Chick Young's new Express column: 'Not everything in life is black and white'

Aug 29 2012 by Chick Young, Paisley Daily Express

Not everything in black and white makes sense. Well, for a start, I’ve been trying to work out this St Mirren thing for years.

I wasn't a Saints fan as a kid. Never gave them a thought really.

I was a child of Govan and raised mainly in the leafy Glasgow south- side suburb of Mosspark.

HadI followed my own preachings of supporting your local club, thenI should have gravitated to Rangers ... and that was when they were a team in a big league!

Most of my mates follow-followed but I was a stubborn wee swine.

That was too easy and, with a logic designed to make my teenage years awkward at a school Bellahouston Academy which was a Harold Davies clearance away from Ibrox and where once the headmaster had been a director, I decided I was in love with Hearts.

Incidentally, if you don’t know who Harold Davies is, ask your granddad.

Meanwhile, Heart of Midlothian. From Edinburgh. What was the matter with me? Ah, the folly of teenage romance.

Im cured now. The Hearts infatuation disappeared with the spots.

In fact, by the time I left school, I was beginning only to follow the fortunes of the national team another pastime which was inclined to induce heart palpitations and premature balding.

If only I had taken to something less stressful, like free-fall parachuting or playing tig with rabid dogs.

My father, Harry, died when I was only five. My mother, thankfully, was blessed by the love of a second husband, Alex Rowan and he was a St Mirren fan. And it ran deep.

I never got it and teased him mercilessly about the dark days of the early seventies. Then, one day in 1974, I was sent by the Daily Express not the now bigger Paisley version to cover a press conference atLove Street.

Well, I say press conference but such was the media interest they could have called it in a phone box.

St Mirren had appointed a new manager ... the former East Stirling gaffer, a bloke called Alex Ferguson.

Suddenly, like the day I first heard Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys, everything changed. Oh, yes.

The fever gripped gently at first but, within time, I was riding shotgun with the Old Man as we followed the Buddies ... me with diminishing objectivity for the papers, him in the main stand.

He died in 1988 nine months after the 1987 Scottish Cup win, after which, incidentally, I was reunited with him in the Hampden car park, expecting utter joy but only to be greeted with a classically-pessimistic Paisley reaction: That Abercromby and Ferguson will never do for next season.

No champagne, just more worry.

I bought him and my son Keith, who died in a motorcycle accident in 2001, bricks in the Wall of Fame at Greenhill Road.

Faither would have liked that. In with the bricks. At least I think that was what he called certain directors back in the seventies