Jumpers for blogposts

Douglas Blane has accused me of being a poet again, despite the fact that I've only written one serious poem in my adult life. It was about the mild synaesthesia I experience now and again, associating each day of the week, month of the year and number from one to ten with a particular colour. I do it with physics quantities as well. When, at a writers' group I once attended, I intoned, "Volts are green, green as the sea-snakes rippling across my oscilloscope screen..." it was always going to end in, "I'll get me coat." I haven't tried another since then.
Read Douglas's blog yourself to see what he says about someone coming to his door asking him to play football. People didn't come to my door asking me to play football, not because I would  have shunned them in order to write an ode, but because I was rubbish at it. They did ask me to play at other things - I had, after all, invented the technique of punting our pram-wheeled bogies gondola-style with a brush handle - so I was by no means a recluse. But games of skill and coordination, well, forget it. Maybe school would help?
Let’s start at the primary, where once a week we had gym. Someone, somewhere in the universe, might have developed a programme of activities that could have improved the body control software of the puppet-operated-by-a- drunk wee boy, but that someone was nowhere to be seen around Carluke Primary from 1965 to 1972.
It may have done the wee boy the world of good to discover something in school that, along with singing, he was rubbish at. In secondary school, gym had been replaced by PE, which was sometimes physical and rarely educational. We played football rather a lot, save for a brief dalliance with gymnastics and another with basketball. If it was too wet, we went indoors and played crab football. The outdoor games, played on a once-grassy field, required little if any input from our track-suited pedagogue. Perhaps the kindest thing that could be said of our teacher was that he was “of his time”. In the years between attending school and becoming a teacher, I thought of plenty of unkind things, often involving the words “lazy” and, well, you can guess the other ones. Unfair, probably, as he doubtless stood at the side of a football pitch on many a rainswept Saturday, encouraging the boys who had distinguished themselves by not walking about with their arms folded as a 20-aside match went on around them during a scheduled lesson. The Scouts, Wishaw swimming baths, a succession of bicycles and, latterly, the school mountaineering club all played an infinitely more significant role in keeping me healthy than did anything formally timetabled.

I came late to watching football too. It happened round about the time that some of my non-serious poems were published. Actually, and I hope I'm not breaching some kind of professional code here by telling you this, it's a contractual obligation, as evidenced in the inside flyleaves of many Scottish authors' books. When he's not writing manky, mingin rhymes or popping out vanity-piece blog posts, Gregor Steele relaxes by watching Livingston FC, thus proving he's a regular guy and not some arty-farty jessie.