I bump into the Falkirk IT girls, the two of them drinking gin for Scotland – the tonic merely a concession – and me a squad player, more Anthony Ralston than Andy Robertson.

And so, by the time I arrive at my wee brother’s, parting ways with the bibulous pair at some point south of Birmingham New Street, I’m pizzled, not to say blooteroo, bordering on ruddled.

What are the Jocks drinking? asks my Uncle P when we arrive in Abingdon United’s clubhouse, venue for Uncle D’s wake, me wondering why the black ‘n’ white photos on the wall, a gallery of the greats of English football and a few other sports, feature hardly any Scots or Irish players. There’s one face of colour – Muhammad Ali, a hero here since a visit when the boxing career was interrupted due to his defiance on Vietnam – and a couple of honorary non-Anglos in Dennis Law and George Best.

But where are the Lisbon Lions, Liam Brady, John Toshack, and all those Jocks and Irish and Welsh who were the spine of the most successful English teams of the 60s, 70s and 80s? Uncle P suggests the Irish diaspora never made it to this part of Oxfordshire.

Identity is an odd thing, right? As an Anglo-Scot with a Welsh surname, Highlands-born with an English accent, with a great grandparent married in Ireland in the late 19th Century and buried in Easter Road cemetery in the mid-20th, and family from the West Midlands with French origins, I consider home is as much where you are as where you’re from.

There are two things though that draw me closer to the Oxfordshire in which I grew up. Football is one. Equal parts Oxford United and Celtic, cut me and I bleed a Pollock-esque spew of green ‘n’ white and yellow ‘n’ blue. The other being an Oxon accent. Think the yocal burr of Pam Ayers, Thom Yorke, or Robin Cowen, close to but not quite in cowpat-flinging cider-slinging distance of the West Country.

The moment I hear this cadence the distance between past and present is squeezed like an accordion playing the Captain Pugwash theme. I resist the word Proustian for that would be wanting to have my Madeleine and eat it.

Which is why seeing the Mighty Yellows win a play-off final at Wembley this year, along with upwards of 30,000 fellow U’s fans, my oldest child sitting next to me, is a day of such undiluted delight. When Josh Murphy scores his second and never mind that Cloughie dictum of it only takes a second: our Josh must be on double time.

He controls a defence-splitting pass while accelerating away from his marker, rounds the keeper and sends the ball goalwards from what my school-boy self insists to be an acute angle. (As one angle said to the other: Why do you always have to be so obtuse?) Two seconds, two touches, two goals the better.

The guy on Sky gushes: Ecstasy for Oxford…Wembley Stadium is yellow n blue. He’s half right. The other half, the Bolton Wanders half, is black ‘n’ white in its misery and, given their team’s dismal performance, registering no shots on target, Dr Dulux would surely describe the white component as Cloudy Dreams or Cliff Walk rather than Frosted Dawn or Feather Flock. I consult him again but it seems White Surrender isn’t a thing.

Speaking of no shots on target…a month later I’m in Munich’s Allianz Arena watching the most execrable performance from a Scotland team since, em, how spoilt we are for choice, Iran in ’78, Costa Rica in ’90, Morocco in ’98???

At half-time, three goals in deficit, down to 10 men, doused in beer, my pal having spilt half the contents of his refundable plastic pint cup over me, I reflect that if I were at home I could always switch off my television set and go and do something less masochistic instead; like having an ice bath while listening to an endless loop of smug TED talks and wondering when my (rolling) kidney stone, whom I choose to christen Bill, will unplug that bass guitar he always holds at a 45 degrees angle (don’t get acute with me, kid) and, uh, leave the stage.

Post-match in Munich we discover a dive bar in Marienplatz and drop down and down and down some more to a basement where a mixed crowd of Scots and local beserkers are dancing on tables. In between the Eurotrash technopop, the DJ plays Toto and BA Roberston and I sing along to Africa and We Have A Dream, ever the squad player, drinking for Scotland.

At 4AM, ascending from this underworld, as if in a dream directed by Wim Wenders, I encounter a dozen German fans, white-shirted ghosts of the morning-after – let’s go with Feather Flock – falling like bowling pins up the spiral stairs before me.

What are the Jocks drinking? Beer and Schnaps, hurt and hysteria, grim fatalism and forever what-ifs, clowns’ laughter and an angel’s tears. But I could just be apostrophising. ■

Rodger Evans