I was in Canada last week, travelling across British Columbia on a luxury train called the Rocky Mountaineer. It was great. The downside was I had to travel to North America and back in five days, meaning that as soon as my body clock had adjusted to the time difference I was back in England. So I was feeling a bit discombobulated when I set off on a road trip to Stoke-on-Trent with my three sons on Saturday morning.

Our first reason for making the journey was to see QPR’s penultimate match of the 2022-23 season against Stoke City, a must-win game for us. We’ve performed so badly since October that only four points separated us from the relegation zone, meaning we needed three from this game or the next to guarantee our survival. More than 2,000 QPR fans made their way up the M1, hoping to have something to celebrate in this miserable season, and for once they weren’t disappointed. Albert Adomah, a 35-year-old midfielder known as ‘Uncle Albert’, scored the only goal, winning the match and cementing our place in the Championship. The visiting fans started singing ‘The Rs are staying up’ the moment the ball found the net and continued until long after the final whistle.

As I often tell my children, the beauty of supporting a struggling second-tier club is that victories come along so infrequently they mean much more than they would to an Arsenal or Chelsea fan. I can’t think of many other football supporters who would be so ecstatically happy just because their team had avoided the drop, but for us it was like winning the FA Cup. I liken it to being a not particularly attractive man. Yes, you have to work a lot harder to persuade a woman to go to bed with you, but when you do it produces a sense of achievement that the Hugh Grants and Brad Pitts of this world will never know. If Man City become the first team ever to win the Premier League title three times in a row – which they’re on track to do – I’m sure that will be very nice for ‘Citeh’ fans. But the pleasure it gives them will be analogous to Leonardo DiCaprio pulling his third Victoria’s Secret model. It will be nothing compared to the thrill I got when I persuaded Caroline to marry me.

So that was Saturday and it was made all the better by my friend Tom – a Stoke supporter – introducing me to North Staffordshire oatcakes, which were vastly superior to the Scottish variety. Discovering a takeaway on London Road offering these hidden gems, once used in a party political broadcast by President Macron to illustrate the fate that awaited France if people voted for Marine Le Pen, was another perk of supporting QPR. My sons and I have enjoyed some fine meals in England’s Red Wall constituencies as we follow our benighted club round the country.

Our second reason for making the trip was not such a success. Fourteen-year-old Charlie has been nagging me to take him to Alton Towers ever since he discovered rollercoaster videos on YouTube and, given that it’s only half an hour’s drive from Stoke, this was an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. After an overnight stay in a Holiday Inn, we set off early in an attempt to reduce the waiting times to get on the rides. But after queueing for 20 minutes for one of the coasters, we were informed it had closed ‘due to a technical difficulty’. When Charlie then checked the Alton Towers app, he discovered that four of the seven rides he’d planned to go on were closed, which was a bit rum considering the park had only been open for half an hour. Admittedly, it was pouring with rain, but that couldn’t have been the reason, surely? You’d hope the engineers would have thought of that, given that it’s in Staffordshire.

To be fair, when I complained to customer services they offered me four complimentary tickets to another amusement park, and then some of the rides reopened later in the day. But I don’t think I’ll be accompanying Charlie on any more rollercoasters. At 59, I’m too old. I don’t mean my body can no longer cope with being tossed around like a tennis ball in a tumble dryer, although that’s certainly a struggle. Rather, it’s that floating sensation you get in your stomach when you’re descending a steep incline and your internal organs are suddenly weightless. As a child, I used to love that feeling and remember encouraging my father to drive as fast as he could over humpback bridges. Now I don’t like it at all. After each ride at Alton Towers I was grateful for the half-hour wait, because it took that long for my organs to settle back into place.

On the plus side, it had the effect of resetting my body clock, and on Sunday I got my first good night’s sleep in a week.