A fixture card from a banded pile

When I was much younger. news of the football fixtures would snake round the fans slowly, tasting the air with a leisurely tongue. It really didn't matter that much who you started the season against, or who you played last. You went along and bought the programme and found out about your opponents on the day.

But no longer. The 2011/12 fixtures were released today at 0900 and, without any effort on my part -as I'd forgotten that today was The Day - the full list was emailed to me by a mate at 0926. Palace had been promoting an 'exclusive' find-out-first premium SMS service but really, haven't those days gone? No sooner are the fixtures announced than they're on websites, Twitter, Facebook, texted to contacts, salivated over on blogs, emailed round...

When I was much younger my dad used to give me a coin and send me off down the road to ask Mr Patel to peel off a fixture list from his banded pile. It was made of thin card, folded, wallet-sized, and available from the counters of newsagents all over South London. Mr Patel also ran a VHS rental club from which I hired the full-length Thriller video.

I wondered today whether the newspapers of the time published the fixtures themselves, because why else would dad ask me to buy this treasured card? Perhaps it was because the sports pages were much, much smaller then - no room on a single back page for pundits and pictures and gossip and fixtures and tactics and boardrooms and finances. Perhaps it was because football wasn't the media darling it is today, so the papers reported it grudgingly - I grew up in the time when football was a hooligan sport, with Chelsea smilers, terraces, fencing and ID cards.

But maybe it was just so I could feel brave and proud and excited and trusted at going round the shop with his money to buy something that mattered to him.