‘Did you really say…? But, moving on. What, Sky? No fucking way,’ I said vehemently. ‘I’m not giving that shite Murdoch any of my… soft-earned dosh.’ I’d moved into the Temple Belle a year earlier. It hadn’t been lived in for many years so it only had terrestrial; Craig had been trying to persuade me to have Sky fitted ever since.
‘Mind you,’ Craig mused, ‘for a Clydebank supporter, what’s the point? I suppose.’
‘Fuck off. Hun.’
Craig and I had this unpleasant though also comforting habit of reverting to our West Coast Male Scottish cultural stereotype when we met up, talking about football. Craig was a bluenose, a Rangers supporter. Almost his only failing, really, unless you were going to count his part in a long-term-struggling marriage (and in a spirit of male solidarity and the above-mentioned cultural stereotype, I was duty-bound to blame that mostly on Emma, regardless of anything else).
It was early May 2001, a couple of weeks after the party at Sir Jamie’s groovy pad at the top of Limehouse Tower. We were sitting in the kitchen of the family home in Highgate, an elegant three-storey terraced house with a large conservatory and lots of decking in the garden. Emma had her own place these days, a garden flat a couple of streets away. Nikki lived with Craig but spent occasional nights at Emma’s. Those tended to be the nights I came along and Craig and I got the chance to relive an adolescence that he – a father and effectively a husband at eighteen – had quit maybe too abruptly and I – arguably dissolute, still alone but variously entangled at thirty-five – had never quite shaken off.
So we listened to some music, smoked joints, drank beer – or wine, more often these days – and talked about women and, of course, fitba. It was my misfortune to be, nominally at least, a Clydebank supporter (could have been worse; I might have decided to support Dumbarton). Clydebank were the closest team of any note to where I grew up, in the prim grid of sunny, south-aspected Helensburgh, a town far too middle class to have anything as proletarian as a decent football team of its own. The Rugby Club, on the other hand, was a social centre almost on a par with the Golf Club. Clydebank is one of those teams at least one level beneath the big Scottish clubs that are themselves a level beneath the big two, the Old Firm of Celtic and Rangers. Craig had inherited his Rangers scarf from his dad. They were posh Hun; not bigoted or anti-Catholic, but unswervingly committed to the team.
‘Supporting a team like Clydebank has its compensations,’ I told Craig as he lit the spliff, blowing smoke into the darkened kitchen. I had a sudden vision of Nikki the next day, sniffing the air and flying round opening windows here and in the adjoining conservatory. ‘Da-ad!’ Though actually these days she would say, ‘Crai-aig!’
‘Compensations?’ Craig said, cupping his free hand to his ear. ‘Hark! Do I hear the sound of a straw being grasped at? Why, I do believe I can!’ I just looked at him. In fact what he could hear was Moby sounding soulful and interesting on the kitchen mini system. ‘What compensations?’ he demanded. ‘Having to travel to Cappielow for your home games, or visiting East Fife?’
‘No,’ I said, ignoring the insults. ‘I mean that it prepares you more comprehensively for life as a supporter of the national team.’
‘You what?’ Craig said, sounding very London for a moment.
‘Think about it,’ I told him, accepting the joint. ‘Ta. If you support a team like Clydebank you get used to disappointment…’ I paused to pull on the number, then talked out through the smoke. ‘The grossly truncated cup run, the good players – the very rare good players – sold on before they have a chance to do much for the club beyond show up the rest of the team for the sorry plodders they really are, the mid-season nervousness as they sink towards the lower reaches of the league, even, in the long term, the occasional promotion you know will probably end in demotion the following year; the just plain boring, inept displays of football where you sit in the cold for two hours realising you’ve doled out twenty quid to watch two gangs of intellectually challenged bampots running around a muddy field hacking away at each other’s legs and seemingly competing to see who can punt the ball the furthest up the park, while your fellow men around you hurl abuse and insults at their own team and the other supporters.’ I took another deep toke and handed the J back.
‘Ah, the beautiful game,’ Craig said, affecting misty-eyedness.
‘And so,’ I said, ‘when it comes to supporting Scotland as a national team, you’re fully prepared for the resulting failures, disillusion, frustrations, let-downs and general all-encompassing despair, which is the natural result of following our plucky but generally rather undistinguished Bravehearts. You’ve been inoculated against such disenchantment throughout your supporting life; this is the sort of rubbish you’re used to watching and coping with every week or every fortnight of the three seasons where it rains. You just scale up your already pre-battered, ready-deflated expectations a little and you’re there. You, on the other hand,’ I said, taking the number back. ‘You,’ I repeated after a deep pull, ‘with your fancy nine league championships in a row and your players with Ferraris and your forty-five thousand fans through the turnstiles every home game and your European experience… you get used to success. You feel cheated if there’s no new silverware in the trophy… yeah, you have a trophy room; we have a trophy cabinet.’
‘Currently empty, if memory serves. Thanks.’
‘Fuck off. You start whining when you don’t finish top of something at the end of the season. We’re just glad our teams still exist and some fucker hasn’t sold the ground out from under us for a new B &Q. The point is that you get totally conditioned to winning, to victory, so when you support Bonnie Scotland, as you’re genetically programmed and constitutionally bound to, you can’t cope with the fact we’re basically crap.’
‘We’re not crap,’ Craig said defensively.
‘Well, not total crap, but just not much better than a team from a country of only six million people ought to be. So suddenly you’re in a position of inferiority, of having to deal with-’
‘All right, all right,’ Craig said, kicking off his moccasins and putting his feet up on the farmhouse table. ‘I take the fucking point. You end up taking refuge in peripheral stuff, like having nice supporters.’
‘Nicer than those nasty, yobbish, xenophobic English supporters, certainly, which is the unspoken subtext of this aren’t-we-great Caledonian self-congratulation.’
‘Drunk but amiable.’
‘Harmless.’
‘Pretty much like the team.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Just going for the spectacle,’ Craig said with a trace of sadness, stretching to hand me back the spliff.
‘It’s the national equivalent of the straws you clutch at league level with teams like Clydebank: people around you applauding sportsman-like behaviour, the fleeting glimpse of skill when somebody on the park accidentally does what they meant to do, the combined pride and resentment when a player sold to the big boys three seasons ago scores a hat-trick in the English Premier.’
I pulled on the J until it was finished and then mashed it into the ashtray with the one we’d had before Craig’s homemade chilli. I reached for my wine.
‘Yeah, but when you do win…’ Craig said, leaning back in his seat and putting his hands behind his neck. ‘It’s worth it. Even as a supporter of the Bankies you must have at least heard of this, you know, from supporters of other teams.’
I ignored this too. ‘Is it? I’m starting to question that, frankly.’ Behind his Trotsky glasses, he blinked. ‘What? Winning isn’t fun?’
‘Na, I mean I’m getting fed up with football in general.’
Craig gave a stagy gasp and said, ‘Wash your mouth out with half-time Bovril, you blasphemous bastard.’