Et In Arcadia Ego: The Stephen Purcell Story and How I Came to Be

It has been the most remarkable weekend. First of all I became embroiled in the most peculiar set of circumstances at Parkhead on Saturday which I'll relate later but first I want dear diary, to ponder my chance meeting with Stephen Purcell on Sunday and the memories it awakened.

I'd thought Stephen gone you see, after his fall from the balustrades in the City Chambers the week before during the great Hapoel adventure. Then on Sunday I was wandering down Byres Road and there coming towards me, being pushed in a bath chair by a tall muscular Swede was Purcell. He looked drawn and ill and was clutching his teddy bear as he used to in those long gone days when I first knew him at Glasgow University. The west end was still a city of aquatint then, exhaling the soft airs of centuries of youth. Her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare of her summer days - such as that day - when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft vapours of a thousand years of learning. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour. I'd bumped into Stephen in the cloisters and he whistled and whispered 'hello sailor' before whirling me off on my first adventure since arriving in Glasgow the son of a stern presbyterian who had yet to encounter that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city. By day we'd attend soccer matches at Parkhead and delight in the company of Celtic supporting ruffians in various seedy pubs in the Gallowgate and by night we'd flounce around such bars as Austins and Findlays before catching cabs to Bennets where we'd dance all evening before repairing to Stephen's flat to lie in each others arms until the pigeons on the window ledge heralded morning. 'I shall protect you for ever Spiers' he sighed.

Time and circumstance cruelly separated us though and although he disappeared into local politics and I into sports journalism, we remained in touch, usually to conspire over our latest scheme to heap opprobrium upon the Rangers but fate was to intervene when he felt the all conquering pull of his religion which dragged him from my arms. I remember well the day when he told me we could no longer sit among the ivy, eating strawberries and sipping champagne - he had his teddy with him as usual and had been chastising it for the slight huff it had taken after it had been announced that Billy McNeil was returning to manage Celtic. 'Such a pompous old bear' he had said, 'if anyone is to bring glory back to Celtic then it is this man. Anyway, what do stuffy old bears know about football?' and he tapped its nose with a hair brush. Of course he was wrong about McNeil but he wasn't wrong about the end of our affair. He was to be married shortly and in a Roman catholic church, the Romans being not very fond of the love that dare not speak its name, I was to break off all contact with him. I did but ever since, whenever the cherry blossoms are in bloom, I think of him and every piece I have ever written about Rangers, denigrating them as much as I dare, I have done for him. For his part, he has kept his promise and always protected me, especially from the Traynor. Ironic that he should have fallen just as the Traynor and I had at last joined forces but this is way of the world in which we live.

On Byres Road on Sunday he bade farewell for the last time, he is now gone to a Tunisian monastery to see out the last of his days. A tragic, forlorn figure in his bath chair with his teddy, St. Aloysius. As I walked home that evening, my mind lost in reminiscences of those lost days of youth, a dark figure walked up to my side and kept pace with me. 'Don't look around Spiers,' said Graeme Souness. 'Another one bites the dust, eh? At this rate my team will have mopped up all the opposition within weeks and the war will be over by Christmas. What do you think of that?'
I turned, my eyes full of tears but he was gone as suddenly as he'd appeared. Oh Stephen, Stephen Purcell, I'll never forget you.