Valentine’s Day Massacre

I touched on my obsessive personality in a previous blog entry. There have been a whole host of things that I have become obsessed with during my 43 plus years on the planet but the dominant, all consuming, one has always been the fortunes of Partick Thistle Football Club.

Calculating the amount of actual time I devote to Partick Thistle is a task that I’m simply too scared to perform lest the men in white coats take me away. And therein lies my greatest fear. Not so much that my obsessive, compulsive behaviour will end up with me sectioned for my own good, but that the consequence of that would mean I would miss a game.

You see I simply can’t miss a Thistle match. I can no more get up on a match day and not go to the football than I can avoid blinking.

January 1^st 2005 was the last time Partick Thistle played a fixture without myself being in attendance. While I like to think that the players stopped, took a look up in the stands and wondered, maybe even worried, where I was the world didn’t stop turning simply because I was on the Isle of Mull that day rather in Paisley where I should have been. 

It was, however, an uncomfortable afternoon. The scenery on the Isle of Mull is desolate yet beautiful. As we took a trip round the island I should have lost myself in the beauty of the countryside, yet all I could do was worry about what was unfolding at Love Street. The fact that for much of the afternoon I had no signal on my mobile phone didn’t help.

When word eventually came through that we had drawn 1-1 I was relieved that we hadn’t lost. If truth be told I was equally as relieved that the 90 minutes had passed without anything out of the ordinary, my non-attendance aside, occurring.  

Since that afternoon over 7 years ago I have made sure that wherever Thistle are playing you will find a fat, overly intense, grey haired man there watching and worrying.

That means that every social engagement has to be arranged with where Thistle are playing in mind. Want to book tickets for that show at the theatre? Better not, we might have a re-arranged league game or cup replay that night.

In moments of rare self-analysis, which I suppose the blog is a kind of, I hate the fact that I get so wrapped up in the fortunes of a mere (did I really say that?) football team. I hate too the fact that I have involved others in my obsession as well. My better half has gone since meeting me from someone with no interest in football to someone who spends every second Saturday at Firhill. She can be found in the Jackie Husband Stand selling programmes and when she calls Thistle “we” I love her all the more.

She understands the massive role that Partick Thistle play in my life, which is why when she learned that instead of a romantic tete-a-tete somewhere on Valentine’s Day I’ll be making a 250 mile round trip to watch Partick Thistle play Ross County she just shrugged, laughed and said “never mind”. She probably knew that given an ultimatum between spending time with the woman I love and 22 hairy arsed footballers, the hairy arsed footballers would win every time. And that is just plain wrong.