-old son. It's a hefty dowry, which has so far been extracted through visas, passport stamps, leaves-to-remain and various cruel and unusual admin fees. But the most recent outlay, of £720, has finally earned my wife the status of fully naturalised Pom, entitling her to a British passport (and that'll be a further £77.50, thankyouverymuch) and all manner of heartbreaking disappointments in international sports tournaments. But before she gets to hunt foxes through the Cotswolds at the wheel of a Mini Cooper, there’s one last duty her prospective country requires of her: she must attend a formal indoctrina– I mean citizenship ceremony at Bromley Public Hall in Bow.

Union Jacks are everywhere in the lavish hall where we wait in nationally undesignated limbo with 40 or so other proto-Britishers and their guests. It’s unnerving: you only ever see this sort of flag saturation if you happen to find yourself at the last night of the Proms, or in rabidly unionist parts of Belfast, or inside Richard Littlejohn’s boxer shorts. Since we arrived, a stereo has been buzzing background Elgar around the room like a red, white and blue wasp, and by the time we’re all ushered in to the chamber where the ceremony is to be held, I’m already feeling a little Britished out.

As we take our seats, then, I’m dismayed to see that down the front, they’ve installed an imposing photograph of the Queen, in guest-of-honour position, like a pagan idol in a tiara. Her Majesty’s effigy is a Home Office stipulation for all citizenship rituals, as are the flowers, fanfares and flags; the idea is to make these occasions feel less like staid legal formality and more like a memorable event. Here in Tower Hamlets, they may be aiming for Charles and Di street party, but to me it feels plastic and sinister, like a UKIP rally in the Blackpool Tower gift shop.

Citizenship ceremonies have been a mandatory rite of passage for anyone seeking naturalisation since 2004 (the UK’s first was held by Brent Council). According to an employee of another London borough, who helps organise the ceremonies, group declarations of allegiance to the Crown ‘were brought in following the American example. It's about the idea of building a community, so you know there are other people who've gone through the same journey.' In her experience, most attendees get into the spirit of things: 'We get people who come along in their national dress, people wearing Union Jack ties or England football shirts. We often get people bursting into tears and clapping and cheering.'

There's none of that sort of malarkey at my wife's rather more sedate ceremony – it seems everyone here's already got the hang of being British. Among her 40 co-assimilators today are three people from India, one from Malaysia, one Mexican, one American and an Egyptian, with the rest all hailing from Bangladesh. Following a municipal pep talk from the congenial Mayor of Tower Hamlets – himself a former immigrant from Somalia – the registrar gets down to the serious business of Britishisation.

One by one, the inductees are asked to stand and state their name. A few stumble over the wording of the oath, which comes in both secular or God-fearing versions, both adapted from the officialese used to swear in MPs, judges and members of the armed services. My wife, when her turn comes, affirms her loyalty to the law, the land, the Queen and her successors through a visibly suppressed attack of the giggles that come at the precise moment when she can be legally executed for such behaviour.

Next we all rise to mumble our way through two verses of ‘God Save the Queen’ (NB: Who knew the lyrics to the second verse were so paranoically funny? If there’s ever another series of ‘Blackadder’, they should use it for the theme tune), after which my wife troops up to receive her solemn symbols of investiture from the Mayor: a nice piece of A4 paper, a bit like a cycling proficiency certificate, and a shiny Tower Hamlets keyring. Not bad for £720.

Beautifully embossed though the shiny Tower Hamlets keyring is, it’s galling to think that as recently as March 2007 this whole palaver would have only set us back £268. And this dramatic fee hike reveals the callous logic underpinning UK immigration policy. The council employee explains: 'The idea was that by putting the price up so much it would discourage people who wanted the passport for inappropriate purposes – so if it’s something that you really, really do want then you will be able to get the money together.'

But isn’t that extremely unfair? ‘Personally, I think the fees should be on a sliding scale,’ she says. ‘Students can’t afford that much money, and neither can a single mother on benefits – the 720 quid for her and the £460 for her child.'

To me, it has an air of tinpot colonialism in reverse: unbeknown to the British-born public, the Home Office is blithely fleecing incoming foreigners for revenue in the name of the national interest. That said, the ceremony itself, by way of consolation, is harmless enough. In fact, in its own hokey way it’s actually quite positive. 'People have such a clouded view of immigration,’ says the council employee, ‘and this has brought the idea of citizenship to the fore, giving it more meaning for the people going through it.'

So, following her ordination as a daughter of Albion, does my wife feel in any different? Any more 'British'? ‘Weirdly, I do feel an affection for Britain I never have before,’ she tells me. ‘It’s as if in taking on citizenship I’ve also taken on good and bad aspects of being British – like I’m partly responsible for the beauty of St Paul’s Cathedral on the one hand, and on the other the terrible customer service.’ Finding the cloud in every silver lining – sounds pretty British to me.

I went to the football on Saturday. Readers aware of my disposition may now expect a short eulogy for Chelsea’s scintillating performance against Wolves, with perhaps a brief mention of how much better it is to deploy Michael Essien as a shuttling ball carrier rather than a holding player, and a marked aside on this season’s continuing outstanding performances from John Terry, the best centre-back in the league. Rio who?

But on Saturday I forewent the superior but not inexpensive delights of Stamford Bridge, for a reminder of what aficionados like to tell us is ‘real football’: the Blue Square Premier (that’s Conference for old-timers) clash between AFC Wimbledon and York. AFC are the London club formed by fans from the ashes of the old Wimbledon after the Football League, to their eternal shame, allowed the Dons to abandon their historic home in South London and move to Milton Keynes. AFC are, as such, a Very Good Thing in a sport that is lacking in them. I know a few AFC fans, and like to get down to Kingsmeadow every now and then to see how things are progressing.

I used to watch non-league football regularly when my local team, Sutton United, were a Conference outfit. Sutton would draw decent enough average crowds of 800 but the Conference has grown since then, boosted by the addition of former league clubs such as York, who dropped down from the league earlier in the decade but still brought around 700 boisterous fans to Kingsmeadow: the attendance was more than 4,000, which is pretty extraordinary.

Which is more than can be said for the football. Although the conditions were horrible, I was still a bit surprised by the paucity of the play; players rarely had time to take more than two touches before they were hustled off the ball or launched it towards the forwards, and I’m not sure there was a single move of more than four passes from either side. At such times, I recall my second favourite passage from Nick Hornby’s ‘Fever Pitch’, in which he recalls watching an Arsenal game from the touchline and marvelling at the pace of the game and the first touch of the professionals, the way they shape their body to receive the ball, giving themselves that extra split second of space that non-league players, with their inferior technique, simply do not have.

I sometimes watch non-league games with my friend Graham, who is a football purist and the most talented player I know, and he tends to spend the entire 90 minutes wincing as the ball is leathered from end-to-end. His pain is double-edged. Graham often knows at least one player on the pitch, having played youth football with or against them in his teens, so he will also know that while these players are no world-beaters, they were still extraordinarily talented, the best the area has to offer. Often they will have been bigger and stronger than their peers, but that in itself would not have been enough, these kids would have been very good, better perhaps than Graham and certainly much better than myself, a stolidly defensive one-footed right back, itself traditionally the position of refuge for the worst player on the pitch. (I pretty much had to retire from competitive football when FIFA banned the back pass, thereby relinquishing me of the only tactical weapon I had in my armoury.)

And that in turn reminded me of my favourite passage from ‘Fever Pitch’, the great one in which Hornby considers the case of Gus Caesar, a player considered to be one of the worst who has ever played for Arsenal. Displaying tremendous empathy, Hornby considers that to have got as far as the Arsenal first team, Caesar would have had to have been the best player in his class, the best in his school, the best in his district, the best in his county and one of the best in the Arsenal youth and reserve teams. ‘To get where he did, Gus Caesar clearly had more talent than nearly everyone of his generation... and it still wasn't quite enough,’ writes Hornby. It is one of the few really memorable pieces of football writing.

As I watched AFC and York’s players labouring over the pitch on Saturday, I thought about Gus Caesar again, put up my hood against the rain, checked out the extravagant murals by AFC’s temperamental but gifted artist-in-residence Fleydon, and settled back to enjoy the game for what it was – something far superior than I could ever hope to be involved in. And if the quality of the football was slightly lacking, at least the company was great, the effort honest and the Bovril a damn sight better than the stuff they serve at the Bridge.

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