Fifty not out
Fifty years ago today I walked into my first newspaper office and started out in journalism.
The circumstances of that day will seem like an extract from a passage in ancient history for people of a certain age, but that’s understandable given that it was half a century ago.
My first Sports Editor showed me how to put a sheet of A4 paper into an Olivetti typewriter and invited me to teach myself typing as well as learn the basics of the business I had chosen at the same time.
There were no mobile phones or computers or laptops because they, like the internet, hadn’t been invented.
The following day I found myself outside Celtic Park interviewing Billy McNeill, who had become the first British player to lift the European Cup three years earlier when Celtic beat Inter Milan in Lisbon.
The thinking was that I should sink or swim and learn by my mistakes.
Given that I am still here and doing my job, I can at least claim to have avoided drowning.
Anyone and everyone can feel free at this point to interrupt and add their own punchline about incompetence, cowardice and negligence as it applies to me and the last five decades.
That, I have discovered, is the way of the world today. Just hurl unthinking criticism and abuse at anyone who sticks their head above the parapet.
Believe me, it is of no consequence.
I’ve put in the years. I have stored away the indelible memories. And I have forged the lifelong friendships.
I have served the bans imposed by clubs and fallen out, and back in again, with the best of them. I have seen the world and had a ball in the process.
The other stuff is just white noise.
But the genuinely sad reflection I have on a personal milestone is to say if I was twenty today, instead of seventy, I wouldn’t enter the profession it has been my privilege to be part of for so long.
There’s just too much badness, too much weirdness and too much intolerance. The atmosphere is poisonous and it must take a strong constitution to negotiate each working day for those who are much younger than me.
I read one columnist recently who stated that he had been driven to depression partly by the recurring thought that he might be the subject of physical attack from a misguided member of the public.
Really?
Physical assault just because you might have an opinion that runs contrary to someone else’s opinion?
Who needs that?
Age affords certain privileges. One of them is to understand life is just too short to be bothered by some faceless wonder calling you everything under the sun.
When you’re seventy the top priority is to be seventy-one. Trust me.
Another privilege is to understand that history repeats itself. Sectarianism, for example, is a part of everyday life in this part of the world.
Those who go in for it with such relish today are no different from those who had the same inclination in the decade that saw me start out in journalism. Today’s lot just have more outlets for their puerile behaviour, that’s all.
The mindless who filmed the mindless sectarian taunt aimed at Alfredo Morelos for the benefit of a mindless audience on social media are sadly typical.
Sectarianism afflicts the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the well read and the ill-educated. It is a problem for those you least expected to be like that and for those from whom you would have expected no less.
It is suffered by Rangers players and Celtic players. There is no moral high ground.
It is to the credit of both sets of players that they have delivered so much good football this season while working in such a tawdry environment.
Today we’ll need to brace ourselves for another outbreak of questionable conduct when the SFA decide if Celtic’s Ryan Christie is to be punished retrospectively for grabbing Morelos’ genitalia during the league meeting of the clubs on December 29.
If the referee, Kevin Clancy, had seen the incident he would surely have shown Christie a yellow card and that would have been the end of the matter.
A slap on the wrist of that sort, rather than a more excessive punishment, would only seem fair.
Likewise, if Morelos’ hand over throat gesture to the Celtic fans when he was sent off in that game is to be reviewed by the Compliance Officer then a sense of perspective is needed there as well.
When Morelos gestured to the Motherwell fans after scoring against their side last month he got a yellow card.
That level of punishment would seem appropriate and consistent in the wake of his stupidity at Celtic Park.
Those who must be offended by everything will want Christie and Morelos to receive savage sentences because they have created outrage. Allegedly.
But filming sectarian abuse in the street is just banter, presumably.
We’ll talk about it on the programme tonight and leave the over excitable to their own devices.
Let’s get this fifty-first year started.