I do not, as a general rule, enjoy crowds. I find them noisy, unpredictable, and almost always in the way of wherever I am trying to walk. My ideal street has two people on it: myself and someone going in the other direction. Three is acceptable if one of them is a dog.

Tomorrow, by all indications, I will be sharing the streets of Bobington with something in the neighbourhood of 150,000 people, and I confess that I am looking forward to it enormously.

This is not hypocrisy. It is the exception that illuminates the rule. The daily crowd — on the tram, in the market, at the post office — is a crowd of individuals pursuing private errands with no particular interest in one another. It is mere proximity without purpose. But a parade crowd is a different animal altogether. A parade crowd has assembled because it wants to feel something collectively, and there is no force in civic life quite so powerful as a large number of people who have decided, together, to be happy.

I was present at the centennial celebrations in 2019 — the last time Bobington gathered in anything approaching these numbers — and I remember it with a clarity that surprises me, given that I remember approximately nothing else from that year. I stood on Threadneedle Street near the old clock tower, wedged between a woman holding a small child on her shoulders and a very tall man who kept apologising for blocking my view, though he could no more help being tall than I can help being irritable. The processional bands came through, and then the floats, and then the Mayor’s carriage, and then — this is the part I remember — the crowd began to sing.

Not a song, you understand. Not any particular anthem or melody. It was more of a roar that gradually found a tune, the way a river finds its course. It started at one end of the street and rolled toward us, and when it arrived, we joined in, because there was nothing else to do. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so completely a citizen of anywhere.

That is what a parade is for. Not the carriages, not the dignitaries, not the cup itself — though I’m sure it’s a handsome bit of silverware. A parade is for the crowd. It is an opportunity for a city that spends most of its time arguing with itself — about tramways, about taxes, about whether the new lamp posts in Fernwich are an improvement or an abomination — to set all of that aside for an afternoon and simply be together. To stand shoulder to shoulder with people you have never met and very likely disagree with about everything, and to cheer for the same thing at the same time.

I understand that there are those who will not attend. Some have work. Some have infirmities. Some, I suspect, are the sort of people who consider public enthusiasm to be vulgar, and to them I say: you are missing the point of having a city. A city is not merely a collection of buildings connected by plumbing. It is an arrangement by which a great many people agree, however reluctantly, to share a life. And a parade is one of the rare moments when that sharing becomes visible.

The Rovers deserve their celebration. I am not, it must be said, a devoted follower of the sport — I find the rules obscure and the passions disproportionate — but I have read enough about Kael Dunmore’s extraordinary goal to understand that it was one of those moments that transcends its context. A young man struck a ball with perfect force from an improbable distance at exactly the right instant, and 48,000 people lost their collective mind. That is worth celebrating. That is worth standing in the cold.

And it will be cold. February in Bobington is not a gentle season. The forecast suggests temperatures near freezing, with a possibility of that thin, spiteful rain that does not so much fall as hover. My advice: wear your heaviest coat, bring something warm in a flask, and choose your position on the route early. Caldecott Square will be impossibly packed. Threadneedle Street offers better sightlines if you arrive by eleven. Harbourfront Parade, down in the Docklands, is where the atmosphere will be most raucous, if raucous is what you’re after.

I shall be on Threadneedle Street, near the old clock tower, because I am a creature of habit and because I harbour a private hope that the crowd will sing again, as it did seven years ago — that some idiot with a strong voice will start something, and the rest of us, cold and slightly damp and pressed together in our thousands, will join in because there is nothing else to do and nowhere else we’d rather be.

Felix Rensler, with whom I discussed the parade this morning over what is now a four-florin coffee, tells me he plans to set up a table outside his shop on Threadneedle Street with complimentary cups of broth for passers-by. I told him this was either very generous or very shrewd, since a man who gives you broth in February owns your loyalty for life. He smiled in a way that suggested he had considered both possibilities.

“A city that knows how to celebrate,” he said, “is a city worth living in.”

He is right, of course. And tomorrow, we shall prove it — one frozen toe at a time.