Brazil nuts (From The Northern Echo)

Brazil nuts

2:21pm Thursday 1st December 2011 in Backtrack By Mike Amos

Suspecting a £200m Chinese betting scam, or at least an international outbreak of scotch pie running, the column finds itself goalless in Cowdenbeath.

There was a coo on yonder hill,
There was a coo on yonder hill;
It’s gone, it must have shifted,
There was a coo on yonder hill.

COWDENBEATH v Dumbarton is a birthday present from the boys who, properly brought up, check first that it isn’t an FA Vase day. Their Uncle Dave, 20 minutes younger, completes the northbound quartet.

By reason of heading in wholly the wrong direction, and indeed to a different country, today’s column must not therefore be confused with the Railroad to Wembley. That one resumes on Saturday. Nor should lines be crossed with the annual gathering of the FA Cup Final Escape Committee (and Scotch Pie Fest) though there are, admittedly, certain similarities.

Mutton dressed up as lamb.

We leave, change at Edinburgh, first class on the 8.05. The muchvaunted complimentary food proves neither haute cuisine nor even hot cuisine but rather is a reminder of my late father-in-law’s favourite saying, that any old muck will fill a cart.

Edinburgh, Cauld Reekie, offers greater promise. Ian Wilkinson in Darlington has suggested a refresher in the Oxford Bar, drinking haunt both of the fictional detective Rebus and of Ian Rankin, his creator.

A website describes the Oxford as spartan and – memorably – as a Scout hut for the over-30s. Former landlord Willie Ross, reputedly Britain’s rudest bartender – a claim that the late Mr Walton Siddle of the Cowshill Hotel, in Weardale, might amiably have disputed – became particularly agitated if customers asked for vodka.

“Thiss iss a pub,” he’d reply, as Bill Shankly might have done. “We sell beer and whisky.”

Enticingly, the bar is said also to have a 50-year-old machine selling “infamous” Falkirk pies and bridies.

It’s empty. No bridies, two brothers, though the nice barmaid gives us a bookmark instead.

Uncle Dave recalls, apropos of little, that in Hartlepool he once taught English to Jeff Stelling, among our kid’s many claims to academic achievement. The future television presenter, now 56, got a B. “If I hadn’t been so inexperienced, it would have been an A,” says his old mentor.

It’s the younger bairn who provides the real conversation stopper, however, inviting us to name seven Football League clubs whose full name ends with the letter e. The answer to that one is on the opposite page.

COWDENBEATH’S a former pit town, across the Forth Bridge and 18 miles north of the capital, population about 11,000.

That the train is heaving is partly because the previous service has been cancelled and partly because it also passes through Dunfermline, at home to Aberdeen in the Premier League.

A quintet from Tunbridge Wells heads determinedly on to Cowdenbeath.

“It’s because we’re idiots,” a greybeard helpfully explains.

The trolley molly doesn’t have scotch pies, either. “Aa can do ye jelly beans,” she says.

The day, as Mr Bob Johnson used to observe on the television, is dreich, though fairy lights behind the municipal pine tree offer “Merry Christmas from Cowdenbeath”. The sentiment’s reciprocated, of course.

A poster in the bookie’s window offers 11-4 the draw. The boys fancy it.

The lady says it’s come down to 5-4.

The boys suspect a £200m Chinese betting scam.

There’s a match poster in the Dunvegan Bar. That kick-off is at 3pm and gates are open from 1.30 suggest a triumph of optimism over experience to a quite remarkable degree.

CENTRAL Park, Cowdenbeath, is an amphitheatrical, antediluvian sort of a place.

The elder bairn supposes it to be “authentic”, his brother – inarguably – that it is very Scottish. At least it offers scotch pies, though it is necessary first to navigate an Olympicsize puddle in front of the hut.

An advertising board promotes “crowd control in sport”. That seems a bit ambitious, an’ all.

Almost everywhere is, or appears once to have been, painted blue and yellow, symbolic of the ironic nickname “Blue Brazil” coined in the early 1990s when Cowdenbeath went 38 home games – 101 weeks – without a home win. Even the programme’s called the Blue Brazilian.

Home since 1917, the stadium once also hosted speedway, perhaps the only track where the safety fence was a brick wall. For the past 40 years it’s doubled as a stock car racing venue which on four occasions has staged the world championship.

Two stands are on the same side, ash banking piled elsewhere. Behind one end is Beath High School, its alumni including Ian Rankin, old Labour firebrand Jennie Lee and Sunderland legend “Slim” Jim Baxter, to whom a statue has been erected in nearby Hill of Beath, outside the workmen’s club.

The school’s most famous old boy of all, however, may be Jane Cosans’s we’an, excluded in 1983 for declining – not unreasonably it might have been supposed – to be belted by a teacher.

His mother took the case to the European Court of Human Rights, or possibly Wrongs, won £12,000 and costs.

Belting bairns in Scotland was outlawed soon afterwards.

Led by flamboyant QC Donald Findlay, a former Rangers vicechairman said by the Scotsman newspaper once to have been in trouble with the legal hierarchy for telling “a vulgar joke about a nun”, the club has obtained “community club” status and hope soon to move to what Findlay tellingly describes as a “fit-for-purpose stadium”. The stock cars will move with them.

Third division champions in 2007, the club’s first league trophy for 67 years, they won further promotion the following season but are now back in the second division, the third tier.

Whether or not it’s just like watching Brazil will prove very much a matter of opinion.

ONCE 25,000 crowded here, when Rangers visited in 1949.

Today, damp and blustery, the crowd’s just 271, and that includes royalty from Tunbridge Wells. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe because admission’s £14.

Frequent signs warn of the dangers of motor sport; there’s nothing about banging your head against a brick wall.

After ten minutes an advertising hoarding is lifted by the wind, cartwheeling from one end of the pitch to the other. Players scurry for safety, the ref watches as casually as he might an errant puppy.

“Offside,” someone shouts. The ref ignores that, an’ all.

Older fans will doubtless recall the incident in 1983 when the cow shed at the Chapel Street end simply blew away. It’s the story – lest any wondered – behind the Cowdenbeath supporters’ song at the top of the column.

Another song begins “When the sun shines on the cow shed” – to the tune of Una Paloma Blanca – but that one gets a bit naughty and can’t be repeated here.

Nor can the unprecedented avalanche of imprecation from the small group of home fans on top of what might have been Second World War pill boxes, several careful owners on the exposed flank. At one point they appear to call the ref a Milky Bar, though that may be a mishearing.

Just as not a single Sunderland supporter has ever been heard to shout for the Black Cats, so none encourages the Blue Brazil. For short they’re Cowden, which must not be confused with Coundon. Coundon Rec’s up-to-date by comparison.

Rested on this occasion, perhaps a nod to his impending 39th birthday, Cowdenbeath’s player/assistant manager is Sunderland lad Lee Makel, whose career began at Newcastle – 14 games, one goal – before a journeyman career of which of which the Kleeneze Salesman Year of the Year might justly be proud.

The first half’s goalless, though by no means soulless, the second’s blown away a bit though home keeper Thomas Flynn – Newcastle lad, Hibs product – has to make a smart save near the end.

It’s 130 matches, all with a Northern League connection, since last I endured a goalless draw. “I knew the Chinese were up to something,”

laments the elder bairn, who’d earlier declined the odds. We sneak out for the 16.53 train, find that cancelled as well.

None of it matters; this truly is a birthday treat.