I registered on-line for my Paris ticket and printed out a confirmation that all was tickety-boo (tickety - geddit?). I was promised an e-mail reply from TicketMaster by 10pm on Tuesday May 2 telling me whether I had been successful in the ticket ballot. So precise a time, so comforting that I was in the hands of a professional company. No e-mail was received and it was impossible to contact TicketMaster by telephone. The menu didn’t even provide a non-receipt of the e-mail option.

I went into blunderbuss mode. I fired in every direction I could think of to get my ticket. This included Sky Sports News, who I hoped might find some anti-Arsenal interest in my story. I spoke to the only live TicketMaster employee, a young girl in the theatre ticket office in Leicester Square. She wanted to help me but had been disciplined for helping a fellow Arsenal dupe the day before. There was an easy way: on May 2, before my 10pm deadline, tickets were on sale on the Internet at €800 or more.

To their great credit, the Arsenal ticket office responded to my registered letter to them. They told me I had been successful in the ballot and gave me a new TicketMaster number to call. It took me a couple of attempts to complete the automated TicketMaster system. Now I just had to wait for my ticket, with the expectation that I’d have another long and fruitless session with the telephone robots to explain that it hadn’t arrived.

But it did arrive! My wonderful old-fashioned postman who retired in June signed for the envelope himself. That’s probably a hanging offence in the cool Britannia in which I am now forced to live. My postman saved me from having to travel to the Royal Mail depot on the God-forsaken Tottenham one-way system. Things were looking up.

I got to Paris and had the best of times. (Thank you Thierry, Nadine, Orph, Patrick, Sulieman, Mimi and the beautiful Matilda in Bar Berq.) I vowed that on my return I would write of my experience to Keith Edelman with the aim of ensuring that nobody else will suffer my traumas. I now understand the letters to the Gooner complaining of the TicketMaster experience. But time moves on, so many people to see and the ironing to be done. You know how it is.

I can understand Arsenal’s position. The Box Office is not geared up to deal with the sudden release of 20,000 tickets. It makes sense to outsource the activity to an organisation specialising in the work. But accountability has gone. The temptations are too great for too many people along the line when tickets with a face value of €60 sell at €800 or more.

I believe that is why the 10pm e-mail never arrived and why some Arsenal bond holders and season ticket holders never got a sniff. It also explains why so many fans I saw on the road to Paris were not Highbury regulars, but judging by their cars and their gold jewellery were easily up for a few €800 tickets and a couple of nights away.