14km of optical cables, 3488 doors, 2618 toilets, 23000 tonnes of structural steel and a circumference of 1 km: you can see Wembley stadium from all over North London. I live round the back of it and mostly forget it’s there. Living here’s a bit like living in a Don Delillo novel - occasionally I think watered down Delillo-esque thoughts. On Event Days, I sit in my back garden and listen to the muted and dense roar smoking out the top of the stadium. It sublimates some inner wrath or pain unconnected with the basic humanness of things. Sometimes I think that the stadium is like the Colosseum or a Vogon space ship.

It’s only when I’m leaving, that last backward glance, and I see it suddenly anew, towering like a paneled volcanic island of steel and thunder over the flat redbrick tundra of North London, clothed in bulging cumuli and I think with a sudden sense of wonder, yes it is amazing. It makes steel look as light as sailcloth. It makes the sky a grand statement of intent. Clouds seem to gain more definition and saturation in its orbit. Sunsets turn to lava.

The road sign on Empire Way which skirts round the North side of the stadium points to a place called ‘Wembley City.’ I have wandered around the stadium surrounds, searching for this City, through underpass and concrete floodplain carpark, sagging metal fencing, stared up at the vast cliff escarpment, the empty newbuild apartments, peered into the sole Tesco Metro, past the tabarded workmen, feeling like Percy Fawcett looking for the lost city of Z. And found nothing. My flatmate had whispered in my ear of cinema complexes and shopping malls, but Olympic Way, Empire Way and the White Horse Bridge, built only for funneling floods of flag-draped football fans and for nationalistic fervour, are deserted. On Royal Route, I am lonelier than Petrarch in his green solitude. This is the place that would have driven Baudelaire mad with its emptiness and its amateurish mosaics of pastelly footballers. Perhaps Hopper would have caught its loneliness. There are no narrow alleys here either, only broad deserted avenues and boulevards - alleys incubate sedition and rebellion I suppose. There is nowhere to hide Wembley City, nowhere to hide in the place that doesn’t exist.

For the truth is Event Days are surprisingly few out here at the second largest stadium in Europe. There are a few days when an amplified woman’s voice fills the stadium, testing the sound system. Her voice is rich yet gentle, it drenches the stadium and its surrounds in honey and maternal creepiness. She will be the one to greet the aliens.

When Event Days come, they explode out of nowhere, a sudden flash flood of people and longing-on-a-large-scale. You wake up on your peaceful street with its peaceful plane trees and drifting Sundays and the sky throbs with helicopters, riot police on huge riot horses line up outside the red brick Jehovah’s Witness Church and Wembley Triangle is amill with slobs and sunburned retards spilling off the Bakerloo and Met, pouring out of the tube stations, flooding down the steps, drawn from their houses and marching down my quiet street as if the stadium has suddenly become magnetized, a forcefield with sinister hum that draws to its steel and green heart all the mindless acosmic conforms and beer-bellied Dionysians clutching their season tickets, looking for a hollow in the afternoon where they can frot themselves into states of rapture. Nope can’t say I like football fans. Medieval depictions of hell and football games share one thing - they are both hoard-based. ‘Crowds come together to form a shield… to become a crowd is to keep out death’ (White Noise, Don Delillo) Indeed, ‘Turba’ is the old Latin word for crowd, uproar, confusion, tumult… from which comes the word not ‘mob’ but ‘turbulence’. We, in my houseshare, tend not to go out on Event Days. We see Orpheus floating downstream torn to pieces by the nasty little Maenads – ‘beware of crowds’ history seems to whisper. It was Hitler who said ‘The crowd is my bride. I am wedded to them’.

Even the stadium’s grass seems sinister - developed by the Sports Turf Research Institute, flown in under moonlight, one imagines, by men in spacesuits, the NASA of the football world: divot-free technology, unmoved by wind or sunlight, stripped of chlorophyll. How would Delillo rhapsodise that? The kind of stuff that could turf Mars and withstand the burning out of the sun? My street occasionally has moments of weirdness – I see a young girl with a python draped round her neck out the corner of my eye then she is gone. A funeral procession led by white horses and a white carriage that disappears into nowhere.

There are those who argue that the passion for sport is greater now than at any point in human history because our intellectual capabilities, our very presence is no longer inscribed within flesh but freed from the flesh nexus and poured online, reassembled, reconstituted, we are all pixellated Frankensteins. But Alex Ross pointed out in the New Yorker that crowd participation in sports in America is actually at its lowest ebb. The very attraction of football may indeed be its physical inscription within limited space and the primordial binary of win/lose, hero/worship. But concomitantly our passion for football is ever more billboardy and commercialized. It’s capitalism-funnelled not based on the same noble-ish ideas that fuelled the Colosseum crowds. Indeed, Wembley Stadium is part of Foster and Partners architectural empire, which extends everywhere, from the Twin towers to Kazakhstan, it’s part of a global currency. You will note that the stadium shares the same thin snaking ribbons of steel bracing in the wind as does the Millenium Bridge. Its sliding roof, a bit like a horizontal garage door, means it slides open and closed – I imagine it winking at the sky like a great nictating reptilian eye, the evil eye of a Hegelian ‘bad infinity’ of endlessly proliferating league tables and Vatican-style football associations and endlessly prolifering moronic fathers and sons stretching on and on without thought into the past and future. Football the father, football the son, football the holy ghost. Earth air fire Bovril. I am not like one of those American intellectuals like Robert Harrison raptly invoking Heidigger or Kant’s Third Critique, the chess-like quality of strategizing, the therapeutic nature of ritualized contained violence. I don’t like football. I don’t like Cheryl Cole. I liked the Aztec version mildly better – they sacrificed the winning team and possibly the WAGs too if they had any sense.
After the hoards drain away back into the civic groundwater, the stadium reigns once again, silent and eerie over its vacant kingdom. They leave vomit behind like Rorschach splats to be decoded on the deserted walkways of ‘Wembley City’. Beer cans blow sideways in mysterious cross winds. Prices are mysteriously hiked in local bars. The departure of the hoards leaves behind a lingering sense of mystery, an absence that is almost poetic. ‘Longing on a large scale is what makes history’ said Don Delillo in ‘Underworld’. Nick Shay in the same novel jokes about how he feels like he lives in a Witness Protection Programme living on the street he does. I feel the same living on the street I do in the shadow of what I do. This is the perfect street to disappear.