…The Tartan Army… yeez don’t enlist… yeez are automatically part of it when yeez are born Scottish… #TBSU…

…some criticism apparently coming out of Brazil on bad crowd behaviour at the WURLD Cup and my mind goes racing back ‘ahem’-years ago…as a mere twenty-two-year old bank clerk, this ol’ Jurassic was already working in the noble Clydesdale & North of Scotland Bank branch in Lombard Street in London… I claimed at the time I was there in England as a missionary… so when the Caledonian hordes descended from over the border for the then annual joust with the English football team at the old Wembley stadium, this Celtic Trojan Horse-ite was already in situ… whatever the score, the fun really started post match, with revelry in London’s West End that looked more like the massed Gathering of the Clans… Trafalgar Square usually the first stop, where the trick of the day/evening was to see how many be-kilted bodies could clamber up to the high point in the base pedestal of Nelson’s Column, probably some fifteen feet or so above the ground…

…admittedly, more than a soupçon of strong waters was imbibed… or, truth be known, more like a full loch of the electric soup… I recall struggling to get to the high point, clad in kilt, when a huge Scottish mitt grabbed me from above and hoisted me like some Highland rag doll on to the plinth… the giant owner of the helpful fist, also boasted a wild red beard… a true Man of the Glens… but through all of this mayhem, the humour of the congregation shone like a beacon atop Ben Nevis… the Scottish football fans, either of the round or the oval ball version are known globally as well-behaved, great, friendly, party animals, much given to singing, chanting and generally having a bluudy good time… the majority of which the following morning is obliterated from the memory banks (one wonders why?)…

…there’s a book I read a wee while back, The Tartan Army, (so due acknowledgement to that as the source of the ensuing comments) which still tickles me every time I refer back to it… there’s a photograph of Scottish fans dancing in the streets of Madrid holding a large stretch of white cloth on which is painted, ‘Spanish Bed Sheets Make Great Banners!’… another that creases me up is when a troupe of around fifty or so kilted supporters stood at the Wailing Wall after a match with Israel, standing in line and singing ‘We Are Wailing, We Are Wailing’  a la Rod Stewart… and so it goes on… grab the book if yeez see a copy… there’s tons of laffs in it… see yeez later… LUV YEEZ!…

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