The hotel room is quiet—just two blocked noses and the hum of memory. I’m sitting with Russell, who leans back and begins to unspool a life shaped by football, faith, work, and the stubborn will to choose differently. As he speaks, Central Scotland in the sixties and seventies comes into focus: steelworks, bookies, Friday drinks, and the weekly orbit around Rangers and Celtic.
The way Russell tells it, the rivalry wasn’t just about a badge—it nested into schools, pubs, bus routes, and family rooms. You were born Catholic or Protestant, sent to a Catholic or Protestant school, then nudged toward Celtic or Rangers. Identity felt given rather than chosen, and yet Russell’s story is about the friction of choosing inside what’s inherited. There’s the boy who answers “Christian” in hospital, not yet fluent in divides; the young centre-half who can’t quite keep his temper under a scout’s gaze; the apprentice who learns manhood by sparks, soot, and the blunt language of hard men on a shop floor.
He returns to Rangers with pride and a wince, calling it a roller coaster—loyal even when it hurts. But what cuts deeper is the love story that crossed the line many said shouldn’t be crossed. Katie, the youngest of fourteen in a large Catholic family, meets Russell in a red jumper at a community centre disco. They try the secret path at first, waiting for older siblings to test the waters, measuring risk in glances and weekend plans. The reveal happens, the heat comes, and still they move toward a chapel wedding in 1983. A few don’t show. Some grumble. But the vows hold. Decades later, they still go back to Los Cristianos, where a coin toss once chose honeymoon over a flat—and somehow still led to a home. That circular route—impulse to anchor—feels like Russell’s way: act, absorb the cost, and build something lasting out of it.
Work threads the story in gritty chapters. From selling denim and jackets at Chelsea Boy—learning how people want to look on a Friday—to a trade in the steelworks that was filthy, exacting, and formative. He learned fast, because the men around him spoke in few words and taught in raised eyebrows and hand signals. Redundancy cut the line after four years, and another path opened through doorsteps and ledgers. A collector’s knock became a bridge to Prudential, where his route book and rapport turned into a top-performing agency. It wasn’t luck; it was the slow accrual of trust, the remembered names from mail-order days, and the willingness to stand at a threshold and ask a better question. Sales here isn’t a hustle—it’s continuity: being the same face that comes back, not to sell a dream but to maintain a promise.
Still, the edge of rivalry sliced into real life. Friends from the steelworks—Celtic men—arranged a bus for a cup final and placed Russell in the wrong end. He looked the part of a threat in Wrangler, stay-press, and Doc Martens. The law against “bandaging a flag” became the trap door. A day in custody, a night almost gone, a long walk home when the buses stop and the clocks spring forward. It’s the kind of story that makes you laugh, then wince, then think about how easy it is to game a system when identities harden into caricatures. There’s no heroic moral, just the bill: sixty pounds and a lesson in who pays when the joke lands.
The family portrait is softer and more complex. His dad worked at Cummins—steady job, strong pension, and Fridays that drifted into whiskey and trouble. His mum stayed—stubborn in love and covenant, taking the blows that don’t leave marks but leave grooves in a week. Russell grew up with a refuge across the road in his gran’s home—proof that a family has many rooms, and sometimes the safest door is not the front one. Over time, his dad’s drinking eased, as tempers wind down when the years grow heavier. The sense of “we made our bed, we lie in it” comes alive not as resignation but as a disciplined form of hope. It’s an ethic that shaped Russell’s standards: keep your commitments, fix what you can, take a walk to cool a hot head, and apologise with actions more than words.
There’s another scene that breathes—a minibus to the Clyde Valley Hotel, mods and music that made Sundays feel electric, scraps that warmed up in car parks and cooled down over pool tables. The names fall like postcards—Lanark, the Roundtree, Watty Kyle—and the bus that always looked too tired to make it but somehow did. What remains is a sensory archive: the hiss of gravel pitches, the thud of a Mitre Molemaster, the smell of hot steel and solvent, the press of a chapel aisle, the salt air of Tenerife, and the paper rasp of insurance books signed at kitchen tables. This is working-class culture as living memory, not nostalgia. It shows how rituals—football Saturdays, Friday pay packets, Sunday music—give shape to weeks and to the people who fill them.
The question that pulls tight at the end is about drink. Russell watched what alcohol did to his father and learned to track his own compass. He calls himself—
Longtime Ago people 
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