MY retreat from the football beat has resulted in a severe case of profound nostalgia. I no longer sit at games facing a laptop that contains the incontinent witterings of a desperate man. Instead, I take my seat and memory, that increasingly capricious friend, visits me with a profound power.

To the astonishment of my press mates, and to myself, I have taken to paying into matches. This has prompted what might be called an intervention with colleagues advising therapy and some time in a darkened room.

But I press on. It is as if the past is calling me back in a mixture of gentle comfort and unsettling memory. I have not yet ventured to Greenfield Park, Shettleston, home of many of the most treasured times spent with one brother and grandpa. But I have sat among the punters at Celtic Park, peering down at my old colleagues furiously hammering away to make a dent in word counts that would dismay Tolstoy.

But, curiously, the past is never more present than when I visit the main stand at Firhill. I have been there a couple of times this season. My seat now is on the opposite side of the pitch from where I once threw letters at a screen, hoping some of them might stick.

The feeling of a lost childhood is found in that wooden stand. It is perhaps because nothing really has changed. It is also because visits to Firhill as a kid were never routine, always a joyful, chaotic expedition marked with sugar overloads that would fell an elephant with a sweet tooth and tinged with an excitement that the exotic might be found on Garscube Road and beyond.

This was largely because the trip was led by Davie, an adventurer who would make Shackleton seem cowed. Davie was a mate of my dad’s and he adopted us on the occasional Saturday, normally after a Friday night spent carousing with my dad in the sort of sessions that would have caused Brendan Behan to have an early night.

Davie would wake with the sort of vigour that suggested that instead of imbibing malt whisky through a large hose, he had instead drunk deeply and wisely of the elixir of life. Davie would cook a breakfast that consisted almost entirely of fried fat. This would be consumed with a Caledonian gusto and he would inform his audience – my brothers and sisters – that we were off to the football and the pictures.

He would gather up as many of us that formed a decent quorum and we headed into town, usually by taxi. This luxurious, unaccustomed form of transport was just a hint of the glory to come. Davie, in the best of senses, was just a child in a man’s suit with an adult’s pocket of dosh. We would stock up in the nearest sweetie shop with an enthusiasm that led the owner to believe we were provisioning for an attempt on Sugar Candy Mountain.

We would arrive at Firhill as high as a 1960s pop band. And Davie would pause in some sort of homage in front of the ground before gathering us up and taking us into the stand. The stand. Where one sits, of course. I never, ever understood this. Still don’t. But we sat in what seemed like opulence as the punters stamped on the terraces.

Davie watched the game in a mixture of fascination and bemusement. These, I have learned, are the necessary requirements for all Scottish fitba’ watching. His joy at a victory or his disappointment at a defeat dissipated by the time we tumbled out into a Saturday tea time, ready for the entertainment to continue and more sugar to be sourced.

It was back into a black cab and into town where, after careful perusal of a newspaper amid the hordes of Sauchiehall Street, Davie would give a gentle whoop of approval and declare that Carry On Screaming or The Robe were in a cinema near us. Off we headed to picture houses that were untainted by corporate sameness, though probably tainted by strains of deeply infectious diseases, to watch Kenneth Williams or Victor Mature, who were far from being interchangeable.

The night would end with another commandeering of a cab and a trip home. We could not have been more satisfied with our day if we had spent it on Broadway with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly. It is impossible at a distance of half a century to convey fully how glamorous and exciting it had been. It was all the better for being enjoyed far from our parents and the restrictions posed by big families and small houses.

There was a sense of fulfilment at a day spent in the larger world and football had been a big part of that. This sense of fitba’ as something wonderful, enchanting has never left me, even as I now sit frozen watching the diminished quality of the Scottish game.

We said our goodbyes to Davie yesterday in a utilitarian crematorium in Ayrshire. There was a sense of regret in me in that I had not seen him for years, perhaps decades, as our lives, perhaps inevitably, drifted apart. But this self-centred feeling was overwhelmed by a sense of gratitude.

He remains in my memory and I smile. It is the sincerest form of tribute. It may be the highest, too.