STARTED watching The World at War on DVD for the first time in 20 years.

Forgotten how brilliant it was and can't remember much more, so don't tell me ending.

In my frail state it also reminds me of those scenes in the war-time jungle when the weak or wounded have to be left behind. Sitting at Fir Park on Saturday, my laptop a sizzled, twisted wreck worthy of the aftermath of a Bomber Harris surgical strike, I muttered to my young colleagues: "It's all over for me. Go on without me." With a frankly distressing lack of protest, they left me a canteen of water and a pistol with two bullets, in case the first one missed the shrinking piece of gristle that constitutes my brain.

My desperate state has not been helped by news of another defection in the ranks of my column's readers. It was already an elite band. It comprises one of my brothers, the resident psychiatrist, John, my probation officer and the in-house physio. I need the last because this can only be considered a column at a stretch.

But Jim Martin, a physio manager at Hairmyres is off into the happy land of post-work, leaving the rest of us to carry the awful burden of creating and digesting these witterings without any hope of remedial exercises. He says he is retiring, I reply that I am very shy but I still have to stick around.

But he was a luxury for the column. Physios, after all, were only invented recently, before that we sporting types had to endure treatment that made a clearing station in the Crimea look like a tea party in Milngavie.

Those who know about such matters say physio is necessary in sport for preparation and recovery. In my day preparation consisted of stubbing out one's fag on the forehead of our centre half before kick-off. He used it as a motivational tool, believing it ridded him of worries. It certainly dispelled our doubts.

We then gathered in the sort of poses that provided the template for The Warriors and stared with menace at our opponents. This was always a difficult part of a Saturday afternoon because I would always see that my direct opponent had come fresh from being groomed by David Attenborough in a Rwandan forest. There was one centre half so hirsute that he permed his back and had an Afro in his armpit. He subjected me to an afternoon so traumatic that the damage required the services of a psychiatrist rather than a physiotherapist.

In those days, too, treatment on the pitch put the rude in rudimentary. There were only two types of injury. The first was a broken leg. Big Jimmy once broke his leg with such a snap that a flock of starlings suddenly and loudly vacated the trees at Beechwood Park, Stirling. Jimmy was advised by the magic sponge man to "stamp it off".

These medical auxiliaries were only good for increasing the pain. One claimed he was a certified physiotherapist. He was certainly certified. (And thanks go to John, resident psychiatrist, for clearing that up).

This demented physio would lift a shattered leg and shake it as if he was auditioning for a mariachi band. He would take an ankle and twist it as if he was an Alabaman redneck who had just grasped a chicken's neck.

Physios were better with the second type of injury: flesh wounds. They could apply a bandage to the most effusive haemorrhage but unfortunately these dressings carried more germs than a squadron of particularly squalid flies with personal hygiene issues. The idea that a wound should be stitched was regarded as risible, ensuring that my legs are covered with so many scars that many suspect I have shaved them. And I only do this when auditioning for a musical.

Their advice on recovery was non-existent. Our idea of a warmdown was to try to get the immerser to work in the showers so that the water did not freeze on contact with the atmosphere. Any stretches in the dressing-room were restricted to extending the neck of an errant goalkeeper with the aid of a soggy towel and indulging in the sort of horseplay that could only be described as lame.

To digress, if all males of a certain age were given a towel and bare bahookie to flick it at then there would be no appetite for, or interest in, war. All male aggression would thus be played out in an environment that was safe for the rest of the globe.

But the japes in the dressing-room had no pretension to rehabilitation but to humiliation. Tired limbs were shrouded in tight jeans and shoved into the back of two motors that carried a team plus subs to the recovery area known as the Scots Wha' Hae.

Entrance therein was followed by repeated sprints to the bar where we became as rehydrated as a newt.

Don't know how Jim's preparation for retirement has gone but one trusts his immediate recovery period may be spent in a similar manner.