Dan narrowed his eyes at the man. “I wasn’t meaning that. I meant that I should put on my protective gear.”

Ronnie clicked his fingers. “Och, I was forgetting about that.” He ran off into the hut at the side of the pitch and returned far too quickly holding out Dan’s armour to him.

Dan ran his tongue against the top row of his teeth, wondering if it would be the last time that he would ever be able to do such a thing. “What is that?” he asked quietly, looking at the wafer-thin pair of shin pads and the soft leather gloves that Ronnie held in his hand.

Ronnie dropped the meagre collection on the ground in front of his goalkeeper. “That, Dan, is your gear.”

“You have got to be joking.”

Ronnie gave him a wink. “Don’t worry. Those laddies will never get near your goal.”

The game ended after ninety minutes of play, plus a full ten minutes of injury time, in a resounding 5–1 victory for the Seascape Camanachd Club. For Dan, however, it ended after only twenty minutes of the first half. He had been standing quite happily minding his own business in the goalmouth a good seventy yards from where the action was taking place, when the ball suddenly came looping through the air in his direction. The centre forward of the opposing side, a deceptive little devil who looked as if he trained on four pints of lager before each game but who, in truth, had the same fleetness of foot as Pegasus, covered fifty yards of the pitch at such a speed that he arrived with at least two seconds in hand at the spot where the ball was destined to make contact once more with terra firma. This fractional moment in time gave him the opportunity to steady his feet and to swing his caman around his head like a hammer thrower, before hitting a first-time ball absolutely fair and square in the direction of Dan.

Dan stood transfixed, like an earthling who was caught in the path of a mighty meteor from space, his eyes rooted on the cork and leather missile that flew towards him. In the last few seconds before his eternal demise, and as he found out later, much to the disgust of his fellow players, Dan took cowardly avoidance action, ducking unceremoniously and covering his head with his arms. He felt a whistling wind rush past him as the ball screamed over his quaking shoulders, immediately followed by the zing as it concaved into the back of the net. Dan unfurled himself and stared at the ball on the ground, convinced that a few wisps of smoke still rose from its leather casing. The blood in his body, which had been hitherto pumping madly somewhere about his feet, began to boil up to his head and he turned, his eyes bulging in fury, as he glared at the perpetrator of this unsportsman-like deed.