A Game of Two Halves: The Autobiography by Archie Macpherson (Black & White Publishing 2009)

Argentina, 1978, was wounding and stimulating at the same time. To watch a cheerful, personable, approachable guy undergoing an ordeal of which only a Torquemada would have approved was deeply unsettling. I had felt a personal stirring of unease, many months before, when I assisted him in a brewery-sponsored tour of the country to cities and towns, as he bathed in the glow of admiration which came from his ecstatic nation. I felt that if it didn't come off for him, the fall from grace would finish him. Failure, set against optimistic hysteria, could only mean a death warrant. When I watched him cuddle a dog on a hillside in Alta Gracia, the town we were all based in, after the defeat in the first game by Peru, 3-1, and heard him tell us that the animal was probably the only friend he had left in South America, you  could tell he was slipping into self-perpetuating misery. After the game against Iran, who we assumed were the Glenbuck Cherrypickers of the tournament  but which ended in a 1-1 draw, my colleagues in BBC television in London deliberately and maliciously edited pieces together with close-ups of Ally's contorted, tortured face on the bench which were the closest television has ever got to portraying Edvard Munch's The Scream, in a sporting setting, there really was no way back.

The win against the ultimate finalists, Holland, in Mendoza, 3-2, but which meant nothing in terms of qualification, was summed up beautifully from underneath a wide-brimmed hat in an airport lounge by a pissed-off looking Alan Sharp, the Scottish novelist, who had interrupted his screenwriting business in Hollywood to travel to the game, when he pronounced, 'We didn't win, we just discovered a new way of losing.'

If Chic Murray had subscribed to War Commentary

Hot on the heels of attending the meeting 'Towards a synthesis of Anarchism and Marxism?' at last weekend's Left Forum, where one of the panel speakers, Ruth Kinna, spoke on “Bridging Differences Through Revolutionary Action: Aldred on Anarchism and Marx”, comes news - via a SPGB google alert - of a fascinating article on the anarchist movement in the 1940s in Glasgow that has recently been posted on the LibCom website.

'Anarchism in 1940s Glasgow' contains an interview with Charlie Baird Sr that dates from '77 and the transcribed reminiscences of a roundtable discussion of Glasgow based Anarchists (1940s vintage) that dates from 1987.

Both pieces are fascinating insights into a tumultuous period for radical politics, and, like Ruth Kinna's talk at the Left Forum, it was a blast from the past for me 'cos many, many years ago, I went through a period of reading up on this subject in depth.

Not for any academic reasons, but simply because I was combining my interest in the history of radical politics with my interest in the history of Glasgow. I was reading John Taylor Caldwell's biography of Guy Aldred; Mark Shipway's book on Aldred and Sylvia Pankhurst; Wildcat's mega-pamphlet on the APCF; and Freedom's hundredth anniversary works on their tradition amongst others at a time when I would have been better served listening to Pop Will Eat Itself and getting drunk on snakebite. Maybe in my next life.

PS - Chic Murray? War Commentary? Chic Murray was a brilliant Scottish comedian who is probably best known today - if at all - for playing the headmaster in 'Gregory's Girl', and War Commentary was the name of Freedom during World War II (it's a convoluted story . . .don't ask me now), and Eddie Shaw came across as that sort of speaker even before I spotted the reference in the roundtable expression.

It seems that Glasgow has a history of outdoor speaking that comprised of half polemicist, half patter merchant.