OBSERVATIONS on growing old: an occasional series that will appear when I remember to write said articles.

Which means this is the first and last.

All this is prompted by signs that one is becoming very senior. The most recent include the increasing inability to stop anywhere near the machine at the car park barrier that dispenses tickets, thus occasioning me to lean out the window in the manner of a stunt man auditioning for a role in Speed.

The other is my credit card technique. Like all people of a certain age, I view the hand-held payment machine as a sort of Krypton Factor challenge involving both physical and mental powers.

Thus I press the keys as if I am using a hammer in those test- your-strength contraptions at a local fairground. Then when it declares Pin OK, I smile in triumph as if I have won a tiebreak on University Challenge against Stephen Hawking and the combined membership of Mensa.

But it is the election that has made me most aware of my age. Sitting in my Bearsden attic eagerly awaiting another episode of Storage Wars, I heard a letter slip on to the hall floor. It was from a woman I do not know, but who kindly supplied her address, and said she was a Tory but was advising me to vote Liberal Democrat.

Now, once I believed polling day was about putting one's X against a candidate who was destined to lose. Not voting for someone you do not believe in just to beat someone else you believe in less.

It has all become confusing so I sympathise with David Cameron. (No.3 in sentences I thought I would never use. No 2: Thanks very much, gaffer, I thought it was a decent column too. No.1: Sober up Kylie and put on some clothes, I want to be respected for my mind not just my body)

Back, with some reluctance, to David Cameron.

He mixed up the name of the team he supported while speaking to the masses during the election campaign. He said his team was West Ham when it should have been Aston Villa. Or it may have been the other way round. Either way, it doesn't matter because both options are not true anyway.

Mr Cameron may have led a full life at Eton and Oxford but I doubt it involved rammies in the lower remove about the precise details of the forthcoming Midlands derby. The only discussion involving Hammers would be the vexed question of whether they should be used to dent the nappers of the feckless fags who had burnt the toasted muffins.

No. Here's the deal. What Mr Cameron was doing was joining in the national obsession that one must have a football team and one must proclaim it loudly. It can lead to mistakes.

It even exists on the sports desk. Instead of supporting Celtic and Rangers like the mass of the population, sports desks are replete with Motherwell, St Mirren and Morton supporters. I have no reason to doubt their sincerity but I do have reservations about one Morton supporter whose regular incantation is: "I love Cappieloft. Home of the Grenn Knock Morton. Daddy used to take me every week and my hero was Drew Ritchie. He could score direct from a throw-in. Indeed, he had a very good kick."

This need to be part of football baffles those of us who remember when it was a despised subject. When I first joined a national newspaper - just as Mr Caxton left the building, since you ask - I was regarded as a Philistine because I persisted in raising football as a topic of conversation in editorial conference. I even suggested that we should cover the sport occasionally as a news story.

My colleagues could not have laughed more if the editor had suggested that the leader of the Scottish Labour Party would in the future need the help of Tory voters to stand any chance of winning his parliamentary seat.

Football, in effect, was in the late seventies a game for the obsessive who did not mind standing in the sort of conditions that make that the black hole of Calcutta resemble in terms of luxury a spa weekend at Stobo Castle.

It was for the dedicated and not fully promulgated on the media. If one missed the match, one had to buy a Saturday evening sporting special or catch the classified results to discover who did what and when.

The football fan, too, could not watch live games on the telly unless the SFA, UEFA and the interim government of Schleswig-Holstein all convened to agree that is was okay.

Thus the football fan was regarded with the sort of contempt now only afforded LibDem promises.

The fitba' supporter was a victim. What his fellow supporter did to his leg in the absence of proper toilet facilities, was done to his napper by the football authorities and, indeed, anyone who had middle-class pretensions.

We were then the disenfranchised, the lumpen proletariat. But at least we knew who we supported and why. And this applied to sport as well as politics. I still do. And all without the aid of a letter from a Tory in a strop.