Dundee

No Helicopter Sunday—The Spurs’ dilemma.

Brendan Rodgers said he won’t watch Rangers playing at home to Dundee. Neither will I. Both of us will check the score later. It’ll be interesting to see how many season-book holders turn out on a dreich night with nothing to play for. We’ll watch Spurs take on Manchester City.

City have had a shit season by their standards. No Champions League. Despite outplaying Real Madrid, they were knocked out by their rivals. Celtic can only win the league for the fourth season on the bounce by winning their next two matches. They’ve got an FA Cup Final to finish the season. Like Celtic it’s against their rivals and they’ve favourites to also win the consolation prize. The League Championship is the big one.

Ange Postecoglous’s Spurs team led the League at Christmas. They lost four games before their latest home win. They’ve no real chance of finishing fourth and obtaining a Champions League spot. Aston Villa have got that pretty much nailed down. We here all the usual nonsense about playing on until it’s mathematically impossible. The reality is Spurs last two games, like Rangers in the Scottish League, are unfriendlies. Meaningless fixtures they are obliged to complete.

Arsenal fans for once want Spurs to win. In Scotland, and Glasgow in particular, we sneer at other teams having a rivalry that is not written in blood. Ally McCoist said he’d want his son to miss a penalty if he was playing for Celtic against Rangers. I’m reminded of the story (perhaps apocryphal) of when Dixie Deans signed for Celtic his brother, a staunch Rangers man who drove a bin lorry, emptied the contents in his front garden. Which was fair enough. But he called for a second load.

Could you imagine the circumstances when you’d want Rangers to win? The media reminds us of Europa’s and Champions League coefficients and how they’ll affect Scottish football. Fuck them, I say. I want Rangers to lose, regardless.

I’ve got a drinking buddy, Archie. He’s one of the many that got sucked into the Ponzi scheme and lost thousands of pounds investing in Rangers after Chairman David Murray sold the club for £1. Overpriced, I thought. But, hey, I’d have paid a quid for it. Archie tells me when Celtic are playing in Europe, he wants us to win. He’s a Scottish fitba fan.

Nah, I could never say that about Rangers. I was at the game at Love Street when Celtic had to win by five goals and Hearts had to lose. Which they duly did to Dundee. Thank you, substitute Albert Kidd.

Could I imagine a scenario where instead of Dundee, Hearts were playing Rangers and for us to win the league, Rangers had to win, as Dundee did, all those years ago?  

It would be tough. Sophie’s Choice, which kid do you want to save? I can’t find it in my heart to say I’d want Rangers to win. But hey, Rangers always beat Hearts anyway. I couldn’t wish it, but if it happened, it happened.

https://amzn.to/48khBJ5

Dundee 1—2 Celtic

A James Forrest double gets us over the line. With four games remaining, Celtic, with a win over Hearts, can effectively win the league by beating Rangers at home in the penultimate match. This was a twitchy match. Like many others we could have been out of sight or left reeling in injury time when Mellon missed a free header at the back post.

The Dundee plan was exactly what we’ve come to expect. Sit in, hit longish balls towards the forwards, focus on Taylor and Liam Scales side of things were Celtic are vulnerable to cross balls and corners in particular.

Celtic do what we always do. Started well with seventy or eighty-percent possession, with a few half-chances. Nicholas Kuhn and Reo Hatate threatened. The latter hitting the post with a wonderful drop of the shoulder, in the second half, but his shot hit the inside of the post. With Celtic two ahead that would have settled the match. Hatate is not back to his best, but he always tries to make a forward pass. He was the best midfielder in Scotland last year. Kuhn has had teething problems with his teeth and weight loss. I’ve yet to see him play a good game. To me, he is an empty jersey as he was again today.

James Forrest—yes I used to slag him off, but even a blind Rangers supporter would recognise him as our best winger in a poor bunch—match winner. Brendan Rodgers said something along the lines of he was the best winger at the club. Play him, many of us have been saying so for weeks. Palma looks good enough for backup. Yang may prove a good buy next season or the season after, but it doesn’t look good. Kuhn (sigh) I don’t understand why he keeps starting. I’m waiting for him to prove me wrong.

Forrest has nothing left to prove. But he’s only 32. His first goal on the half-hour mark was a belter. Kyogo teed him up from the edge of the box. A ball fired into the Japanese striker. He spun away with the outside of his boot. Forrest took it first time on the volley and fired it in the net.

Around the hour mark, after Dundee had started the second half strongly and corner after corner created goal scoring opportunities for the Den’s men, Forrest robbed a defender on the edge of their box. He played a give-and-go with Hatate and got on the end of it. Ricki Lamie and Portales played like Laurel and Hardy and Forest nipped in and nutmegged the keeper. That looked like job done.

Forrest, of course, comes off for Palma. Kyogo off for Idah. But it was the loanee Norwich striker that brought Dundee roaring back and looking for an equaliser. Mo Sylla and Jordan McGhee headed past the post and straight at Joe Hart. The Celtic defence looked to have cleared—yet another—free kick. Portaless’s downward volley was nothing like Forrest’s, but it hit Idah and wrong-footed Joe Hart.

Hart found time to get a late booking for time wasting. He deserved it. But it would be interesting to see if the same rule was applied when we play home and away and keepers take an eternity and opposition players fall down.

Man of the match by a mile, James Forrest. I gave him the man of the match for his contribution against Aberdeen. Let’s hope he’s a certain starter for the remaining fixtures. We still lose too many goals. McGregor still looks off the pace, but he’s still far superior to Iwata. If we can get Maeda back and Forrest on the other side, we’d be full strength for the remaining four league fixtures and the cup final. We’ll win the league, not the cup. I’ve been saying that for a while. I hope I’m wrong and we win both. Maybe Kuhn will get a hat-trick in the Cup final. Let’s just get over the line. Hearts at home. Home win.

https://amzn.to/48khBJ5

Don Paterson (2023) Toy Fights: A Boyhood.

Don Paterson is around the same age as me. But he’s won a stack of poetry and literary awards and is Professor of Poetry at St Andrew’s University. That’s the university that usually comes out near the top for all the English nobs that can’t get into Oxbridge and even a few that can. Don Paterson, like me, grew up in a council estate in Dundee.

Dundee is on par with drug deaths with Glasgow, which every year wins the award for dying. That’s how I measure how shite a place is. Don had a solid enough start to life. His dad worked as a colour-iner during the day for D.C. Thomson. That Scottish institution that sold the Sunday Post, Oor Wullie, The Broons, The Beano, The Dandy to us. A twee-wee vision of Scotland.  No Catholics, or blacks, or girls that considered getting pregnant without first being duly wed. It was part of the contract for working for D.C. Thomson. Knowing your place. No sex, no homosexuals, nor unions, obviously. That would be spelling trouble.  

Don got a job there as well, working in the ‘Banzai’ department of Commando comics before his brain melted and he had a breakdown. His dad was a solid enough musician and played every night to make ends meet, while his mum went catalogue mad and had a new couch every week and black debt was there middle name.

Don too got into the band scene after experimenting with other instruments. He found the guitar or the guitar found him. But he didn’t want to be like his da. Being like Billy MacKenzie was their goal. He tells us how a woman interviewing him couldn’t help to stop and kiss him half-way through.

The pudding haircut and Jimmy Osmond, ‘I’ll be your long-haired lover from Liverpool’, was to him the polar opposite of no talent and a voice that shouldn’t be heard. He doesn’t blame him. Family business. Crazy Horses.

I agree with much what he says about how the buroo harasses the sick and poor, but it could provide a creative space for working-class artists if it was renamed something catchy, like Universal Income and not Credit. (Buroo money generally is worth 10% less than it was 10 years ago, which coincides with toxic Tory policies, but that’s me going off on a tangent).  

Paterson is a jazz aficionado and music lover. I don’t even have a radio in my van. I’m tone deaf and not interested. His references fall flat. But we can agree that a woman singing lifts her and makes her more beautiful. It worked for Celine Dion and before that Barbara Streisand. Anyone that can hit the high notes and fling in enough sugary lyrics to ring school bells in a primary school is fine with me.

I’m not a fan of institutions. But most of my stories seem set in them. So I’m an aficionado. When Paterson had a psychotic break from his body and was admitted to Madness, not the band but ward 89, the Largactil shuffle and Ninewells Hospital, my ears didn’t prick up but this seemed familiar territory. Paterson, we know escapes (he wrote this book, won awards). But he was both sane and insane enough to spot a trend. He adapt the ‘law of stupidity’, which states that x proportion of any group will work against both their interests and those in the group. He adds that the group leader—like the recently promoted charge nurse in his ward, Graham, with a propensity for humiliating patients and intimidating and having sex with women on Ward 90—will be a narcissist.

We’ve moved on from the eighties. We know this from watching the moron’s moron Trump, Boris Johnston and Nigel Farage, to name just three. He does not name Jimmy Saville directly, perhaps for fear of being sued, or just doesn’t need the hassle.

It’s no secret that the Jute Mills of Dundee created, for a time, a matriarchically inclined culture (*with higher than average infant mortality, even for working class slums, as babies were weaned by house husbands on sugary water). Don Paterson looks back to the seventies and eighties  in short punchy chapters. He finds lots worth remembering, including himself, and his morbid guilt. That’s the beauty of this book, unbanal wonder. Read on.  

Jimmy Johnstone, Life Stories, BBC Alba

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07xdrv3/jimmy-johnston

James Connolly Johnstone was born on the 30th September 1944. He died on 13th March 2006. We all know who Jinky is. We voted him Celtic’s best-ever player and if you look at the footage of that night, you’ll see a young looking Martin O’Neil and a grinning number seven with dreadlocks called Henrik Larsson. A statue of Jinky is outside Parkhead, but he rests in our hearts. Because Celtic is our religion and he’s one of us.

I’d met Billy Smith in Dalmuir, one of the older guys that used to train our Guild team. He remained remarkably young looking up until he got Motor Neurone Disease.  

‘How you getting on Jake?’ he asked.

‘No bad,’ I said. ‘But I heard you’ve got that thing, like that Fernando Ricksen?’

Fernando Ricksen had been in the Daily Record and the other media. He’d been to his spiritual home at Ibrox, but was in a wheelchair.

Billy was quick to shake his head and correct me. ‘No, no like Fernando Ricksen, like Jimmy Johnstone.’

No statute for Billy Smith, but I understood what he was saying, without wanting to find out what it meant. It’s endgame and part of the Jimmy Johnstone story. Archie Macpherson said it was like being in a room when the walls closed in. But Jimmy didn’t die alone. Agnes, his wife, his son and two daughters were beside him.  His Celtic family were there for him. The team that won the European Cup in 1967 supported him through his illness. Bertie Auld, who was never lost for words, but now, sadly, has dementia visited Jimmy almost every day. When asked why, for once, Bertie was stuck for words. ‘That’s just…who he was,’ he says. Hail, Hail, Bertie.

And a special word, for a special friend, the Rangers winger, Willie Henderson. He was there for Jimmy too. But he said he found it hard. Hail, Hail, Willie Henderson.

My brother Stephen (SEV, may he RIP) told me the story of working for Lawrence and asking this wee labourer to get him some two-by-two planks. Then he realised it was Jimmy Johnstone. Much has been made of Messi’s standoff with Barcelona. The Argentinian was willing to take a pay cut from his annual salary of twenty million Euros (which didn’t include bonuses or image rights). But here was wee Jinky, whom 100 000 Spaniards in the Bernabéu stadium, cried ‘Ole, Ole,’ every time he touched the ball in  Alfredo Di Stéfano’s  testimonial match, following their European Cup win. Jinky, was quite simply, the best player in the world. Yet, here he was working in a building site, after offering to sell all his medals for £10 000 to William Haughey. It’s difficult to imagine Messi doing that.

But it was a different world then. We used to think that guys like Billy McNeil and Dixie Deans would be alright because they had their own pub. They would always have money and an income, we thought.

My brother and Jimmy had something in common. They were both alkies. No pubs for them. One day at a time.  Jimmy’s son, James, shakes his head, when he remembers what his da had become. Anyone that has been to Alcoholic Anonymous meetings know what happens when the guys that at the top table get competitive and start telling stories of their fall from grace. One guy might say he ate a baby seal pup in front of its mother. And the next guy will tell you he did something similar, but didn’t stop with one seal pup. But Jimmy could say he’d held up the European Cup. He’d done a lot of stupid things and played for teams he didn’t want to, but it was a job, and one he could do.

He played in with San Jose Earthquakes, but he couldn’t be doing with all that American stuff as if it was show business. He wanted to get back to Viewpark, and home. He’d spells with Sheffield United and played three times for Dundee. Tommy Gemmill was the manager, and he was being kind when he said he brought him in to do a job. Gordon Strachan remembers getting drunk with Jinky and thinking he’d hit the big time. Jinky played with Shelbourne and ended his career with Elgin City.

His heart remained at Parkhead. He tells the story of crying in the car park, after Jock Stein had let him go. Archie Macpherson said that if Jock had a favourite, it was Jinky, but Jock Stein was ruthless when it came to our team. He cut Jinky loose and the wee man unravelled. Like Benny Lynch, he turned to the drink, and thought he could sweat it off.

Jinky might have been the greatest ever, but he fancied himself a bit of a singer. When Rod Stewart visited he told him to shut up and give him the microphone. He sung a duet with Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr. Jinky’s daughter remembered Billy Connelly sleeping on the floor.

Jinky believed in UFO’s, and John Clark tells a story of how Jinky wanted him to take him to some godforsaken place to hunt for aliens. But Jinky never strayed far from his home in Viewpark. Like another legend, Tommy Burns (also on BBC Alba), he was devout and was buried in his local parish. Jimmy Johnstone was our Messi. But he was just an ordinary wee guy with extraordinary football ability that worked as a labourer, did what we all dreamed of a kid, played for Celtic and loved the club. Hail, Hail. May he RIP.   

Traces, BBC 1 Scotland, BBC iPlayer, based on an idea by Val McDermid, written by Amelia Bullmore, director Rebecca Gatward.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08zhgmb/traces-series-1-episode-1

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08zhgs6/traces-series-1-episode-2

‘You’re unbelievably beautiful, you are.’ Daniel (Martin Compston) tells Emma Hedges (Molly Windsor).

It must be dispiriting for a young actor thinking if any series is set in Scotland, I must have a chance, but only if Martin Compston is busy and doesn’t want the part.

She’s got baggage. He’s got baggage. Every character has more baggage than Buckaroo. (I’ve got baggage. Did I tell you I did a forensic science course, elements of forensic science, and somebody stole my course book? I might even be a suspect here.) Molly’s a forensic student in Dundee, Tayside College. Her mum went missing eleven years ago when she was seven. She was unbelievably beautiful then too. Her mum wasn’t bad either. Julie Hedges (Neve McIntosh) she turns up—blonde hair swilling about, print dress, bright colours.  And she’s laughing because she doesn’t know she’ll go missing during The Tall Ship’s Gala and her dismembered body will be discovered by a dog walker, three months later on the beach. She’s not a ghost, like in Randal and Hopkirk Deceased, because then she’d need to wear a white suit.

That’s the cold case, but it’s complicated by her boss at the lab at which she works, Professor Sarah Gordon (Laura Fraser) is also running a MOOC course in forensic science that has been viewed by over 23 000 online viewers. I might have done it. I like MOOC courses. But she’s made a bit of an error. The case study and corpse they use as analytical material matches the case of Molly’s mum, because it was based on her case. But Professor Sarah Gordon can’t admit this. Nor can she seem to avoid Molly, they bump into each other more than is humanly possible without intercourse.

She’s got something to hide. As has her colleague Professor Kathy Torrance (Jennifer Spence) who also had intercourse with an Australian backpacker, but it was sexual.

The forensic scientists are deep into murder cases at the appropriately named Secret’s Nightclub. Three bodies and the manager of the nightclub jumped off the Tay Bridge after the club burned down.

Emma goes to stay with her pal Skye Alessi (Jamie Marie Leary) while trying to digest all those secrets. Skye is her wee pal in the swirly hair moments when her mum appears. You guessed it. She’s also got secrets her mum, Izzy Alessi (Laurie Brett) doesn’t want Emma to know about. Something to do with the photo of her dad, old rocker Drew Cubbin (John Gordon Sinclair) being in bed with her mother, taken in Izzy’s house, possibly by Izzy, while her mum was married to her step-dad. He’s got something to hide. She’s got something to hide.

The lead detective in the case  DI Neil McKinven (Michael Nardone) was a junior cop when Emma’s mum was killed. But as a favour, he’s helping Professor Sarah Gordon cover up her mistake in using an ongoing case in her course material. He’s got a secret too.

So far every cast member has a secret, and some non-cast members (me), we need to know who the killers are or were, and work out if they were related cases to the person that stole my course book. Taggart would have done it in an hour. Here we’re in for the longer haul of six episodes. Nah, not for me. Too suspect.