Just as nature marks time by the passing of the seasons, I have tended to mark my own life by the passing of the football season. And another one has passed.

Memories of life in general, merge and match with the fortunes of Everton Football Club. From the passing of my dad on the day in 1985 when we beat Oxford at home and looked odds on to retain the title (only to effectively lose it,  away at Oxford when Gary Lineker lost his shooting boots) to the birth of my daughter, days before a crushing home defeat to Aston Villa left us in the mire of a relegation struggle, (only to survive on the last day of the season when Gareth Farrelly found his shooting boots)

I remember my first continental holiday in the days before the mobile phone and the internet, frantically looking for an English newspaper on the empty island of Crete. I knew we would have thrashed Notts Forest in the first home game of the season. We had a decent team and they were newly promoted. It was the Tuesday after the match that I discovered the awful news. Not that Elvis had died, but we’d lost 3-1 and the name George Wood was on the Blues teamsheet.

The man had played a full game in goal for Everton  and I had never ever heard of him. I was sad at Presley’s passing, of course, but let’s keep things in perspective!

And so onto the latest season, the highs and the hellos, the lows and the goodbyes.

My own personal highlights include the win at Metalist Kharkiv. I still think they were the best team we met in Europe, despite the fact that we beat the eventual winners! Staying with Europe, another highlight has to be the incredible fight back against Fiorentina at home, although typically in the bitter-sweet life of an Evertonian, the same evening provided the season’s penalty-laden low.

Fond farewells to the mercurial McFadden, the madness that is Tommy Gravesen and , most of all to Lee Carsley, whose reliable tenacity we will struggle to replace. There’s a welcome to young Jack Rodwell, who I’ve seen many times at youth level and who really looks ‘the business’ and a second welcome to Manuel Fernandez (I hope another welcome this summer makes it ‘third time lucky’)

Nature’s season of renewal is, of course, Spring. But the real renewal begins in Mid-August!