It is an extraordinary and much overlooked fact of life that people actually go to football matches. Games don’t, in fact, take place in front of television cameras with a tape of crowd noise in the background. It would be logical, then, to bring these people — thousands of them — into your calculation when planning a football season. But no: the attitude of the fixture-makers is clear: if you are stupid enough to want to go to a football match, you must take the consequences.

This parallels the belief held by the people who run the trains in this country. They feel that it is bad enough providing trains at the best of times, but at Christmas there is no point in even pretending to try. If you are stupid enough to travel by train at this time of year, you must be ready to suffer.

Traditionally, the Christmas football programme has centred on the derby. This has a double value: easy travelling and matches with a special zing appropriate to a special time of year. A derby is an event, an occasion, redolent of tribal histories and prone to gratifyingly unexpected results. This week, the fixtures computer had Newcastle United at home against Charlton Athletic, from southeast London. A Dantesque descent into the hell of bad motorways and worse trains reached its climax as the match was called off half an hour before kick-off. Other fixtures included Plymouth Argyle against Preston North End, postponed two hours before the start, and Stockport County v Torquay United, called off with only an hour to go. The fixtures computer is a machine filled with a witless contempt for those it serves. It needs reprogramming with a rare software called Common Humanity.