Fenerbahce rules (my husband's life, that is)

European football seems to inspire levels of commitment Kate Oktay admits finds hard to understand  - and Turkish club Fenerbahce is like a cult.

I would like to start by saying a resounding "I hate you, Fenerbahce".

Fenerbahce is a football team. But they are more than that. They are the barometer of my husband's mood. And right now they are on the cusp of being relegated to the second division. So according to my husband, life also feels a little like it is being relegated to the second division.

European football seems to inspire levels of commitment that I can't comprehend and Fenerbahce is like a cult. Let me list a few of my husband's Fenerbahce foibles:

• When we first met my husband had to sign something and I looked down at the steel-wool scrawl with bemusement. "How did you make it that crazy?" I asked. "It's nothing, just my first initial, and then F.B and then my last name." I scrunched up my nose, "What do you mean, F.B?". My husband looked at me like I was a slow child. "Fenerbahce." Yes, dear reader. This.

• Colour is very important in our household, and a clear preference would be (for all occasions and mediums) blue and gold. He picks fish and flowers based on football colours. Buying a T-shirt? Blue and yellow is a solid bet. And there is always going to be a fight about red. Hated, terrible Galatasaray red.

• I hate driving my husband's car. This is because it is also a Fenerbahce supporter. The driver's seat has a team t-shirt stretched over it. The backseat window has a large Fenerbahce sign. He has a sort of prayer beads in yellow and blue hanging from the rear-vision mirror. People lean in the window to have a chat, stop mid-sentence and look at me with troubled expressions; "Ah, is your car wearing a t-shirt?". "Yes," I mutter while trying to think of distracting anecdotes from my day to divert the gales of laughter I know are coming my way, aware that I am mentally being put in the same basket as people who dress their dog in shoes.

• Once when Fenerbahce almost won something but then very badly lost everything my husband was distraught. It plunged him into a terrible fog of anger for weeks. I forgot about it and got sick of the constant sniping and bad humour and sat him down. "I think we need to talk about this. This clearly isn't working. We aren't working," I said, gesturing back and forth between us. "What is wrong?" I asked gently. "You know! You know what's wrong!" he replied in mouth-frothing madness and I suddenly remembered his stupid football team that lost some stupid match five weeks earlier.

The list of Fenerbahce's invasions into my life is endless. Every phone number we have has Fenerbahce's establishment date of 1907 featured prominently. Every time we name a pet he argues for players' surnames to be bestowed. Our letterbox is a lurid yellow and blue stripe. A Fenerbahce sign is nailed to the front of our house, and the only reason the flag is still in the cupboard and not on the roof is because it is a long fall and my husband is both clumsy and not DIY inclined.

My delightful, but even more Fenerbahce-mad brother-in-law once told me what the three most important things in the world were: No 1: Allah; No 2: Fenerbahce; and No 3: Russian women. It was a joke. Sort of. My husband tells me his list is; Allah, Fenerbahce, his mother, his daughter, me. This is not a joke.

My husband's first game watching the Highlanders was a shock. "Why are we all sitting together?!" he asked my father in distraught tones when he saw people wearing Crusaders flags nearby. In comparison, at the Fenerbahce stadium there is a small area of seating that is completely caged off for the opposition supporters.

This, it was explained to me, was so that they didn't get killed. I thought this was an over-reaction until I went to a match and was petrified at the manic fans who spent the entire game with their back to the pitch leading chants and staring with crazy-people eyes at you if you weren't showing enough enthusiasm. "He is saying that if you don't start clapping he is going to do something very bad to your mother," my brother-in-law translated matter of factly as I tried to avoid getting my hair set on fire from nearby flares.

This level of mania would be partially forgivable if Fenerbahce won more frequently.

This week, however, we had good news: despite Fenerbahce being the worst team they have ever been in more than 100 years, they played Galatasaray (hated, terrible Galatasaray) and didn't lose. This counts as a win right now, and my husband has spent the week whistling the team song absent-mindedly and behaving like a regular human being.

In a Pavlovian dog sort of a way he is almost turning me into a supporter.