JEFF SCOTT, the man who tries to do for speedway what Ian Holloway did for Blackpool FC – promotion against all the odds – has published yet another mucky book. Mike Amos features frequently.

Mike Amos, it says, is prolifically prodigious. Mike Amos is modestly selfeffacing, peppers the notepad with shorthand like a bird pecking the snow for worms, knows almost everyone.

Mike Amos, it insists – most improbably of all – was the best-dressed man in the stadium.

We’d met last July, St Swithin’s Day, for the column a first visit to the South Tees Motor Park to watch Redcar Bears take on Kings Lynn Stars and for Jeff one of 32 meetings during the summer of 2010 which, colourfully and cleverly arranged, form Bouquet of Shale.

It would have been 34 meetings. Two clubs won’t even let him in. Gratitude for you.

Best intentions notwithstanding, he’d also upset a few in the Bears pits by suggesting that the hospitality room pies were the best in speedway. What about those in the canteen, they spluttered?

Jeff’s a bit unrepentant on that one. Available, the book notes, from A P Jackson, butcher, 10 High Street, Ruswarp, Whitby (or from the hospitality room at the STMP.) The evening had been thoroughly enjoyable, the Bears victory a famous one, the headline something about Bears being out of the woods. “The hard core crowd,” we wrote, “is almost evangelistic in its fervour and its friendliness, as if individually and collectively charged with reserving an endangered species.”

Shale and hearty? When Jeff caught up with them at a Newcastle meeting a few weeks later, half the Bears pack hadn’t liked that, either. Condescending, they said.

He lives in Brighton, holds a Sunderland FC season ticket because his family are from there – “the first time I visited Sunderland was the first time I realised the sea was warm” – may himself be sport’s most single-minded evangelist since the Rev David Sheppard strode out to open the batting for England.

Though the cover notes suggest a sensible reluctance to take any sport too seriously – “”As the tender buds emerge from their long winter sleep, so too do the methanol-fuelled speedway bikes in preparation for anther season of earcaressing and nostrilbewitching excitement” – his mission’s self-sacrificial.

At the Redcar meeting he hadn’t sold a book; at Newcastle sales were “poor.”

He perseveres, no brakes.

This is the eighth, selfpublication these days akin to self-flagellation, Echo photographer David Wood’s Redcar pictures on the cover.

It’s only mucky in a backwheel- speedway sense, of course, but Jeff Scott deserves promotion, too.

Dirty Deeds may follow.

􀁧 Bouquet of Shale costs £20. Details of that and other speedway titles from methanolpress.com