HERE'S a tip:
if you really want to avoid as coming across as someone quite old, never ever discuss your football memories with a teenager.
My chance discovery the other day of a couple of tattered football programme from the late 1970s, and the news of the death of Berwick Rangers' player Sammy Reid - the man whose goal famously knocked the big Rangers out of the 1967 Scottish Cup - occasioned a conversation with a close friend's teenage son.
This, of course, is an 18-year-old to whom anything that occurred before the advent of the English Premier League in 1992 is coeval with the late Cambrian period.
When I told him Berwick's victory was one of the biggest upsets in Scottish football history, he seemed interested. Then he probably worked out this was so long ago his dad would have been at primary school at the time.
He lost interest.
I tried to share some of my memories of football in that spell between the very late 1960s and the early 1970s, when I followed my local team.
"There were some great players back then," I said. I mentioned a few names but I might have been talking about reserve team players in the Johannesburg Sunday League of the 1940s for all the signs of recognition he showed.
"If memory serves, I saw Alex Ferguson play a couple of times," I said.
"Yeah?" he asked. You could almost hear him working it out: Wait a minute, Fergie's 72 now ... and this bloke saw him when he was playing football?
I should have stopped there, but I droned on.
"I remember ... there used to be all these light blue, three-wheeler invalid cars parked along the touchline during games ..." I began. "And you wouldn't believe the way they'd give you the half-time scores from the other games!"
"Tannoy?" he said.
"Well, yeah ... but they'd also have this touchline board with letters of the alphabet. You'd look at the programme, and find out which letter matched which game.
"Then at half-time, guys would put numbers next to each letter. That way, you'd know the score."
He looked at me curiously. The conversation dried up there and then. If his parting thought was, "This sad old bloke's even older than I thought", mine was a startled, "Good God. I'm even older than I thought."
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