Just a coincidence. Beating Aberdeen first game of the greatest league season of our lives and beating Aberdeen in the last game. It’s just the way the fixtures panned out. It is symbolic, yes. It is a nice book-ending of a colossal campaign. But, in the end, it’s just coincidence; there’s nothing deeper than that to be read into it.
Rangers success and delight washes over me. I’m in agony, wailing over the absence of a beautiful friend: that’s how it started. Not caring about the world agonising and wailing over Rangers celebrations because I’m in the beautiful company of friends: that’s how it ended. Both times it was Aberdeen losing.
I was in bed early on the last night of July 2020. Maybe it was even the first few minutes of August when I clambered into my kip, sober as a very fat judge who hadn’t had a drink since February because he might as well use the enforced anti-social dynamic of Covid protocols – of locked-down Britain – to lose a few stone… especially important as I was now officially, comfortably in my early fifties:
“I know the colour of that blood. That blood is arterial blood. That blood is my death warrant.”
I might have made it to twice Keats’ age but the price I pay - and Goram bless the Scottish Health Board bowel cancer screening project for all men over 50 - is my death sentence will be contained not in evidence of consumption, Romanticism’s preferred fatal disorder, but in a discoloured stool. My knell won’t come on a stanza-scrawled parchment but a smelly square of bog paper.
Cardiac event, stroke, malignant tumour: However it actually comes at me is a mere detail. It’ll be the over-consumption that ends my tenure, long “before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain”.
Anyway, I was in bed early for a Friday. It had been a hard week. We were selling a house we no longer lived in. Negotiations had rumbled on. This after a year of being unable to lose the house to regular home buyers because our insane former neighbours, a pair of Celtic-supporting ladies who the whole street kinda protected from themselves, would accost every viewer before they got down the path.
That was annoying. As had been the fact I had to go round to check on the house at midnight each week, lest these ladies who had always been painfully neighbour-aware but had gone totally out of control since they both retired to spend every waking hour in each other’s deranged company, ran out to goad me about the latest of Celtic’s never-ending litany of domestic triumphs.
But it was far from the hardest aspect of the week now fading into the weekend. We’d been up to Aberdeen on the Monday, driving up and back from our rented Glasgow house to visit friends. And it had been hard. Masks and protocols had eventually been put aside - for the foreverest of forever hugs and the most passionate man-on-man kiss of my life (so far) - but it had been the only unhappy trip I’d ever made to that house. Probably the only sober one for a start.
In fact, it was easily the worst of any of the few dozen times I’ve ever been in the Granite City for whatever reason, and that includes the 5-1 humping at Pittodrie in January 1985 which necessitated me doing my Ayrshire paper round an hour early just to catch my supporters bus which got there four hours early which meant me spending three and a half hours drinking Coke in pubs with my uncle’s mates who were drinking stuff other than Coke as preparation for having all our nuts frozen off on the skelf-addled benches of the old Beach End as Frank McDougall celebrated every one of his four goals by goading me with a crucifix so huge he could probably have scored eight had he got rid of it, a la Laurent Fignon losing the 1989 Tour de France by eight seconds because of the drag imparted by the ponytail he refused to cut off.
Fignon died of cancer a couple of weeks after turning fifty, in 2010 - in August 2010. August. Yeah, “died of cancer” is, I know, as specific as saying someone “likes Jazz”. But I can tell you it wasn’t cancer of the ponytail. Laurent did some drugs to chill - he did other drugs to win. It’s often what we take to get through life, as much as what we take to celebrate it, which ends up taking life from us.
Luckily, the exhaustion took over from the stress in my painfully sober body, late on 31 July 2020, and she and I both passed out shortly after midnight. And then, of course, the wankers a few doors down unleashed their secondary school-age kids.
The inconsiderate, look-at-us, posh hippies down the street – all self-conscious let-the-children-express-themselves types, as if behaving like our street is a William Morris idyll excuses them from instead of confirming them as being selfish, entitled twats – who perfected the art of the loud garden party long before Covid was a thing, were at that stage of middle class pissed which sees them not give a shit all their kids are running up and down the otherwise silent, darkened street of oldsters, shouting and screaming.
A summer night, our window open, I woke up, reached across and looked at my phone. Eleven minutes before 1am. Fuck me. When it starts, this Guantanamo-esque sleep interruption from our newer neighbours usually goes on hourly, until the one or two couples attending this regular brazier-based bacchanal masquerading as a barbeque drag their spawn back to their own homes sometime after four.
The other house is almost sold. Soon we will also be moving from this street. Don’t get involved.
First day of August 2020 was a Saturday. And a Rangers Saturday. When was kick-off at Pittodrie? Noon? Half past? Whatever - it was live on Sky and while my arse was on the sofa my heart was on the floor and my head somewhere else entirely; in Aberdeen, yes – but in a different part. The part that’s home to a hospice. My head was where my friend lay.
I’d been up since 07:30, when that friend’s wife phoned to tell me he’d gone. She, of course, as everyone feels obliged to when making those phone-calls, mentioned the exact moment: Time of Death, 00:49 hrs.
A coincidence. Nothing more. Just symbolic.
Hazel, who from late the previous year had been making arrangements for his 50th birthday – coming in September 2020 - had been segued brutally into phoning and texting details of Andrew’s sudden decline from that catastrophic April day he’d been diagnosed with incurable liver cancer. For the last four months she’d been stoically sticking to the details and the arrangements and the process – even of his basically deciding, on the Thursday, it was time to get on with the actual dying. When we’d seen him in person that Monday, when Andrew and I told each other what we had to tell each other, I knew he was just hanging on to tidy things up. Never seen anything like it. Don’t want to see it again. But what a fucking man.
We saw him on the Monday, in his house. A few days later he pulled out a few tubes and told his girls he was ready for the hospice.
That was him. Even at Uni where our mature student undergrad friendship was forged in a debauchery few of the PhD-ing friends of our own age could compete with [whatever was wrong with Andrew’s liver, I helped put it wrong], I was always a late riser who could drink til the next break of daylight whereas Andrew was always up at the crack and in bed by, well, usually around, eleven minutes to 1am.
Hazel knew those stories, was sick of them. So, on the phone that morning, me sitting up in bed as the kind of sunshine that should herald a new sporting season cracked offensively through the curtains, I told her about being woken at 00:49 that morning. She dissolved. So I told her about the time I’d phoned him from the Travelodge round the corner from The Grill on Union Street - one of planet Earth’s greatest bars - to tell him I’d be late because I’d just got out the shower to discover there were no towels in the room and he told me...
Just try spinning round on the spot. Quickly. By the time yer dry I'll have yer Tennent's topped up.
When I think about the kind of love and happiness which only studying the likes of Keats teaches you is indeed as valid as you felt it was at the time, I think of him telling me that. I think of that silly wee, magnificently enriching, invaluably sustaining moment and know it’s not just my wife and my football team who have poured through me a warmth and a joy that will last far longer than my physical being.
I had a mate so great he could make Aberdeen the only place to be.
I thought of it as Ryan Kent was put through on goal by that lovely ball from an Alfredo Morelos so recumbent he looked like he’d discovered the pleasures of The Grill at the end of the previous season. Like me, Alfie doesn’t like Aberdeen but knows how to enjoy himself there. It’s a small city, obsessed with hating Alfie and Rangers so, on a day when none of that meant much to me, it seemed strangely apt this game was the first competitive match Rangers had played in a stadium emptied by Covid.
A venue emptied in an effort to forestall death created an atmosphere which seemed to mourn someone I couldn’t save. Played in front of zero fans, the tepid pace was respectful of my friend’s passing and the final score-line, of just Kent’s subsequent calm finish to nil against ten home men, remained respectful of the city where he grew up.
Things had felt like this for a while. Being unable to visit Andrew because of Covid and thinking of him all the more as a result. Talking to him on the phone and hearing it in his voice. I even did a virtual pub crawl with him one Friday tea-time – me sending him pics of all our old haunts on the Byres, Dumbarton and Great Western Roads – and the Ashton Lane. But they were all closed. Covid. They looked literally haunted, the absence of life inside them painting what we’d lived through beyond those doors - from Brel to the Volcano, from Clatty Pats to the Queen Margaret Union – in more black than sepia.
Naff symbolism? Fuck, he’d been slagging me for that, for my need to see any kind of poetry anywhere I could get it, for as long as we’d known each other. And he one hundred percent backed me in it. I can’t remember what position he played in gridiron but Andrew knew my favourites and bought me a Hemingway first edition for my 40th.
And I couldn’t tell him now. I’d spent eleven years meaning to but now it was too late to tell him he’d bought me a first edition of the one major Hemingway I’d never read and the one I was saving to complete the set, once I’d got all the letters and plays and minor novels read. I couldn’t tell him about that coincidence – that poetic symbolism – of me refusing to read the hardback copy of that novel he’d bought me for my 40th lest I ruined its 70-year-old pages so I turned to the paperback copy I’d bought sometime in the late-90s and, half-way through, burying myself in it one night, I realised the paperback had around forty pages missing so I had to turn to Andrew’s first edition to save me. And I couldn’t tell him now because it was For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Symbolism. It’s just coincidence. Nothing more. And it can go fuck itself.
Yet I had just watched Aberdeen and Rangers temper their rivalry for my mate. It had to be for Andrew.
And as the locked-down weeks of mourning went on it was as though Rangers kept winning because my heart was fucking breaking. We weren’t even conceding goals. It was like they were doing everything they could to soothe me, to pick me up. But they couldn’t get me to his funeral.
His folks were from the west coast and Andrew was always more Glasgow than Aberdeen. But his dad took a job in the oil industry in the late 70s/early 80s and up they moved. A great player - a great sportsman – Andrew wouldn’t kick me at the fives where we first met, despite my more than deserving it in my crude attempts to curb his fleet-footed, cultured defending. He probably knew too well the damage he could do, being a trained physio. He worked for a ladies team when we were both students (yes, that was a good time) and briefly for Clydebank when Ian McCall was manager.
But he was a surfer at heart. Part of the reason I’d started Uni so late was I’d wanted to follow Rangers all round Scotland and found the work, straight from school, which allowed that. At the same time, before we knew even the people who would bring us together, Andrew went all round the UK catching waves, working summers in the bars of Devon & Cornwall.
This is where the opposites part of our attraction came in: I can’t swim and he was a trained lifeguard. Meeting up for a student pint after our part-time shifts, he’d reek of chlorine from the pool and me of fag smoke from the bookies. He’d cheer on Rangers with me from the sofa, was sure his dad had taken him to the Hibs game at Ibrox in 1977 which was also my first Rangers match but, while we never actually attended a Rangers game together together, Andrew did attend the Artmedia Bratislava Champions League 0-0 in a different part of Ibrox from me, with the father he occasionally mumbled had “just taken him along to see” Aberdeen returning to Pittodrie with the Cup-Winners’ Cup when he was a kid. We three drank in The Count House before and after.
And that father-and-son pair drove me up to Peterhead one day, from one of my early post-Uni visits to their adopted home town, so I could get Balmoor Stadium off the tiny list of Scottish league grounds I hadn’t attended.
But Andrew was an armchair Man U fan. Of course, he was. Because his first love in field sports was American football, playing for the Granite City Oilers back in the day. I want to say he wore shirt number 55 because that would be a coincidence that would make this a bit more bearable, but he was definitely some sort of lineman. A couple of times I knocked back the chance of going to Wembley with him and his Aberdeen mates to see an NFL match. Why? Because I always had some UEFA fixture I was saving my dough for, didn’t I. And, you know, there’d always be a next time.
When I think about that - when I think about me casually saying nah to those invites, and him and his dad, Jim - Jim, who died the fucking day before Andrew got his diagnosis – giving me the fear at Balmoor as they sportingly cheered and clapped both sides in a bitter cup derby with Cove Rangers, unaware of the simmering, inter-mixing tension all round them, it simultaneously shames me and breaks my heart.
Not because I feel sorry for either of them. Hey, they could be a pair of wankers when they wanted to – Jim would slag the shit out me for supporting Rangers when they lost and suddenly be a life-long fan when we were winning, and his son would back him all the way if I tried to point out the hypocrisy - but because life is often so hard on those who deserve it least, and just isn’t long enough to let you do all the good things with all the good people.
Rangers beat Aberdeen on the first day of the 2020-21 season and then lost in Leverkusen in a remnant of all that wasn’t finished from the previous season. Between times, as funeral arrangements became delayed and then impossible thanks to people like the eight Aberdeen players who decided to go for a pint of Covid the night Andrew died, we completed the sale of our house round the corner and something my wife and I had looked forward to celebrating hard for the last year was suddenly no more than dropping off some keys to an office followed by a Domino's on a Monday tea-time.
Domino's. Interflora. We sent a bouquet to Andrew’s funeral like we sent those pizzas to ourselves. We got to see him ravaged to the point of death but we didn’t get to share and testify on the day his remains said goodbye. The Birdie Song. His coffin went down to The Birdie Song. A naff laugh – from the man who taught me it’s the best thing you can have. We’re staying in Glasgow, he’s going in Aberdeen. The distance never felt more chasmic.
But the more Rangers won the less I drank, or ate. And as the weight dropped off and my exercising increased, the hypochondria metastasized. I had never previously, obviously, given a shit about my health. I’d been glassed in a pub, I’d been set upon by gangs in the street – I’d jogged half-marathons and played any kind of fitba that would have me. I’d drunk too much booze and always ate too much of the fatty stuff and I didn’t care. I once went to the doctors for a weird cold and was told I had tonsillitis so bad I shouldn’t be walking. I was more lazy than stoic but I never really gave a shit. And now my every actual shit had me worrying what I would see. Every ache and itch had me convinced I was a goner.
As Rangers cruised into and through their Europa League group in one of the greatest European campaigns in our history I found myself, after a couple months of my wife telling me it was all psychosomatic and getting physically checked out might help me process it, I found myself yanking down my trousers to have my balls felt by a nice, attractive blonde doctor who, despite this middle-aged man’s fantasy-laden scenario, must have thought I had a particularly shy whelk for a penis so scared was I by the prospect of the fatal tumour she was certain to find somewhere about my abdomen, or my groin, or my … my… or my one of those areas where a man who drank and ate like me but had suddenly realised, emotionally, that that kinda stuff could separate him from his wife and from life was bound to get fatal, incurable, terminal fucking cancer.
Talking of laughing about porn tropes (Doctor: "There's absolutely nothing there, Mr Anderson". Me & Andrew: "Yes, Doc, but what about tumors? BOOM! BOOM!"), yeah, Andrew and I had our laughs with the casual ladies. Edinburgh one premillennial Hogmanay – him getting his kilted cock out for Japanese tourists on The Mound and me in the finest cut M&S tin flute for everyone’s sake was, I feel, looking back, for both of us, the final top-up on that front. The atmosphere in the Grassmarket’s Beehive Inn, pre-bells, was akin to that in the changing room at the Kelvin Hall before we starred in a win over our fit-as-fiddles brainiac PhD pals in the intramural five-a-side league; the result just as glorious – the celebrations almost as long.
[They pettily challenged us to a rematch the following Friday night. We beat them again. They had the fitness - they'll all live to 90 - and they had the moves, and they certainly had the pre- and post-match mouth, but they just didn't know fitba like me and my mucker. They didn't have the real respect that gives you the real dig. They'd never really lived.]
But Andrew and I were drinkers for a reason. His dad could be a wanker as much as he could be great and mine could drink as much as he could be even greater. We’d been raised in a way that would make the emotional aspect of “the ladies” as vital to our chats about them during marathon two-man pool tournaments in the Hogshead, across from the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, as the pints.
We were, essentially, romantics. Not the self-styled tragedian slackers but the real romantics - wannabe Romanticists - living for love. He needed his Star Wars and Peter Gabriel as much as I couldn't go long without a bit of Three Colours: White or Björk. So he knew better than most why I married the Scottish Literature graduate I married.
And, as casual as she and me tried to make our wedding – a midweek registry office job with the “reception” dominated by Andrew running back and forth to theboozer with the telly across the road to keep us updated on Man U v Bayern atthe Nou Camp – three weeks earlier he threw us the engagement party we never wanted. He had Sky at his flat. There was a match being played we needed to see live. When we got there he’d made one of his huge lasagne, gifted us a card and presented us with a quaich which has sat and will continue to sit on every mantelpiece my wee wife and I have lived and ever will live with.
In what is just another one of those stupid coincidences – never symbolism; no way - Andrew, that day, also threw in the greatest Scottish title-sealing moment in my Rangers life. You see, our “engagement party” took place on the 2nd of May 1999. Andrew literally threw in domestic bliss.
The Saturday after our wedding, Rangers completed the treble.
And then, as the Old Jock sessions in Tennent’s on Byres Road were tempered by his post-grad return up the road, Andrew married the local lady of his dreams and they had a gorgeous wee daughter and our friendship moved into that lovely phase of distance making the heart grow fonder and when we met up it being like we’d never left off.
Andrew and I were mature students and immature men. We started our courses about six years later than we should have and so, while I may have snatched a cradle for my future wife, in terms of accommodation, we ended up in the company of masters and PhD students. It’s how we met, through mutual flat-mates as painfully and boringly uninterested in alcohol and action movies as we had both wrongly imagined Uni life should be for us.
The pub-and-home scene from Hot Fuzz, where Nick Frost shows Simon Pegg how to chill and enjoy himself? Lived it. Andrew and I are both of those characters – I’m certainly the fattest – but Andrew literally introduced me to the joys of Point Break and we showed each other we could actually do that life-transforming Uni thang without needing to deny ourselves the bar room buffoonery and all-round bampottery we grew up with.
At a time I was still scared by wanting to write about football, just as websites and blogs were becoming a thing, Andrew came along with me and another of our mates to see Hamilton Accies v Elgin City at Firhill. As I took notes, there in the Jackie Husband Stand, he began calling me “Scoop”. Stuff like that. Love like that. He just breezily, easily, unquestioningly believed in me and what little writing I have done – I acknowledged him in my first ever book and he was so chuffed his cousin, Gillian had to tell me because he couldn’t – led me into another friendship, with a man who met Andrew at my fortieth, the night Andrew and Hazel and their Jennifer gave me that first edition (precisely ten years after I knocked the properly crazy drinking on the head following a long night in the bars of Woodlands Road led to me throwing Andrew and my sister out our Dowanhill flat because I was so drunk I didn’t know who they were*).
That friendship, last Saturday, saw me sat in a lovely garden listening to lovely music with lovely people with whom I’d just enjoyed watching Rangers complete turning their last three games of the season into the greatest statement result of 2020-21; An 11-1 aggregate win and an unbeaten league campaign and a one hundred percent home record and a British defensive record and the season which began with a slim win in Aberdeen to make me feel better about Andrew ending with a huge home win over Aberdeen to confirm this season as, for me, being all about Andrew.
That we didn’t lose a single league game, in this of all seasons, is just a coincidence. Nothing more. Just a random conflation of unconnected events.
I mean I don’t believe in him being “up there” or “looking after me”. Nah. It’s just that you can see symbolism in anything if you want to. Isn't it?
My wife helped me realise it’s the not getting to his funeral – and lockdown – which combined with how suddenly Andrew went to throw me into a much-delayed mid-life crisis (the pub, Uni - our funerals - I was always arriving late). Rather than taking a sudden interest in soft-top sports cars, I dabbled with healthy living. It almost killed me. I’m piling the weight back on, to morbidly obese levels again - with Rangers helping out by giving so many causes for celebration. But my dear departed mucker will always be the one face I miss at any party. He was the party.
Whatever Rangers achieve under Steven Gerrard they’ll struggle to match a moment in my life, upstairs in the old postgrad club in University Gardens, where Andrew and I were usually vouched for by pals and flatmates of our age who’d gone straight to uni from school like you’re supposed to.
This time, however, everyone else was down in the bar as Andrew and I hogged the pool table upstairs and nicked bites from a buffet none of the fitness- and focus-addled PhDs were daring to even acknowledge. Pint glasses draining of Black Island, we knew a return to the bar might blow the fact us undergrads had this overqualified scene all to ourselves:
Just at that moment, the barman walked into the room: “Hey. You two!”
Fuck. Rumbled. Probably gonnae get John and Photis barred for signing us in too, maybe even deported back to Galway and Greece, sans doctorates…
“Anything you don’t eat gets binned so you better get busy on that buffet. Now, can I get you more drinks from downstairs…”
That’s the heaven. That’s the heaven where we’ll meet again, mate. My round - your break.
*Next day, Andrew was even more forgiving than usual and, knowing his penchant for heads as red as my sister’s, I have an idea his nearby flat and her sudden need for new overnight Glasgow accommodation had something to do with it. I'm not asking her though and I'm happy for him to take that one to the grave.
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