Charles Bannerman

Second from the right is keyboard specialist Tom Anderson and seated on the trap beside the guy with the accordion is Tom's fellow Tenerife Trio member, drummer Ted Walker. By a strange coincidence, I was approached in the Social Club just last Saturday after the game by a guy who told me he was Ted Walker's son and reminded me of how my mate and I used to wind his dad up by continually banging on the metal doors of the St Ninian Drive garages. Tom Anderson was head of music at Millburn and the third member of the Tenerife trio was Les? Munro. I've forgotten what Les? looked like now - possibly because our beverage of choice in the Tenerife in the early 70s was Carlsberg Special. But might he be the other accordionist at the front?

Not much more than what you and DD have said. It was largely an institution for the nobs - both senses of the word, local and not so local - and I believe that sundry Chinless Wonders used to hang about there to meet their posh chums or stay there whilst "in town". I was delighted to see this cease as an institution for the over-privileged and positively gloated over the irony that it then became a doss house.

I suppose in some ways, taking pyrotechnics illegally into football grounds is simply regarded by those who do it as some kind of rite of passage.... or a step along the career pathway towards an appearance on The Jeremy Kyle Show.

You are very possibly right. Apart from the admission cost, fans, many of them wearing eyewateringly expensive replica strips, drive in numbers into the home car park where they are prepared to pay £3 rather than walk a few hundred yards and often buy a programme on the way into the ground. Before they get to the turnstiles, they will encounter collectors for charities, many of which obviously believe that a stance outside a football ground is a significant money maker. Once inside, many fans will also patronise the expensive catering outlet and/or the bar. In other words, there seem to be so many peripherals which are not necessary in order actually just to see the football but which still have money spent on them. As a result, you have to wonder why complaints about the single absolute necessity - ticket cost - are so frequent and why admission prices seem to be such a big deterrent. The one that really surprises me is the charity collection. Obviously it is well worth the charities' trouble to go to football matches despite the fact that the charity contribution is the only one of several possible outlays which yields nothing tangible (this side of Heaven!) and which might be expected to be most vulnerable if there is a general resentment about how much the attached football experience is costing.

Indeed - a larger and more loyal fan base despite the tens of thousands who have been pouring into Dougal's blue phonebox (Tardis?) on Telford Street for the last 20 odd years. And irrespective of how monstrous or otherwise you meant to make your post, I think it's a very good one and bang on the money in very many respects.

In a word... yes. He who pays the piper calls the tune. The TV companies will only pay up on their terms, for the games they want and when they want them. Football below the very highest level is steadily becoming a non-spectator sport, and TV is one of the main reasons for the steady decline in attendances at a lot of games. The obvious key is to maximise income and that seems to have been done by a combination of charging punters quite a lot whilst receiving TV revenues which more than compensate for the drop off in crowds resulting from the presence of TV. Dougal can make as many simplistic assertions as he likes about the M-word, with all the predictable wisdom and logic of Spot The Dog or Postman Pat that you would expect from him. But declining crowds are a long term phenomenon across much of football. Kingsmills was bang on the money a couple of posts ago in that there are plenty of born and bred Invernessians and that the chip on Dougal's shoulder is now quarter of a century old. The effect of the M-word on crowds was, for the first 12-15 years, to create a steady 500% increase compared with Highland League days. This has declined in more recent years to around a 400% increase on what used to attend Thistle and Caley and is obviously a result of other, more recent factors. Unless of course Dougal is suggesting that it's taken a some punters a couple of decades to find that blue phone box on Telford Street and start subscribing to the paranoia that Gordy Bus fixed a vote involving 105 people in 1993.

Probably not, but "No Giro, no party" probably holds very true among the city's longer standing Winos (if you'll pardon that rather bad oxymoron!) Quite remarkable, though, that a few brainless, immature wee neds chucking fireworks should have given rise to a thread as long as this.

... but may no longer need to do so to the same extent at the rate things appear to be going?

I'm sure it's quite like a lot of young kids who support Rangers (or used to when there was glory to be hunted). It's something people tend to grow out of as they mature. Pyro is possibly to the 2010s as flares and male perms were to the 1970s.

People like nopyronoparty94 tend to be quite far up the queue when it comes to gaining Darwin Awards.

It's interesting to hear IHE speak so enthusiastically of that - given his "bestie" Mr Putin's apparent liking for homoerotic poses.

Given that your lot's paranoia that it wasn't the shortcomings of their own case but the bias of the BBC that lost them the Referendum remains alive and well, you seem to have missed the opportunity of a better one liner than you have there!

Shortly ago Sturgeon was also banging on about wanting ALL parts of the UK to vote to leave the EU before such a decision could be binding. So presumably she would be just as adamant that ALL parts of Scotland must vote to leave the UK before any decision of that nature could also become binding? And now we seem to have Jum "persecute all pro-Union businesses" Sullurs breaking ranks with the rest of the separatist lobby and demanding that we leave the EU. Let's face it, Sturgeon and her chums quite simply say whatever they think they need to say to con people into supporting them or to fabricate their latest grievance. As a result, the SNP have plunged a perfectly civilised society into a mire of division and resentment. What also alarms me is that, for them to have gained their current level of support, more people than I thought are clearly unable to understand even the basics of the issues. But let's imagine that the SNP did call another Separation Referendum on the basis of a majority of Scottish voters opting to stay in the EU as against a small overall "OUT" majority across the entire constitutional entity which really matters here, the United Kingdom . (I actually have a hunch that the SNP's enthusiasm for Europe is less a matter of conviction but more the opportunist spotting of a possible source of grievancemongering, but never mind). Anyway, let's also imagine that this developed into the ultimate nightmare scenario. Despite ongoing problems over currency, foreign policy, defence and God knows what else they were unable to provide answers for pre-September 2014 - PLUS the now suddenly disowned panacea which "was" Scotland's Oil having gone t!tsup - they actually got the single, slender Yes majority which is all they need to damn us all for all time. By now Britain has left the EU, so Scotland becomes a new applicant. IF they did get Scotland into the EU, the situation is now a total pantomime. Here would be a tiny EU exclave/appendage, with a basketcase oil industry and using the bloody Euro which has just one border. And that's with a major world player with 11 times its population which Scotland - despite generations of Anglophobic rubbishing from the SNP - now desperately needs to be its main trading partner, but the said world player is no longer in the EU and uses the pound. Border controls, foreign exchange controls, trade tarrifs, an obligation to follow EU rules not designed for non-EU trade, no benefits for Scots staying south of Gretna etc etc. And does anyone REALLY think that the non-EU UKcontinuing would give a toss about Scotland if Oor Jock was sadly out of step with it? I can, of course, already hear the Nats among us chuntering "Project Fear!" but sorry chaps. It's time you woke up to the fact that you can't simply add the several inconvenient truths of this debate to the SNP Handbook of Grudgery. You are running out of people daft enough to be conned by this nonsense. A similar situation would also apply at the frontier between Ireland and Northern Ireland, but here NI would have the advantage of being part of the much larger UKcontinuing so it's that member of the Arc Of Prosperity which is Ireland which would would suffer, albeit rather less than Scotland. However, there is one part of DD's post that I just can't agree with - "Ms Sturgeon's persistence in trying to force the will of minorities over the will of the majority is really getting tiresome." DD... it's not GETTING tiresome. It's been a complete pain in the backside for years!!

On which subject, go into the Asda café for your lunch before a Saturday home game and the stadium pies are then guaranteed to taste delicious!

Better ask the club office. Seriously though, if the food is not to people's liking, simply don't buy it. Have a decent lunch and there should be no real need to replenish on pies before teatime. Also look at the money you'll save, how much more of the game you'll see and, in some cases, the inches that will be kept off the waist by simply not consuming food that's really not needed. How many other afternoons of the week do people punctuate with a pie? On the subject of seeing more of the game, I just don't understand how people can pay £20 odd quid to go to a game of football and then spend much of the 90 minutes queuing for a pie which they probably don't need. PS - any comment to the effect that I get into games free and get a free (very nice!) pie is hackneyed old hat and like water off a duck's back.

Not for lack of passion, it is said that this NEVER happens in the home end at Pittodrie

It used to be said that, in the days of standing in the terraces, at some of the busier grounds where the punters stood really close together, the nightmare scenario was to feel this warm, moist sensation from outwith percolate throughout your trouser leg.

So how did you come to support ICT and not "Plastic Whistle"?

Yngwie.... your question possibly originates from the erroneous assumption that the perpetrator was capable of acting in a discerning and rational manner. But if you stare into the cubic miles of nothingness which float around in the head of an individual like this, you very probably won't find measureable intelligence but, if you are lucky, you may uncover some deep but unfulfilled desire to seek attention. Other than that, you would probably have to peruse the works of Sigmund Freud to get any insight into the mentality of the kind of complete prat who does things like this. The only mitigating factor is that people like this tend to be front of the queue when it comes to gaining Darwin Awards. IHE is also correct in his parallel between possessing these things and using a word pertaining to a Romany traveller - in the presence or the absence of further allegations about the individual's cleanliness and legitimacy. These "offences" are a' Jock Tamson's Bairns nowadays. And Alex is completely correct about home made smoke bombs from table tennis balls, which are made of nitrocellulose - a nitrogen containing polymer. Such polymers tend to produce hydrogen cyanide when they burn and also, like most other polymers, carbon monoxide as well.

What a shame you've seen fit to break such a well established habit! I do realise, though, that you will have been very busy with the Inverness Panto over the Festive Season.

I think Captain Mainwaring got you spot on son......."Stupid Boy"!!!

No I don't. In "cleanliness, ethnicity, legitimacy" I'm referring indirectly to the final three words of a certain accolade of Highland Derbies - highly civilised encounters which, refreshingly, feature none of the above.

Agreed totally. Despite nutty and now discredited legislation, there really is no doubt as to which is the bigger issue requiring the full weight of the law between banter about the cleanliness, ethnicity and legitimacy of the opposition fans or the reckless discharge of explosives in a tightly packed space.

Anywhere they can get a drink I would imagine During the Mod the Leejun was packed with them. Or maybe they go to "Glasss-co" for the "Parrrk Baaarrrr".

Got you!