Hillonearth

I heard they're doing work on Posties Park at the moment - at a guess it would be there.

Be handy when he inevitably falls out a tenth storey window in a few weeks.

I fondly remember this one mainly for the headline - couple of steaming das start trading punches after a red card at a schools final up at our ground, get the game abandoned and it's somehow our social club's fault - and presumably also the fault of the boozers on Maryhill Road - for irresponsibly opening their doors before such a powderkeg fixture. 'Ya wee w***': Booze-fuelled rammy at Catholic school football match leads to calls for drink ban for parents.

"What am I getting lifted for?" "We'll think of something...."

Every year since we've been here we've had a pair of (usually) blackcaps or (more rarely) garden warblers in the garden...never the two the same year for some reason. Was beginning to think this was the first year we'd drawn a blank until this morning when the male blackcap finally showed himself. They're just skulking wee buggers to see.

The snotrocket, which admittedly you don't see much outside of football players these days...worst one I witnessed was a mate who decided to do it at a bus stop while in the throes of a bad cold...covered one nostril, blew his nose and it hit the pavement without the results actually detaching themselves from his nose. I was "treated" to the sight of him attempting to back off from the carnage, while the bright green rope of snot got longer but still didn't break. Also, perhaps more of a medical condition than outright boggingness, but there was a guy in our work that had the worst case of dandruff I've ever seen - he looked like a human snowglobe. I had to check something on his PC, and the keyboard wasn't working right...I turned it upside down to see if a paperclip or whatever was jammed in the keys and it was like shaking the crumbs out a toaster.

I always understood it was because it was served in smaller measures than standard. Either that or they had a well-developed sense of irony in 18th century Scotland.

Guy I used to work with announced he was away for a Barry Manilow. "You mean a Barry White?" "Naw...Barry Manilow....he's shite..."

Geography's got a bit to do with it in my case for sure...I'm maybe a 15 minute walk from the nearest pubs from me which are on our main street and consist of a Rangers and a Celtic boozer on opposite corners from each other, a Wetherspoons - which we'll maybe go down for breakfast in three or four Sundays a year but which like all Wetherspoons projects a pretty heavy divorced dad energy - and a handful of dying-on-their arse old man's pubs which seem to be haunted by the same dozen or so old boys every day. The nearest pubs I'd actually want to go to are in the south side twenty minutes away on the train, and it's only really when tying them in with going out for something to eat across that way or visiting a mate of mine that lives there that I can be bothered making the journey.

You'll be fine aside from only getting a three minute warning when the bomb drops.

I'd agree with that...the covid thing changed a lot of habits in terms of how I like to spend a night out...obviously going to an event (football/gig etc.) is a completely different kettle of fish, but that random night in the boozer doesn't float my boat any more in the way it used to...the concept of paying over the odds just to be in an annoyingly-busy room where it takes ages to get served doesn't have the same appeal it did. It's happened a couple of times recently when I've been out for a meal with the missus...more often than not previously it was a case of going on somewhere afterwards, but now halfway through the second drink one or other of us has tended to say "This is a bit shite...you want to go home and just have a drink there...?"

One of the less cheery entries in the series TBH

Makes for some potentially great rhyming slang though.

I walked up to it last time I was at a game there - the way the buses ran I had about an hour to kill before kickoff. The footprint of the stand's still there and there's the shell of some building I think might have been the changing rooms. Worth visiting for sure, although inevitably it started absolutely pishing it down on the way back down the hill.

That's the one I immediately thought of, as well as Burghead which is in the middle of a conifer forest. Weirdest ones for me are the Borders ones where there's a modest football ground right next door to an much bigger rugby ground as if to reiterate what the pecking order is down that way...Gala, Hawick, Peebles and Selkirk all have or had that kind of arrangement. A unique one is Lochar's new park which we visited earlier in the season and which is right next door to an aircraft museum...spent half the game trying to identify planes over the hedge while I was supposed to be running the line.

There seems to be a sweet spot age-wise for sure. I used to go out with a girl whose family had lived in Canada for about ten years...they'd moved there when she was maybe six or seven. They'd eventually moved back to Edinburgh and both her older and younger sisters had reverted to a Scottish accent almost immediately, whereas the one I was going out with still sounded like she'd just stepped off a plane from Vancouver...it was almost like the younger one was still at a malleable age in terms of accent and the older one's accent was perhaps more fixed by the time they went there.

We had that a while back - a series of compulsory soul-searching Teams meetings scheduled between 12 and 2. They were remedied - certainly in my case - by attending the first one then going out on lunch for an hour from 2.30 till 3.30 when every c**t was looking for me.

It screams horrible newbuild estate when you see a group of streets named after trees. Can also add a seeming aversion to the more normal street/road/avenue kind of terminology...the more Gates, Wynds, Groves, Walks and so on there are the more likely a place is to have been thrown up by a Barratt tribute act in the last 20 years.

There's a few places in Scotland where you don't have a clue how they're pronounced until you hear a local say it...there's a wee village out the arse end of Dumfries called Torthorwald which I was a bit surprised to find was pronounced something along the lines of T'thurrol like a minor female Vulcan character in Star Trek. The name Menzies is a weird one...used to go out with a girl with the surname, and she code-switched the two pronunciations depending on who she was with...used "Mingiss" when speaking to her (posh) family, but "Men-zees" in everyday life because she claimed it was a pain in the arse to have to spell it out to every second person.

Building a fanbase is always going to be a slow process, and I think there's a certain degree of naivete in some quarters where as I say there seems to be an expectation that existing membership will equal ready-made active support. There's also the question of catchment area - someone like Gartcairn will be fine in the longer term because they're smack bang in the middle of a fairly heavily-populated area where there is no competition for fans at that level, whereas in Bishopbriggs there are now no less than three teams in an area where it's debatable whether there's enough appetite to sustain one.

They apparently already severed the connections with the adult teams not long into this season:

I think that's been the gameplan for a lot of the former boys' clubs who have entered the juniors and latterly the WOS...the assumption that because they've got a membership of x-hundred they've got a ready made fanbase. It rarely pans out that way though...parents are happy to ferry their kid to their age-group game at 9.30 in the morning, but in the main are understandably reluctant to hang around for the rest of the day to watch the adult team. I've always equated it to being a member of a gym - you're happy to pay for the service they provide, but if they started a competitive gymnastics team you'd be unlikely to feel compelled to drop everything and start going to competitions they're involved in. Another issue they seem to face is that the pathway they provide turns out not to be what they perhaps envisaged - if you eventually get two or three first team players from any age group side you'll have done really well. It ends up that only a small minority of the youth setup's production line make the transition to adult football with the rest of the first team squad inevitably filled with players from outside of the organisation. This seems to cause friction and in some cases fracture between the youth and adult setups...it's hard not to see a pattern emerging there...BSC/Rossvale/Harmony Row and over in the east Syngenta...

Interesting choice to feature a painting of the young Brian Clough on the tail.