The non-league football club Aldershot Town and the ominous ascension of Donald Trump don’t appear to have much in common, yet they happen to be the twin obsessions driving David Kynaston when he decided to keep a diary of the 2016/17 season. This country’s most accomplished contemporary historian, Kynaston, born in 1951, is also a lifelong fan of “the Shots” with a memory for games, names and anniversaries that has surely earned him his badges as a fully licensed football anorak.
Why a diary? For one thing, Kynaston uses them a lot for his research, and thinks that – like David Cameron’s answer to why he should be PM – he’d be “rather good at it”. Being a diary-keeper for 20 years myself, I was keen to know if he could justify that little boast. One essential requirement, in my experience, is stamina, and as someone who has slogged around the country as a supporter for 60 years Kynaston doesn’t look short of puff. He’s also got the diarist’s gifts of curiosity and enthusiasm, albeit for a throwback vision of football – that prelapsarian era of muddy pitches and wooden rattles before money tore the game away from its traditional roots. Indeed, much of the book is a cri de coeur for a lost England, not just in football but in civic architecture, community spirit and public integrity, and for all that he deplores nationalism, he recognises in himself a “Little Englisher” with a patriotic love of “green Sussex fields”.
As the diary proceeds, a seeming chasm opens up between the parochial and the geopolitical. His fan’s notes on Aldershot’s game-by-game progress in the Vanarama, AKA the National League, sit oddly adjacent to his dread that a Trump victory in the US election has gone from “virtually unthinkable” to a horrifying possibility. For a while the footie becomes an alternative universe, a way of not thinking about what’s happening – as it does for so many of us. When reality bites and Trump wins, Kynaston takes it personally – “the biggest political moment of my lifetime” (bigger than Brexit?) – just as he does the death of his hero, Leonard Cohen, a couple of days later: “I’ve been faithful throughout & love almost everything he’s done.” What with the Shots continuing a poor run with a 1-0 defeat to Eastleigh, it has become an unhappy November for him.
One thing you notice is how Kynaston the diarist differs from Kynaston the historian, in mood at least. The steady, magisterial voice that informs his epic sequence up to Modernity Britain (2013-2014) is in these pages more tentative, troubled, ambivalent. He more than once calls himself a “pessimist” (he’s a Gissing devotee) and by March 2017 admits that “outside personal stuff, I’ve never been so apprehensive in my life”. His grief over Trump broadens into agonised meditations upon democracy, populism and whither-the-left in Britain. He despairs at Corbyn’s intellectual emptiness yet also finds himself out of sympathy with the centre-left and their aggressive moral certainties. He believes that mess and contradiction are not only unavoidable but necessary for life to “retain its savour”, though how that might work in politics he doesn’t know. Meanwhile, the Shots have lost only one game in a late surge and might qualify for the play-offs; not knowing how the 2016/17 run-in ended becomes quite exciting for the non-partisan reader (ie just about everyone). As Kynaston likes to quote from Clockwise: “I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”
There is much that enlivens and engrosses here. Kynaston does prove a “good” diarist, but he is fundamentally too fair-minded to be a great one. His decency as a person keeps getting in the way of his duty as a writer. His diary is severely short on gossip, even for someone living in New Malden. It may also be because he’s writing with one eye on publication that he never really lets himself off the leash to be ruthless, or just mildly indiscreet. When considering the former England manager Graham Taylor – not Graham Turner, as printed here – he calls him “the better sort of footballing person”. Doesn’t he mean a small-minded and overpromoted club manager who led the national team into a football cul-de-sac? He almost allows Trump and his wrongdoing to hijack the project, and at times he knows it: “I hate the way that this diary is getting dominated by this thin-skinned egotist.” Rage can be a wonderful tonic, but it needs tempering if the prose isn’t to be dried out by it. I prefer Kynaston when he is, in his own favourite word, “inspiriting”.
Anthony Quinn’s Klopp: My Liverpool Romance will be published by Faber in November
• Shots in the Dark: A Diary of Saturday Dreams and Strange Times by David Kynaston is published by Vintage (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
