I don't care who you are in world football or where your allegiances lie - there can be few experiences to match your very first Old Firm game.

Mine was on the cold, dark afternoon - at least in Glasgow - of January 4 1975. The venue was Ibrox Stadium - the old oval Ibrox - where a crowd of 70,000 gathered for the traditional New Year (ish) Glasgow derby. To a child's eyes it was simply an unbelievable scene.

That said, the backdrop to this story is pretty ludicrous. I laugh about it to this day, given the sheer naivety of it all.

I was steeped in Rangers FC as a kid. I've been somewhat lapsed in recent decades - some have even called me "a Rangers hater" - but this peculiar scenario is beside the point. Back then I loved the club, and my father and I regularly traipsed along to Ibrox to see Rangers, much to my delight, cuff just about anyone who crossed their path.

All of this is true except matches versus Celtic. As a wee kid I was never allowed near an Old Firm game, despite begging my dad to take me to one.

There was a time in the early 1970s when it was nightmarish being a Rangers fan in the Old Firm context. You'd sit there at home, waiting for the old Grandstand teleprinter to chatter out the results on your screen, and any kid, like me, who was a Rangers fan, would watch all this in recurring gloom.

Click-click-clack-clack…out came the Grandstand results:

Rangers 0, Celtic 2

Celtic 2, Rangers 1

Rangers 2, Celtic 3

Rangers 0, Celtic 3

Rangers 1, Celtic 2

In my childhood for a certain period these woeful tidings seemed never-ending. My sister, two years older than me, and a Celtic fan, learned to position herself gleefully beside me for these Saturday tea-time TV results, knowing that Celtic clearly had the upper hand.

Still, Ibrox was magnificent to visit. My dad and I, plus my childhood friend, The Big Bal, stood in exactly the same spot week in, week out for years: at the uncovered Broomloan end. Up the great terracing steps, past the wall, then down the second aisle to about two-thirds of the way to the front, then in on the left.

Except for Old Firm games. "Please, dad…please can we go to Ibrox on Saturday?" I would plead with my father as another Old Firm game loomed. "No, son," he would say. "Not this week."

But then, January 1975 arrived. I was still not quite in my teens when, that Saturday morning, the stunning news was delivered - we were heading to Ibrox that afternoon for Rangers versus Celtic. Uncontrollable excitement.

In those days we would park our car at a friend's house in Urrdale Road near Ibrox and make the 10 minute walk to the stadium. And that particular afternoon my father thought nothing of it…off we went, me with my Rangers scarf on, to our usual spot at the away end, slap-bang in the middle of 25,000 Celtic fans.

Amateur psychologists might have a field day with this, but I will never forget the experience. On a grim, bleak afternoon, with Ally Scott charging around like a wild giraffe up front, Rangers horsed Celtic 3-0.

When the first Rangers goal went in I jumped up yelling with excitement - to be immediately smothered by the surreal experience of hearing your lone voice amid the silence of 25,000 others. In the distance, across at the Rangers end, the roar was like a storm brewing.

I don't know why I remember this, but I do. As I gathered myself a kindly voice behind me - presumably a Celtic fan - said to me: "Don't worry, you shout for your team, son." Two more Rangers goals went in that day, over which I showed a bit more restraint.

That day has remained with me. The great edifice of Ibrox, which I had come to adore, was different: literally tribal and doubtless a bit poisonous (though I didn't know it at the time) with me stuck haplessly in the middle of it.

The weather was filthy and the pitch like a ploughed field - you can still watch about five minutes of the match on Youtube - which gave it all a strange, macabre feel. All this filled the senses of an 11 year old, even uncomprehendingly so.

Two questions….

First, just how unsafe were these packed terracings, and how on earth were there not more accidents at such matches? Not much earlier, when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, I'd got lost at Ibrox (at that same terracing spot) at a mobbed Rangers-Arsenal centenary fixture. It was a terrifying episode.

Second, how many other oblivious fathers back then took their Rangers-clad son (or daughter) to a Celtic end for an Old Firm game? Not many, I'm guessing.

The memory makes me smile today. My dad was a great, caring parent, but his senses deserted him that day. A Baptist minister, his mind was probably whirring towards his sermon the next morning.

I will never forget it - my first Old Firm game.