AAH, the pearls of the sea, as I once remarked to an unfortunate fellow cruise passenger as her necklace fell from the promenade deck into briny abyss below.

The matter of fortune and circumstance has barged itself forward in what I choose to call my brain and my therapist insists is a classic pathology of “a heid full of wee motors”. The occasion for this unusual outbreak of thought was the yachting competition at the Olympics.

My yachting career has been restricted to an outing with a competitor in the youth world championships at Largs. On return to slightly dry land (it was Largs, after all) I interviewed Ben Ainslie, Chief British Sailor, who asked me why I had not sailed before.

“Possil and Cadder Yachting Club had severely restrictive entry requirements, “ I replied. Ainslie tilted his head in sympathy, muttering that many clubs had in the past employed such discriminatory policies but times had changed.

They have, indeed. One can barely access the canal at Maryhill for the locals sailing their spliffs, sorry skiffs, and there are those who insist the word dinghy was made for certain parts of Glesca.

But the most intriguing development in the city is the attempt to experiment with biobanding, which is not , dear reader, the latest washing detergent capsule. It is, rather a scheme that sets children together on the basis of similar body shape rather than similar age.

It was reported this that Chris Hoy, Jason Kenny, Mo Farah and Steve Redgrave were all born on the same day: March 23, since you ask. But those who survived the killing fields, sorry, playing fields of Scotland know that age was never the issue. Body shape – sheer physicality – was the killer, almost literally.

A discussion earlier this week on biobanding with several professional footballers was marked by their suspicion of the notion of playing in teams that were physically equal. Young boys could learn enduring lessons by competing against stronger and bigger opponents they said.

But this was the testimony of the winner. This was the belief of those who had come through that rite of passage that was so brutal that it tested the psychological and physical resources of the rest of us.

The bruised, battered and defeated look back with a chill on those days when we confronted people who purported to be of the same age but were only tenuously of the same species.

The first act of playing for primary school or boys’ club was to run out on to the pitch and have a fly glance at the opposition. It could produce a fear so intense that, if replicated artificially, could provide the solution to world constipation.

There was always a lad on the opposition team who was so hairy he looked as if a cat had coughed him out. It would have had to be a big cat, a Siberian tiger, say, because said 11-year-old had the proportions of a WWE wrestler and the temperament of a wolverine who had just stubbed his toe on the day he was let down by a last-minute goal for a seven-team accumulator.

This beast was always in direct opposition to me. He regarded the ball as an unnecessary accessory to the true purpose of football which was, of course, the premature ending of a life, specifically mine. At half-time he would sook an entire orange, without feeling the need to peel it, and wave off the attentions of a clutch of barbers who were concerned his rapidly growing hair would precipitate drooping eyebrows that would blind him or produce a beard that would satisfy Joe Ledley.

This surfeit of testosterone, of course, produced an attitude that would have made a Viking on a raid seem as calm as a Zen master who has mistaken a bottle of Valium for a container of sesame seeds. These hirsute, extraordinarily precocious youngsters were destined to grow up to be SAS snipers, PE teachers and sports editors. But then they merely seemed intent on bringing their own primitive of views on natural selection to bear on a series of parks around Glasgow and district.

My brother and me recently exchanged a reminiscence of one of them at a survivors’ meeting. He was called Frankie and he wore steel-capped boots. Not football boots. Just steel-capped boots that he had obviously inherited from his father who almost certainly threw them away because they could not snugly accommodate his cloven hoof.

To enter a tackle with Frankie was an act of immense courage or extreme foolishness, though I have always found it hard to distinguish between these traits. I once emerged from one of these challenges with the ball. Unfortunately on closer inspection said ball was in fact a haematoma on the inside of my ankle caused by a brush with Frankie’s footwear.

One of our teachers always insisted later that our occasional forays against Frankie and his ilk – this is akin to saying the marauding Mongols were an ilk – were good for the soul. Perhaps, I once replied, but not particularly beneficial to fibia, tibia or metatarsal.

It is why I am all for biograding. Particularly because I suspect that if I had been possible to take up yachting in Possil of the sixties I would have been forced at one point to walk the plank. With a steel-capped boot up my aft.