CLIMBING THE FU**ING WALLS! (GERS … P Shirey Pirey …P)

Never get off the boat, says Chef in Appocalypse Now. Never ever ever give up says Winston Churchill in times of doubt and fear. Never seen you looking as lovely as you did tonight, Says Chris de Burgh in the musical equivelant of one of those plates with a pussycat painted on it ye see advertised in Sunday Express supplements. And I say, never, never, NEVER let a weekend go by without attending a live, senior football match. Even attend a junior game if yer really skint. Crikey, I could have gone tae Palmerston Park, Dumfries yesterday and seen a Senior team playing a Junior team!. If I’d known yesterday what I know now, Queen of the South v Linlithgow Rose would have been one fat man better attended. Never let a weekend go by without attending a game - this is especially vital when ye haven’t had a mid-week fix to keep ye going.

Dunno about you guys but, right now, I’m going off my fucking nut. The walls are closing in. I’m in the advanced stages of some sort of metaphysical cabin fever here.

I mean, I’ve been outside the hoose, like - that’s not a problem: Fresh air, wide-open spaces. Done all that this fine January Sunday. I’ve been for a walk - took in a park and a pond, and the Firth of Clyde is just a half hour’s drive away if I wanted. But it’s not THAT kind of claustrophobia.

And it’s not as if I haven’t anything else to do. It’s not lack of occupation that’s getting to me. I’ve been to the supermarket, in fact. I’ve washed and ironed all my shirts for the week and there’s not a dirty dish in the hoose. No. Oh no, no - no, it’s not a lack of stuff to busy myself with which has me wanting to, erm, how shall I put this? - wanting to RIP OFF MY OWN SKIN WITH A TATTIE-PEELER BECAUSE I CAN’T BREATHE ANYMORE … no. Aherm. No, it’s more of an emotional, preternatural even, desire to be AT A GAME.

I can’t function without the game, in the flesh - once a week. I’ve had my supply cut twice in a few days now. People tell me I eat, sleep and breathe football and I always think that’s a very exaggerated and highly unoriginal assesment of my “passion”. I do have other interests. I feel my interets are as wide as my stomach. Yet it’s only when you’re denied attendance of the game that its power over your existence is fully realised. Football clearly provides me with something my poetry, gardening, kebab-eating, French polishing and leather bars just can’t match. If I miss the football, I miss my main non-family reason for, well, eating, sleeping and breathing. Basically, it’s a lack of the very thing which keeps me sane - my weekly dosage - which is this Sunday forcing my entire nervous system into the early stages of COLD TURKEY!

Thank fuck I’ve got a ticket for the Gretna this mid-week- that’s giving me a reason to hold on. Thank fuck I watched the Man U-Newcastle game on Setanta last night - I felt cheap, dirty and entirely underwhelmed at the time but it’s probably provided enough basic nourishment to last me til Fir Park on Wednesday. Thank fuck I also have my CIS Cup semi-final ticket. It arrived in the post on Thursday and, ever since I discovered today’s game was called off I’ve been rubbing that Hampden brief all over my forehead just to keep me calm (what? NO! I said “FORE-head”!! ya sick bas … what??? NO!! I said “fore-HEAD” ya twisted bampots!! Goddsakes! What kind of site’s do youse USUALLY surf??!!). The feel of un-destubbed ticket paper on flesh is saving me. Otherwise this bloody god-awful accursed, pain-in-the-buttocks, freakin never-ending RAIN could have pushed me over the edge.

I had the long lie, didn’t I. Sunday morning. No early rise for me. I ain’t religious - well not about “god” and all that ghost shite anyway - but it’s amazing how ethnically Christian my heathen life remains. When it suits me. It’s the day of rest so on a Sunday morning I don’t get up til, well, Sunday afternoon. And noon it was for me today. I casually showers, dresses, has maself a big brunch while watching an episode of Curb Yer Enthusiam via Virgin Media’s On Demand service (Curb isn’t so much laugh-out-loud funny as kind of interesting), with the Sunday Herald’s self-consciously broadsheet-aspirational prose spralwed across my lap as a napkin.

Even when I was bending that copy of the Herald (it’s a tabloid, troops - give up. Yer just another self-hating, spiteful, ignorant little Scottish tabloid, no matter how many polysyllables you use and how many articles you fashion around environmentally-aware business people living on crofts or how often ye urbanely mock people who add conservatories to their converted farm houses. Yer a tabloid. I only buy ye for the football trivia quiz and the Gabrielle Marcotti article) into a half-pipe and dropping the mix of Potato scone and weetabix crumb down my throat, I had no idea East Stirlingshire’s Sunday visit to Ibrox was off.

I’d slept through most of the bad rain, hadn’t I. I’d ignored the Setanta Sports News channel since arising from my kip. My mobile was still powered off. I could see it was raining outside but - yeah, so what?! It wiznae snowing or frosty or even cold - and that, in my sleepy head, was the only real threat to football going ahead. I was too busy reading about how East Stirling were gonnae use their share of today’s gate receipts for a deposit on a new stadium to discover what the rest of the country already new. Game was off. Again. I was more worried about ensuring I got one last visit to Firs Park before the Shire start groundsharing with Stenhousemuir in 2008/2009 than I was about the prospect of The Rangers game being postponed … AGAIN.

It was only when I gulped my last gulp of typhoo tea (one milk, no sugar. I’m sweet enough, thanks - the five doughnuts I had along with the tea made sure of that) from my Union Jack Jumbo mug, and composed a blog post reply to KevinG of the Lord of the Wing site, in which I blythely made jokes about the likely outcome of “today’s game”, that I stopped to look at Setanta Sport News. “Old Firm game postponed again” was the clue.

Fuck. What a pile-up! Fuck - couldn’t we just play East Stirling this Tuesday, coz I’m sure we could take care of both them and Gretna in the space of 24 hours?! Fuck - if this Old Firm game’s put back much further this season’s SPL title could end up being decided like the World Series or one of those other US sports where the top two teams play each other home-and-away in a series of successive matches and if one side wins three straight games they’re champions!

But, most of all, it was a case of “Fuck - if I’d got out my kip two hours earlier and turned onto a sports channel or a fitbaw website I could have known about this cancellation in time to get my bahookie in the motor and drive down to the Sunderland or Bolton games! Fuck - I’ve had a live football-free weekend! Fuck - I’m GONNAE DIEEEEEEE!!!!”

For men of a certain age - my age - Saturday at 3pm is the time, the way, the reason they take their football drug. That day and that time IS as essential as the drug itself. Ye might have the powder but if ye don’t have the spoon, the flame and the syringe then ye just can’t get yer fix on. Saturday at 3pm is crack cocaine football time. The regular high which keeps you going needs you inside a stadium, inside a ground, watching two teams go at it from 15 hundred hours on the day after Friday. If ye can’t have that, ye at least need the methodone of a Sunday game. My gutlessness this Saturday led me to depend on the methodone and then my AWFUL planning today caused me to miss my doctor’s appointment to imbibe it!

I is currently crawling across my ceiling!!

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. Saturday is the day for watching yer fitbaw. But so often, usually on the advice of everyone else I know, I just don’t listen to myself . I sometimes forget what it is NOT to be at the football on a Saturday. Yesterday morning I sat and pondered all the soccer buzzes I could fashion for myself but - January being the most constrictive of financially tight months - I allowed myself to be convinced that I could brave it through the day, using the sure knowlegde that I’d be at Ibrox on Sunday to coax me through the roughest patch - ie the couple of hours after Football Focus has finished. I now know that Golden Rule should never be ignored again. Even if ye’ve got tae get in yer car and hit that M74 tae see Preston at home tae Watford or carry on down that M6 and hang a left at Manchester tae go and see Sheffield United at home to QPR. Every part of Bramall lane was a tenner tae get in yesterday. How do I know that? Coz I spent all of my tortured Friday lunch break surfing the net for possible footie trips. I KNEW I shouldn’t be in the hoose or doon the pub the next day. GO TO A GAME ON A SATURDAY. GO TO A GAME!!

Get to a game even if it means ye huv tae fork out 18 quid to sit beside a few dozen Dumbarton fans as their game of the season ends with a 3-0 doing in front of less than 3,000 Paisley Buddies at Love Street.

Ahh, Love Street. How I wronged you last Tuesday, dear auld Love Street. I can only apologise and I can only sit back and take it - I deserve it - as ye laugh in my once-smug, still-fat face. I mocked your drainage stystem. I mocked the Paisley weather. I blamed everything BUT the weather for the postponement of the live Setanta game last mid-week. Well, you certainly got yer ain back this weekend, Love Street. Sacred, holy, state-of-the-art Ibrox - five times the size of St Mirren Park - couldn’t do any better against the viccisitudes of the Scottish weather today. Custard pie to my coupon, via Gilmour Street station.

But, more importantly, big spanner in the Rangers works. Isn’t it? Before today’s game was cancelled our January schedule was six games in 19 days. Now it’s down to five games, but only in 16 days. Celtic, our likeliest rivals for the SPL title, managed to get their Scottish Cup match, with the Albion part of Sirling, out of the way before the fatal downpour so they now have two less domestic fixtures than ourselves to worry about and, when we consider the fact we have at least one but hopefully two more CIS cup games than them to play this season then it’s maybe a case of Thank Fuck they actually qualified from the Champions League Group stage and have two hellishly hard, draining games with Barcelona on the horizon. Isn’t it?

No - of course it isn’t. I wish Celtic had been fucked out the Champions League at the group stage, had finished bottom of their group and I wish they were already out of the Scottish Cup as well as the CIS. They’re our biggest rivals - I wish them every lack of success, always. As for Rangers, well -Ye want to win stuff? Ye wan to win many trophies and achieve great feats? Well, then, MANY GAMES YOU WILL HAVE TO PLAY!

Listen, we can put our RESERVES out to do a job against East Stirling - this is why Alan Gow and Kirk Broadfoot were brought here. This is why Andy Webster and Thomas Buffell are still here, and why Roy Carroll should maybe stay too. We have the squad. Furthermore, as long as we can keep winning the SPL games and advance in Europe, the Cup games will be like feking warm-downs … and I’m maybe mistaken in including a trip to Easter Road in teh next round in that assesment but, frankly, if yer going toe-to-toe with Panathinaikos after dealing with Barcelona, Lyon and Stuttgart earlier in the season, you’re on a different level of sharpness to even Mixu Put-a-line-on’s Hibs: The Gretna game is the biggest for now. Win that decisively and we officially have ourselves the head of steam which will feed our tired limbs in the weeks and months to come. Beat Gretna on Wednesday and we’re clear at the top opf the table in January - with every other competition at our mercy too.

Gretna can’t beat Morton in the Cup, even with a two-goal start. Gretna have been glued to the bottom of the table all season - if they go any lower they’ll drop off the fixed odds coupon - and they aren’t even playing at their real “home”. There’ll be ten thousand footballa nd trophy-starved Bears there on Wednesday - there’ll be four hundred jaded, dissilusioned Gretna fans - We win this game we go four points clear of Celtic with the same number of games played. Yer maybe gonnae get three quick Old Firm games later in the season? - win the home one and draw one of the away games and we’ve won the league.

My worry isn’t that we’ve so many games to come - winning teams want the fixtures and the competitions to keep coming as fast as possible and I’m LOVING it that, in January, we’re still in for FOUR trophies. No, my worry is that when we go to Fir Park on Wednesday night we won’t have played a game for ELEVEN DAYS. It’s not too much activity which troubles Rangers right now - it’s the lack of it! Like me with the football on a Saturday at 3pm - if I don’t get me some, the rigamortis soon sets in.

Now, I must get back to counting how many leaves of toilet paper I have left in the current roll … and planning what I’m gonnae do NEXT Saturday. Inverness on Sunday is not enough.