THIS is not a column on drugs. Well, it has been written, of course, with the help of substantial medication. But it is not about drugs in sport. It is not about how the Masters champion’s dinner in the future, where the bulked-up green jacket guy picks the menu, will have peach steroid, Meldonium sorbet with a side plate of barbecued EPO. It is not about how the Russian athletics programme was based on a training film called Trainspotting.

It is about a tradition that has nothing to do with obsessed, driven athletes putting stuff in their veins. It is about obsessed, driven me not putting money in my back pocket. It is, in short, about the Grand National. It is story, therefore, of loss.

Grand National day looms before me like an anxiety dream directed by Wes Craven. I no longer bet and, yes, I do regret the subsequent mass job losses in the bookmaking industry. But the mere mention of a Grand National sweepstake induces the sort of dread in me that is only otherwise encountered when I bump into the sports editor outside a crossbow shop. And he has just come out.

It started, like most traumas, in childhood. My family were as interested in gambling as they were in the early work of the Dadaists. But, like most of the general public, Grand National Day was an unanswerable call to put their money on a horse ‘’with a nice name”. Honed by bitter but character-building experience at the side of my granda at Carntyne dugs, I was already betting, specifically by asking Misters outside the bookies to put my three-cross on.

My parents knew naught of this, of course, but my siblings always pointed out to them on Grand National Day that I could explain the intricacies of an each-way bet. They never questioned whence this knowledge was divined but two grandpas who had a bookie’s pencil as a forefinger perhaps made any further inquisition unnecessary.

There followed two tedious hours of writing and then scoring out horses’ names before a bag of coppers and dauds of silver were wrapped in a twist of paper and I was despatched to dump this cash at the wee bookies across from the Cartvale. The travails of the afternoon would continue when a) my horse was beaten b) when the rest of the family backed something that was second or third and I had to go up the main street, grab a passing punter, wait for two hours and collect 7/6.

Age did not improve matters. My National highlights as a young adult include not getting on a dug (won at 5-2) in the 11.06 at Hackney some soddin’ five hours before the National because a gang of novice punters would not let me “jump the queue”; trying to explain to a mate that a handicap in racing terms should not be changed to disability; and to another mate that the weights the horses carried had nothing to do with jockeys who “had let theirsel go”.

Occasionally, my horror at Grand National day was mitigated by backing the winner. But not often. I had a nice touch on Aldaniti in 1981, pairing it in a forecast with Spartan Missile who duly finished second, supplying me with a considerable wad of cash, or betting vouchers as I preferred to call them. However, the abiding memory –because pain has a way of outliving joy – is waiting for Garrison Savannah for an extraordinary accumulator bet in 1991. It was one of those fun bets that suddenly became as serious as a taxman with a migraine. Four previous selections had won with varying degrees of difficulty. But they had won. It was now down to Garrison Savannah.

The horse was the Cheltenham Gold Cup winner, had more than a touch of class and was jumping the fences so cleanly on that Aintree afternoon that one believed it was cruising at a high altitude to avoid flak. It hit the run-in with a decent lead. The inevitable happened. It was caught and passed by Seagram.

This moment of desperate, existential angst was made worse by the proximity of my mate, Iain, whose elation was such that although we were in a pub in St Ninians his roars startled a snoozing cosmonaut. Who just happened to be in the snug of the Falcon across the road, but no matter. “You do not seem chuffed at my win,” said Iain. I replied testily (I was trying out a new set of teeth): “Iain, with the good folk of Ladbrokes returning your stake, you are to collect £6.50. My delight at such a stroke of good fortune, such riches that would lead even Croesus to the very edge of envy, is tempered by the realisation that if the brave Garrison Savannah had hung on I would have been able to give you this £6.50, leaving me just enough to buy this pub, a new car and Sunflowers by Van Gogh.”

This was my last major tilt at the Grand National. It would be much too strong to suggest that some sort of sanity had invaded the napper but the betting days halted suddenly and have not returned.

Now the Grand National Day is just like any other Saturday. But I can still hear the clamour of days of old and, strangely, I miss my involvement. But, then, more understandably, so does my bookmaker.