Arsenal Parade 2006

What can I say about the parade. Arsenal won the Premier League and the whole of North London turned red to celebrate it, more than a million of us crammed into the streets for the day. The Champions League final had been lost the night before, the heartache of it still fresh, and this fan base still turned up the next morning and made me proud all over again, the way it always seems to find a way of doing.

I barely caught sight of the buses themselves, buried as I was under red flares and flags surrounded by people singing their hearts out. The atmosphere was the sort you only get to stand inside of every so often, and I spent most of it enjoying the noise and the colour and the sheer scale of the crowd.

Taking my son along mattered to me more than I can properly set down here. The first time I took him to a game he wanted to photograph everything and soak the whole place in, and this was that again with the volume turned up far past anything either of us had braced for. Whatever comes after this, the two of us were there together, and I get to keep that part with me forever. At least we can both still say we stood in the middle of it all.