HELLO, how’s your week been? We’ve been going through some of my late dad’s stuff, including old football programmes, as I gear up for a (very) early Saturday morning drive to Liverpool, for the lunchtime kick-off between Everton and Arsenal. 

I have to underline we’ve not been treating the task in a morbid way, viewing every possession as if it were the Turin shroud itself.

No, far from it. There’s a time for grieving and a time for being practical. The two aren’t mutually exclusive of course, and the freight train of grief can strike at any time.

But then, in this strange year so far, so can the urge for an early spring clean.

And my mum, while missing dear Dad acutely, often, and invariably often beyond words, is also rousingly practical and has a powerful matter-of-factness about her, which I think stems from her poor childhood growing up in Ireland. Which means she gets things done. In this case clearing out ephemera. 

It’s strange going through a good man’s life in items. Ties, for example — my dad always believed in the old working-class maxim of looking as smart and as well turned out as you could. Hence a large collection of ties.

I, on the other hand, am more of the ideological slant that ties are a form of subjugation, and I vowed a long time ago never to wear one again.

I haven’t and I don’t. And I’m proud of that fact. Which is why I certainly had no problem packing up a black sack of my father’s smart ties to give to a local charity shop. 

What did stop me in my tracks, in ushering happy memories flooding back, was the realisation he’d kept every single one of my postcards and letters to him from when I went travelling the world.

Not to mention eager letters from school holiday trips with Mum to Ireland as a kid. (My mother was born in Donegal, my dad in Basra — yes, it’s a long story.)

To see my childish handwriting eagerly discussing rough and tumble with my cousins, days out sea fishing with uncles, and, as befitted a fledgling journalist, even as a 10-year-old, I was also keen to report tales of playing football until dusk, including scores and notable passages of play no less, in breathless, spidery handwriting that was unknowingly to precede T-line shorthand study learning to be a hack, many years later. 

I also had a pleasant surprise to find that Dad had kept football programmes I’d bought him from games I’d attended as a teenager, when I first started branching out and going to away games with my mates, not with Dad. 

One match programme stood out, this week, among others, in particular. It was Everton v Arsenal. Saturday January 14 1989. 

1989: now that was year. A lot happened over those momentous 12 months. To paraphrase Lenin, it was one of those years when decades happen. 

The Tiananmen Square massacre and the fall of the Berlin Wall were yet to happen by that January, 34 years ago.

I was far more interested in the Madchester music scene and indie music — later that year to be supplemented by dance, following a trip to Ibiza with school pals, that, I must confess, had us looking more like the Inbetweeners than ravers at that stage.

I was also into football. Heavily into football. And The Arsenal was my drug of choice as a 16-year-old. 

Holding that old Everton v Arsenal programme this week while going through Dad’s stuff — blunted corners and a still visible fold to indicate the publication lived in my back pocket during the 90 minutes — I still recall vividly my first visit to Goodison. 

Grand old Goodison. Then as now, the team existing on past glories. 

As an aside, I still contend to anyone listening that their mid-1980s vintage that I saw in the flesh in the schoolboy enclosure at Highbury a few times, was one of the finest English football has ever produced.

Neville Southall, Gary Stevens, Pat Van Den Hauwe, Kevin Ratcliffe, David Watson, Alan Harper, Peter Reid, Trevor Steven, Kevin Sheedy, Adrian Heath and Graeme Sharp — a litany of legendary names, immortalised by their thrilling deeds to lift the league title twice in three years. And how those loyal Evertonians loved them. And still do. 

Yes, their 1989 side was well on the wane by then, even if a trip to fortress Goodison was no walk in (Stanley) park. 

Yet, one of the reasons I love visiting Goodison Park is because not much has changed in the intervening years since my first visit all those years ago.

That might feel like a dig against die-hard Evertonians, struggling to process the lack of progress on and off field these days — but I genuinely mean it as a compliment. 

Archibald Leitch’s flying buttresses are a thing of beauty. When the Toffees eventually move to their shiny new Bramley-Moore dock I hope Engineering Archie’s efforts are saved and preserved for posterity.

Yes, the away end on the Bullens Road — and for that matter the press box opposite — are cramped and uncomfortable, and the sightlines imperfect, but grounds like Goodison — and there aren’t many left — contain the very essence, soul and ghosts of our game. 

Even, for someone as avowedly non-religious as myself, the fact that you can see a church nestled between the main stand of the club that started life as the St Domingo’s Church team, and the Gwlady’s Street End is pleasing to the eye, if not the soul. 

Which is why I’m far more excited than I should be about Saturday’s fixture. 

In football terms of course, Sean Dyche’s arrival — complete with player questionnaires and rolled-up socks in training — is bound to have an effect.

Having observed Everton’s new manager at close quarters during many a post-match press conference in the bowels of Turf Moor, he is a far more thoughtful and intelligent presence than many give him credit for. 

Apart from instructing his new charges to roll their socks up — figuratively as much as literally — Dyche’s first task is to build a culture at the club that closed the infernal transfer window without a purchase.

Admittedly, losing the disinterested Antony Gordon to Newcastle for £40m was no shock. Nor was it a surprise that Villarreal’s Arnaut Danjuma move was hijacked by Spurs. Or that Rennes winger Kamaldeen Sulemana opted for the quieter waters of Southampton.

While an initial £20 million bid for Udinese striker Beto was rejected out of hand, with owner Farhad Moshiri and director of football Kevin Thelwell refusing to go higher, sadly raising no eyebrows either for Evertonians these days. 

Yet, make no mistake, Saturday’s early clash between the team occupying top spot, and the side in 19th position, with only one win in 12 games, will be a tough one for the Premier League leaders.

Former Bluenose Mikel Arteta will know that more than anyone — and will have hopefully impressed that on his players. 

I’ll be in the press box on Saturday, but just as 1989, I was in the away end last season, when Arsenal snatched defeat from the jaws of victory to Frank Lampard’s struggling side, and the Gunners will have to be intensely aware of the Goodison roar. 

I know plenty of Evertonians, sharp, intelligent, witty people, who live and breathe their club, and when they get behind their team — as they invariably do despite all their off-field travails — they create a rare, guttural roar, as intense as it is raw, nearly unmatched in this country these days.

The type of noise that rolls down venerable stands imbued with the spirit of generations past, an aural assault, that new, shiny grounds will simply never ever match. 

Evertonians know their football. My abiding memory is of the majority in Goodison Park on that long-lost midwinter Saturday back in 1989 clapping off George Graham’s victorious Arsenal team, following their impressive 3-1 triumph, with goals from Alan Smith, Paul Merson — and former under-rated Toffee Kevin Richardson, who was a vital cog in that exceptional Gunners side that powered to the title during another Merseyside trip that May. 

The parallels between Gorgeous George’s 1989 league winning side and Arteta’s hungry young guns are evident.

Even if it is still too early to discuss 2023 hopes yet, certainly not given last week’s FA Cup victory over Arsenal by Manchester City — or the fact that Pep Guardiola’s side are yet to face the Gunners twice in the league. (As an aside, thank you to many in the away end at City for their kind words and hugs that comforted me about my dad during the 1-0 defeat last Friday.)

However, what remains from my first trip to the blue half of Merseyside all those years ago is that my mind’s eye can still picture Everton fans applauding Arsenal, as they walked off the muddy pitch that cold January day in 1989, in an act of sporting generosity that resonated across the decades for me. 

Everton fans are still as passionate and knowledgeable about their club and football to this day. 

Which is why Saturday promises to be a cracker — on and off the field. And I know my old man will be looking down from above eagerly watching too. 

Just don’t mention me giving his ties away. Even if I’ll always treasure the memories our sepia-tinted match programmes bring.