Gloryhunting

Chapter 1 Pre – season

I’m scared of dying on the toilet.
Not something I’d admit to in polite conversation but a fact nonetheless. Imagine pegging it; the victim of a sneaky stroke or a heart attack you never saw coming - Sitting there...... on the pan.
Dead.
One minute alive, focussing on the job in hand. The next minute gone, forever. And then being found, Lord preserve us, slumped with trousers at your ankles, by family , friends or worse, an axe wielding fireman or some green clad, ‘doesn’t give a toss’ ambulance driver! The ignominy of it, to my mind, is paralysing.
I can see it now. A row of nose wrinkled witnesses, standing, staring, wondering how they are going to tell everyone down the pub the wonderfully embellished yarn about Craig the Crapping Corpse and his terminal deposit. All except my mother that is who is racking her brains to remember if she’s put the green loo cleaner round the rim recently. After all, you know how the neighbours talk.
Then there’s my adoring public gathered outside, mobilised by the arrival of an emergency vehicle in their locality.
“How did he die?”, shouts Mrs Riley, the neighbourhood watch from Number 43.
“Don’t know”, shrugs the ambulance-man, “but he wasn’t getting enough roughage that’s for sure!”
Just as the triumphant revelation that “He died-on-the-pan!” ripples through the expectant throng of gathered wifeys, I am transported in a state of galloping rigor mortis to the awaiting ambulance. At the vital moment a gust of wind pulls the cover sheet off me and with a magician’s flourish I am revealed as a colourless downhill skier inexplicably bereft of his strides, skis and those pointy pole things they use for balance.
“Ooooooooaaaaaahhhhh”, the crowd gasp appreciatively.
“Check the Ys!” snickers a wee boy with a cone and a face rash.
And as my Quasimodo form disappears into the shadows, a final nail is pushed painfully into my coffin when someone stage whispers to the world, “He’s that nutter that supported The Rovers you know”.
Such is my nightmare.
So you may find it strange for me to say that contrary to my usual SAS operation of ‘in-shit-n-out’, I am, and have been for some fifteen minutes now, perched on the ceramic seat reading a dog-eared, seven week old copy of the Daily Record dated Monday the 17th of May, 2007. I’m looking at the football league tables. No that’s wrong, I’m not just looking. For about the hundredth time I’m absorbing, enjoying, contemplating and reflecting on all the glory that this 6cm square of newsprint represents. My eyes are lingering lovingly on the top line of one league in particular;