Molineux. the home of Wolverhampton Wanderers. It's a long way to come for a football match: 200 miles and more from the dawn mists of the Tamar valley. I still can't get used to the new stadium, all pale brick and mustard-coloured steel. When, finally, we arrive, I feel I should be somewhere else. The Molineux of old was jagged and dark-a place of wrought-iron, rough concrete and foul smells. Now even the lavatories are spruce and well-lit. A man stands at the urinal with a pie in his free hand.
My sons and I ascend the steps to the Stan Cullis stand, formerly the North Bank. By the standards of Anfield's Spion Kop or the Holte End at Villa Park, the North Bank was small. From other parts of the ground it looked hunched and hooded, especially on floodlit, rainy nights. But the acoustics were demonic. The noise of the crowd was a beast. It surged up to the rafters and belted the roof like Beelzebub. At such times, the North Bank was a single vocal apparatus, the crowd a steaming tongue in a black throat. But the terraces are gone. The swirling mass of flesh is no more. Singing and chanting are more sporadic and apt to fizzle out. Now we sit on plastic seats; we listen to anodyne pop over the PA; we watch men dressed as cartoon animals wandering the touchline, careful not to stray into opposition territory for fear of inciting the crowd. (There is hostility enough in the voices around us-this is Wolves v West Bromwich Albion; an acrid domestic squabble). Then Jeff Beck comes over the tannoy: "Hi-Ho, Silver Lining." The crowd galvanises. It's an anthem. I find myself singing along... And it's Hi-Ho WOLVER-HAMPTON. My sons are not joining in. They look at me uncomfortably. I do the next chorus, but less lustily. Third time, I'm silent. I look about me and am visited by doubt. Is this Molineux? Is it me?
The other day I showed my students a video. The scene is a clinic room. A young man and an old man sit facing one another. The young man is carefully probing the old man's observations and recollections. The old man concentrates, giving each question careful thought. But it is clear from his responses that, despite appearances (he smiles readily, seems fully engaged) there are great voids between the sparse constellations of recollection. He has a brain disease and can hardly carry memories from one day to the next. I made the video 12 years ago. The old man and my younger self are performing a familiar routine. He is dead now and it occurs to me that every molecule of my younger self has been replaced with the passage of time. In a sense, neither of those bodies has survived. Naturally, nothing remains of the boy who stood on the terraces.
So, what survives? What makes us the same person from one year to the next, one week, one day, one minute to the next? Some philosophers have emphasised conscious recollection. Continuity of the person is down to continuity of memory. If I can reclaim the thoughts and experiences of the young clinician in the video or, further back, the boy on the terraces, then we are the same person. That's not difficult. I have clear memories of making the film and can picture the patient's wife off-camera. My impressions of the old stadium also remain vivid. I see myself arriving, as usual, an hour before kick-off and taking my place halfway up the terraces or, when I was small, at the trench wall behind the goal. I recall the orange gravel surrounding the pitch and the lurid green of the grass, the smells of cigarette smoke and Oxo. I have an image of the asymmetric outline of the stands, so clear I could draw a picture. Although much is a blur, I can conjure snapshots of certain games and goals. I saw these things from a particular perspective. Mine. I was there. It was me.
But there's a problem with this line of reasoning: amnesia. What if I couldn't remember these things? Would disruption of memory decouple me from the child I once was? Suppose I retained a memory link with the young clinician and that he, in turn, could recall the boy (whereas I can't). It would lead to the conclusion that the younger man and myself were the same person, that he and the boy were the same, but that the boy and I were not. And there's my patient. His problem was with recent memory, not remote. In all likelihood he would have forgotten the video within a few days, but would have had no trouble reminiscing about his childhood. Was the old man fused with his child-self but dislocated from last week's?
Another view is that we should abandon the idea of a persisting ego. A person is more like a club-a football club, say-existing by consensus, capable of dissolution and reconstitution. Wolves twice went into liquidation in the 1980s; the current players weren't even born when I started coming to matches; the stadium was demolished and rebuilt. Nothing survives, yet here we still are-me and the Wolves.
The image of my ten-year-old self brings a churning to my chest. I feel an urge to hug my sons, but resist. They're too big, they wouldn't thank me. We settle to the match. We lose one-nil. The exit from Wolverhampton is dreary and slow but spirits are lifting by the time we reach the motorway. We made the trip for the same fixture last season. The match video is advertised for sale on the club website. I've decided to buy it. We'll look for ourselves behind the goal. I'm going to watch me and my kids not getting any older in a universe where the score is always Wolves 3 Albion 1. It's a restricted universe, but reliable.
