The Highland League is like French pop music: a familiar form in a bizarre parallel world. Like Serge Gainsbourg singing about men with cauliflowers for heads or suicidal ticket collectors (youtube.com/watch?v=HsX4M-by5OY), it has a whole lot to recommend.
It's home to some of the world's most evocatively-named football teams: all hail Buckie Thistle, Forres Mechanics and Clachnacuddin. There are so many crazily high-scoring games that anything less than a 5-5 draw with seven sendings off and a refereeing fatality in a freak seagull collision leaves spectators tinged with disappointment. Not to mention hard men so uncompromising they make Vinnie Jones look like guy from the Domestos ads, and the grisly pleasure of seeing how many Fort William get humped by each week.
Sadly, as my friends at Inside Left document elsewhere - www.insideleft.net - the plight of Clach shows the Highland League is as vulnerable to the vagaries of global economics as anything else.
If you're anywhere near places like Wick, Rothes, Fraserburgh or Turriff, get along to see these towns' teams play. The games are entertaining and the welcome warm, as I can testify from when my stag-do stopped for several hours at Cove Rangers' dinky Allan Park (capacity about 1,500). Our waitress in the hospitality section - which was a smidgeon of the cost for a far stuffier affair at Pittodrie - would not stop bullying us to quaff free booze. It was the first time I'd seen a stag party protest that they'd really rather stop drinking now, thanks very much.