EVEN their own players acknowledge the idiosyncrasies of playing for Partick Thistle.

"When I was young," one once said, "I wanted to become a footballer, or run away and join the circus. With Thistle, you got to do both."

But there is no compunction to slap on the greasepaint these days. Partick Thistle are back in the Scottish Premiership, have an unbeaten record, albeit after just one game, and are already 16 points ahead of Hearts given the arithmetical hurdle the Edinburgh side has to climb.

Folk no longer have to apologise or make some self-deprecating remark when they confess to being a Thistle fan.

The name, of course, is the first idiosyncrasy - they don't play in Partick. They started out as an itinerant club, playing on any pitch which was available in the Partick area, before moving permanently to Maryhill early last century. My mother once told me that, if Thistle were ahead, the Maryhill women hingin' oot their window sills in the tenements, long before smokeless fuel was introduced, would deliberately make their coal fires produce smoke to envelope the ground to make things difficult for the opposition.

This taught me two things - one, that Glasgow really was a lung-clogging city in the old days, and two, even in Maryhill most folk thought Thistle would need all the help they could get to hold on to a lead.

The second idiosyncrasy is the fan-base. St Mirren fans have a chant when Thistle visit about the Glasgow side only having homosexuals and students as supporters, although why that should be considered opprobrium says perhaps more about St Mirren fans.

Writer and Jags fan David Belcher tells me: "Well, it is a west end club where two of the biggest employers are the university and, at one time, the BBC, so that's reflected in the support. Beside me at Friday's game was a chief librarian from the university, a man who sells frocks, and an SNP communications officer. But there are an awful lot of just regular ordinary fans.

"And while some people in Glasgow might think of Thistle as a music hall joke, elsewhere in Scotland football fans hate and despise us."

The celebrity fan tag is a difficult one to shake off, particularly when people in the media eye from Glasgow would grab the Partick Thistle supporting lifeline in order to avoid answering the death-trap question: "Are you a Celtic or Rangers fan?" As comedy writer Greg Hemphill astutely stated when Thistle won promotion: "Love the Jags. They're in my blood. Nobody has pretended to support them longer than me."

In fact, Glasgow-born historian Niall Ferguson declared Thistle were the atheists' team as "You couldn't believe in God and support Partick Thistle".

Some football writers did indeed support them though. It was Malky Munro, latterly of the Evening Times, who, as a Thistle fan, fondly dubbed them the Maryhill Magyars, in reference to the then silky skills of Hungarian footballers such as Puskas. Sadly it's usually a sarcastic reference these days if a player in the red and yellow skies a ball out the park. Fellow scribe and Thistle fan Ian Archer once had to write the newspaper headline when Rangers beat Thistle 6-1. He got into hot water for writing "Thistle in seven-goal thriller".

Treating Thistle as a joke team was probably the pressure valve that allowed many people in Glasgow to cope with the internecine bitterness of the Old Firm. Even Bertie Auld, when he was Thistle manager, joked that Thistle had a good chance in European competition. "We just have to get the song written first," he added.

Yet they were no joke in 1971 when they beat Celtic, still playing many Lisbon Lions, 4-1 in the League Cup final at Hampden with the four goals coming in the first 20 or so minutes. Kenny Dalglish, Jimmy Johnstone, Lou Macari were in the green and white hoops that day. Thistle, though, had players such as Alan Rough, Alex Rae and Ronnie Glavin who were among the best in Scotland. And they also had Denis McQuade. Denis fitted the idiosyncrasy cap perfectly. Tall and gangling, he would sail down the wing with the fans not knowing whether he was going to trip over the ball or cross perfectly for a winning goal.

There were bleak times too - financial difficulties, a Save the Jags campaign by fans pitching in money. A saviour in John Lambie in the manager's office, whose demotic use of the English language made him a television interview nightmare. Lambie, of course, is remembered for his intervention when a player went down with concussion and the trainer declared: "He can't even remember who he is."

"Tell him he's Pele," replied Lambie, "and point him to the opposition goal".

It's why the financial difficulties of other clubs such as Hearts will evince no tears from Thistle fans. They argue they went through the difficult years of living within a budget, spending money on ground improvements rather than players while others spent like drunken sailors on shore leave.

At Friday's match against Dundee United, in Thistle's return to the top flight, was poet John Hegley, en route to the Edinburgh Fringe, who was recalling seeing Thistle lose 4-0 at Stenhousemuir when the ball sailed into someone's backyard, and losing at Cowdenbeath where stock cars arrived at the end for that night's racing.

There were no such idiosyncratic moments on Friday night, though, as a deft young Thistle team held Dundee United to a draw. Sad as it may seem to some people, supporting Partick Thistle is no longer a laughing matter.