THE bairns are 33 and 31 now and their father has brought them up properly. They support Arsenal and Shildon – passionately, permanently and in alphabetical order.

Shildon’s season being finished, we head on Saturday on the 7 54am for the FA Cup final, a now-familiar dads-and-lads’ weekend.

They’ve been reared on the legend of Charlie George, on the last time Sunderland scored at Wembley and on the growing reality of Chippy Brady, Thierry Henri and the totemic Tony Adams.

Lord Tom Pendry, President of the Football Foundation and principal guest the previous evening at the Ebac Northern League’s annual dinner, is on the same train. He’ll be in the royal box, as will Northern League chaplain and Newcastle upon Tyne Methodist district chairman Canon Leo Osborn, who has every Aston Ville programme – home and away – since before the Great War.

Such his absurd optimism, that at the dinner it has been necessary to remind Canon Osborn of a verse from the Gospel according to St Matthew, the one that warns of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The journey’s greatly pleasant, save that no one’s remembered to bring the kettle so Virgin has no hot water for the coffee.

That morning’s Times has a story about a German firm, who’ll use Hitachi trains built in Newton Aycliffe, contemplating a rival bid for the East Coast main line franchise that would lop half an hour off the journey between Edinburgh and London.

It wouldn’t if, like the 7 54, it stops at Northallerton and every other town of more than 5,000 souls between Darlington and Kings Cross.

The Times also has a paragraph about the Latin name for the indestructible cockroach. It’s called a blatta.

THE younger bairn joins us in London. On aspirational days he lives in Greenwich, which is very well-heeled, and on more truthful ones over the border in Deptford Bridge (which isn’t.)

One of his earliest memories, he says, is of having an Arsenal scarf brought home from Wembley when he was just three or four. Instead of waving it from the roof top, he ran around the garden pretending to be a linesman.

“It was the start of my officious streak,” he says.

Since the match doesn’t start until 5 30pm, we head for a few beers to Pinner, west of Wembley, where Elton John went to grammar school and where, last month, he returned from America for a reunion.

Probably it was a flying visit. Not even Elton could afford to live in Pinner. Gosh, it’s posh.

Memory suggests that there was also a goalkeeper called Mike Pinner who kept Harry Sharratt of Bishop Auckland out of the England amateur international team in the 1950s and might have had a game or two for QPR.

Walking through Pinner park, our path is crossed by a single magpie. Just as the elder bairn is gloomily rehearsing the line about one for sorrow, another bird scores a direct hit on his brother.

“That means good luck. It’s the equaliser,” says the elder bairn.

Extra time and penalties, then?

WE'RE headed for The Case is Altered, one of several English pubs with that curious name. It’s an ancient term for bringing in new evidence, apparently, though folklore has it that one of them – originally simply called the Case – was refused a licence on account of being too small. So the owner extended it.

The younger lad, who enjoys quiz setting, asks in the course of the chicken burger which ten parliamentary constituencies adjoin that of Richmondshire, a question which readers may in turn care to consider.

We have another pint in the sun at Eastcote Cricket Club – the sun always shines on the FA Cup final – before the bairns grab a can of gin and tonic (honest) from Tesco and we head back to the Metropolitan Line, and to Wembley Park.

That the Tube’s mainly carrying Arsenal folk is unsurprising, there being few Aston Villa adherents in Harrow-on-the-Hill. That they’re singing about by far the greatest team the world has ever seen is simply a statement of the obvious.

Our more accustomed Wembley visits tend to be in the FA Vase, of course, the most immediately obvious difference that at the Vase final you don’t find grown men almost prostrated outside the station, in earnest supplication of a spare ticket.

AT the Vase final I’m usually in the royal box, too, and very grateful for the FA’s hospitality, though it should not be supposed that this means being hugger-mugger with monarchy.

It’s a very big royal box. In terms of order of precedence, league chairmen are the approximate equivalent of Princess Michael of Kent. In any event, Her Majesty’s usually washing her hair that day.

Saturday’s seats cost £120 each. The programme’s a tenner, a chicken Balti pie a fiver and a pint £5 20. Some of the lads have gone to the Scottish FA Cup final at Hampden. A ticket’s £15.

In every sense we’re on what might be supposed the Gunners’ side. Beneath each Wembley seat thereabouts is a blue-and-yellow scarf and an Arsenal flag and no matter that the flag may inadvertently become an offensive weapon. In the wrong hands, come to think, the scarf might be a bit dangerous, too.

The elder bairn protects his flag paternally, a present for his two-year-old daughter back in Darlington. Even if signed by the Archduke Arsene himself, however, it’s likely she’d have preferred Peppa Pig. The following morning they’re selling for £50 on eBay.

The seats are great. You can feel warmth from kindred spirits, heat from the pre-match pyrotechnics, fire from the fanatical.

Those in front stay seated for the first couple of minutes, forever up and down thereafter. As a form of exercise, it beats the hell out of Pilates.

The bairns sum it in the argot of youth: buzzin’.

ARSENAL are overwhelming favourites, having already between Villa 5-0 and 3-0 in Premiership games – the biggest aggregate difference between two Cup final teams since the Football League kicked off in 1888.

Walcott scores a very good goal after 40 minutes, Sanchez a truly glorious one after 50. It’s a bit hard to discern the words of the ensuing song amid the cacophony, but it sounds like half of Wembley wants to have Alexis Sanchez’s baby.

Mertesacker heads a routine third, Giroud nudges a last minute fourth. Villa, eviscerated, have long since suggested that the game was up. When last did an FA Cup final team fail to win so much as a corner? When last did a team fail to register a single shot, on or off target? Not in the 2014-15 Premiership, anyway.

On the Tube, their fans are cheerfully philosophical. “You lot can’t be much good,” someone says. “Southampton put six past us.”

Buzzin’ like an apiarists’ convention, dads and lads head for London Bridge, and for the Thames Clipper down river to Greenwich. We’ve a bottle of beer apiece, the evening sun on our backs, a gentle wind that wafts the flags on the Tower.

On the breeze a strange and soulful noise may be detected: it sounds awfully like weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Good old Arsenal.