T HE good news is that I have PPI.

The bad news is that it my case it is not payment protection insurance but a urinary tract infection.

So instead of a payout of thousands I have been condemned to a dose of penicillin of the scale once consumed by the Sunday league team after their bonding trip to Amsterdam.

It is the story of my life. If I was given a month to live it would be February. And it would not even be a leap year.

I have, though, been consoled by the realisation that I watched football as a paying customer when Scottish teams were winning in Europe. But there is also a slight downside to this and it is pointed out in the release of One Night In Istanbul, a film that tells the story of Liverpool fans who travel to watch the European Cup final of 2005.

It strikes me with all the strength of a screwtap thrown from the back of the terraces that my excursions to football grounds as a non-journalist (there are those who would suggest with some reason that this includes professional assignments) have been restricted to the glamour of the Hanging Gardens of Bonhill that was Boghead and the vast Serengeti that is Stark's Park.

My football travels as a supporter did not include, for example, a visit to the Alhambra in Granada. This is probably for the best because to a Possil boy the Alhambra will always be a theatre and Granada will remain in the memory as the shop where you rented yir telly.

Trips abroad for the supporter were restricted to those who had a garage business or were turf accountants. The rest of us listened to it on the radio.

But the modern fan is different. They travel the world to watch games. They sit by their computers as the international, Champions League and Europa League draws unfold and click onto budget airlines that will whisk them to a corrugated shed that is a mere 347 kilometres from the stadium where the match is being played.

Once we considered a trip to Arbroath exotic. And, to be fair, it was in that we did not understand the locals, they drove on the other side of the road, though only after the pubs shut, and they had actually seen fish without a covering of batter.

Now the fan will bunk off on a three-day trip for a Europa League second leg that is so hopeless in a football sense that it not only needs the club to sign Lionel Messi to raise prospects but a dose of Prozac to raise spirits.

There is a suspicion - and it can be no more than that - that the football fan may be going abroad for more than just the football.

This raises a deeply philosophical question about the nation in a momentous week. Once football was the working man's burden. It drained one of time, cash, and, more than occasionally, the will to live.

The ethics of following a team were roughly that the journey to the ground should always travel through a vale of tears. There may be the odd moment of overwhelming joy, even elation, but these should not be expected, and, indeed, they should be greeted with the football fans' united chant of "Aye but."

This goes along the lines of: "Hey we have won the European Cup and the missus has just phoned me with news that we have cracked the lottery on a triple rollover week."

"Aye but...the team lines were done by that guy we recruited from Legia Warsaw and your wife has told my missus that she plans a new life with a shiny man and a crumpled ticket."

This is the sort of fate that the football fan of old understands. It is a recognition of the truth that football is something to be endured not enjoyed.

Yet the modern Scottish punter insists it can not only be a source of some satisfaction but a trip that includes a variety of local drinks, a decent hotel and an open-top bus trip before a meal with aperitifs.

They still, of course, have to watch the fitba. But that is a minor matter in Dortmund or even Dublin. But what if Gibraltar manage to change the venue of their home match against Scotland to somewhere more intriguing than Portugal, where they played their last fixture?

Other venues are other under consideration, My mate Tam is lobbying the Gibraltar FA for Las Vegas. But, then again, he believes PPI is first year at school.