IT is Saturday. I am sitting on a piece of plastic at the bottom of the Ochil hills in weather conditions that would keep an Inuit indoors with his feet in front of a three-bar electric fire., wrapped in his polar bear cardie and his ears attuned to his favourite Seal CD.
But I am outside. The snow settles at the end of my nose, a proboscis that fills the need of the Glasgow winter Olympics bid to supply a ski jump. I can hear my blood crackle and freeze. I am so cold, so covered in ice that if I was a playground the jannie would cover me in sawdust.
It is not so bad. I only have three hours to survive, the time of an extended pre-match, match and post-match experience or ordeal, whatever one prefers. I am what was once called Recreation Park but now is the Indodrill Stadium. It serves almost as an emblem of how bizarre Scottish football has become.
It is Alloa Athletic v Rangers. The strangeness of Rangers playing on bits of plastic or dods of grass on lower league grounds has disappeared. It is merely one symptom in the delusional fantasy that is Scottish football.
There were other strange factors at play last Saturday. It may have been the cold, it may have been my advancing years, it may even have been the effects of me honouring Recreation Park in decades past by using drugs of that ilk, but I was struck by the oddity of our national game. It hit me between the eyes like a sliver of lukewarm pie expelled by one of my colleagues in a period of loquacity.
Scottish Football plc 2015 was never better served in all its bizarre exoticism by events in Alloa. First, there was the fitba'. It was played on a shorn plastic pitch covered by pellets. It was as if a flock of feckless sheep had grazed upon it and then delivered, nay deposited their verdict.
But, most spectacularly, there was both a vision and a heavenly soundtrack. The first came in the physical form of Ryan 'Pongo' McCord. The Alloa midfielder was conspicuous by his touch and technique in midfield and his very presence provided a kickstart to my synapses that had been frozen by a wind so cutting a group of bakers were using it to slice bread.
Pongo, aka the Ginger Xavi, could serve as a human motif for my fantastical journey in Scottish fitba'. In the last decade I have watched him play on three occasions: the last was, of course on Saturday; the time before that was in Beith when he was on loan from Dundee United at Airdrie and featured in an extraordinary Scottish Cup tie with the Junior side; the first occasion was when he came up against Lionel Messi when playing for Dundee United against Barca.
This is Scottish football versions of six degrees of separation of back bacon. This is the rule that wherever one is, one is only a step away from a ham roll.
So wherever one travels in Scottish football - to a Junior ground, to Alloa in weather Captain Oates would not venture out into or when Barcelona are in Dundee - there stands Pongo.
Similarly, whenever one recalls the great moments on the telly it is to the echo of Archie Macpherson whose mellifluous tones gilded Trainspotting (incidentally, one of the great Scottish novels of the 20th century: discuss) and those times when Scottish teams, whether at national or club level, were making history.
Archie was there at Lisbon. He was there in Barcelona. He was in Gothenburg. He was here, there, everywhere in the Maracana, Wembley, Bernabeu or in more Olympic stadiums where one could shake a test tube containing a failed drug test.
Archie, along with his pal the late Arthur Montford, thus provided the words to accompany the defining moments in Scottish football.
It would be an appropriate sign off to declare that what occurred at Alloa would have left them speechless, not least because their tongue would have been frozen to their palate. But no.
As my teeth chattered to such a level that my mate thought there was a mariachi band in the stadium, one could hear the distinctive voice of Archie rolling down from above. I believed this to be a sign of my impending demise - a sort of angelic chorus before I drifted away from the Elysian field of the Indodrill Stadium.
However, it was Archie, doing the match for radio. Archie, Pongo and me. Now there is a halfback line to illustrate that there are survivors in the Ice Age of Scottish football.
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