Alan Pattullocharnley

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Tsit down with Chic is to experience how Michelangelo must have felt when contemplating the Sistine chapel ceiling. Where to begin?

The bold Chico had cheerily peeped from the taxi he drives while waiting at traffic lights. The allotted meeting place is an Italian restaurant in Bishopbriggs, one of a few places in Glasgow emitting a town-within-a-city feel. Like one of John Lambie’s homing pigeons, Charnley, 54, was always programmed to come back. In fact he has barely left the area, with the streets of his youth in Possil just a distance of three or four miles from where me meet – or “a seven quid taxi journey,” he estimates.

His mother Isa, whom he has always referred to as “Ma”, is still going strong at the age of 74, and is off to Benidorm this weekend for a hen party. The Charnley joie de vivre is clearly an inherited quality.

He might have played for umpteen clubs but the only time he actually had to leave the area was when he signed for Djurgaardens, a team in Sweden. But he quickly left what sounded like an idyll – “sauna, Jacuzzi, open-plan house” – to come back to, surprise, surprise, Partick Thistle. He played for Thistle in four separate spells, three times under Lambie, the cigar-smoking, bouffanthaired, sheepskin coat-wearing legend, now becalmed, and single, in Whitburn.

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ON ALMOST JOINING CELTIC

“Billy Mcneill tried to sign me a couple of times. He told me: ‘My right hand was saying sign you, the left hand was saying no’ ”

But Chic has his back. “I still speak to him twice a week,” he says. “I have got a case of whisky for him I’ve ordered through a pal who works at a distillery, and who’s going to drop it off this week. He [Lambie] has not been keeping too good.”

The Jags travel this afternoon to Easter Road, a stadium that holds almost as much significance to Charnley as these streets, where every passing person, every restaurant diner, seems to know him. “Haw, it’s you Chic, how ya doin’?” As nearly everyone, including the waiter afterwards, comments, he is looking well. Popularly thought to have torpedoed his career because of his helter-skelter lifestyle, he does remind you he played his last game of senior football aged 39. He still looks as though he could do a turn.

Charnley made his final appearance at Easter Road just as he made his first senior appearance, for St Mirren, there.