THE anecdotes are flowing with such pace that, rather oddly given the company, the wine is actually struggling to keep up.

Sitting across from me is one Hugh Keevins and we are looking back on a life well led, if not always sensibly. It is a wonderful hour.

He is now in his 33rd year on Radio Clyde’s Superscoreboard, a Scottish football institution in which fierce debate and jaw-dropping bampottery are effortlessly mixed together six days a week.

The bold Shug has been the wireless’s most distinctive voice – we can all do an impression – since 1986 which is when he joined the legendary Jimmy Sanderson a few months before that doyen passed away.

Now, a journalist interviewing another journalist tends to be, for want of a better word, naff. Despite all our conceit, nobody cares about us nor are particularly interested in learning. However, Keevins is different in that he has become more famous than most players and everyone seems to have an opinion on him.

For over three decades, he’s been throwing figurative hand grenades at callers who react in a Pavlovian way to whatever this wee Drumchapel guy says.

“It is a life lived by accident,” boasts Keevins as he recalls how he became the most recognised football pundit in the country. And he’s right.

Paul Cooney ran Radio Clyde and Richard Park was Mr Football. It was somewhat of a fluke that Keevins was to join their gang.

“I’ve had 30 years predicated on one sentence. Richard said to Paul ‘that guy has a weird voice’,” Keevins tells me with a smile. “There was no broadcasting talent, because I had never done it.

I replaced Jimmy after one week and it was so nerve-wracking that I don’t mind admitting that I was on sedatives for a wee while.

“I was following a legend in Jimmy, so there was a great deal of pressure on me. I was at The Scotsman, I knew my business, but this was replacing Jimmy Sanderson whose standing at that time was, well, he was out on his own.”

And now the stories begin. They don’t stop. Not even for breath.

“We were doing the phone-in one midweek,” Keevins says. “Jimmy was in full flow and I tried to get his attention by waving my hands. “We eventually get to the commercial break and Richard, who was incredibly astute, says to me ‘you stupid boy.’

“It was then I told them that the studio was on fire. Jimmy had thrown his cigar into the bin at his feet. The flames were huge. I was the only one who noticed. Jimmy was speaking and when he spoke, the nation stopped.”

You can’t move for phone-ins today. Clyde remains popular, but in the 1980s and 1990s it was the only station on in the car when everyone went to and from games. And not everyone was friendly.

“I came back to the house one night and [long-suffering and devoted wife] Janet asked me how it went. I said it had been smashing, apart from one caller who gave me a real hard time about Danny McGrain, who was a neighbour of ours.

“Janet says ‘oh, I know’ and so I ask her how she knew, because she never listened. She says, ‘he phoned from here.’

“A guy had come around to plug in the washing machine or something, it got to 5pm and he said: ‘Mrs Keevins, can I use your telephone?’ Apparently, he then started to get very excited and that’s when Janet realised he was talking to me. So, this guy phoned me to give me a right dusting down over Danny… and I’m paying for it!”

Brilliant. That is, of course, funny, but there is a darker side to all of this. Keevins believed at the time that Walter Smith and Ally McCoist carrying the coffin of Tommy Burns would bring some order and sense.

“If anything, it’s got worse.”

And when you listen to some, if not all callers, and I also believe the sewer has deepened, there are moments which make you wonder about the human condition.

“It’s abuse at times, no other word for it,” says Keevins. “The greatest misnomer is that we’re all Jock Tamson’s Bairns because they have you pigeon holed. You get it for that reason.

“They look for agendas and conspiracies that are not there. These people are full of anger.”

And their way of expressing it is shouting about football on the radio; the stink of sectarianism never far away.

It used to get to Keevins, but then his older grandson was born with severe autism and suddenly Davie from Govan bellowing at him down a phone about an offside decision didn’t really matter.

“I’m not bothered what people say about me on the radio,” he said. “I know the anguish which my grandson’s condition has caused and I know how heroic my daughter and her husband are. These people can say what they like.

“My grandson’s birth changed everything. I know what real life is. I used to take it badly, probably took it home, but my wife is great because she thinks it’s a lot of nonsense. She’s smarter than me. Women always are.”

But there have been some moments throughout the years at football grounds when being Hugh Keevins came with a target on his back.

“A guy hit me at Tynecastle,” he says, almost with pride. “Jorge Cadete scored two goals, Celtic won 2-1, Davie Provan and myself were doing the game. I told the studio not to come to us at the final whistle because it was hostile to the point of being sinister.

“Of course, they did. I went off on full flow and became aware of a guy behind me, and he’s been giving me grief all day, I turn to keep an eye on him and he thumps me, and I was caught by a supporter who lifted my body up and gave me back to Davie, who by this time is purple.

“Davie starts screaming ‘Hugh Keevins has been attacked!’ My youngest heard about it at the dancing later that Saturday night.”

And then there was that almost iconic time in 2000 when Keevins was thrown out of the Celtic Supporters club before a press conference.

I was there that day and can vouch for the incredible silliness of a situation that should have been beneath that football club.

“I recall the journalist Ian McGarry saying to the blessed Finbar O’Brannigan, not his real name, that he had just made me famous by throwing me out. His reply was, of course, that he didn’t give a ****.

“The next Monday I’m in town, I’m at the hole in the wall and someone puts what feels like a gun to my back, tells me not to move and to put my hands up. I’m thinking this is it. I slowly turn around and it’s Bobby Williamson.”

Journalism these days tends to be the playground of the middle class, but there was a time when they’d let anyone join.

Ma Keevins sounds an angel. Keevins was 10 when his dad, a clever man who liked a bet, died.

“She literally scrubbed floors of pubs and toilets. It was as working class as you could imagine.”

But even she was a critic.

“My brother came around one night, he had never been to the house, and I asked what was up. He told me it was about our mother, and of course I’m thinking all things, and he tells me that she wasn’t happy with me tipping Rangers to win the cup and I hadn’t to go back to the house for a while.

“According to her, even though I thought that, I shouldn’t have said it.”

Keevins is 68 in November. He is retired from newspapers, presumably with a few bob – he’s never denied the rumour he has his first fiver – so why still do it?

“I wouldn’t do it if I was embarrassing myself or if it bored me,” he insists. “I genuinely love it. It’s great fun, keeps my mind active. I’ll go on for a bit longer.”

And with that, we down our glasses and say our farewells.

The old soldier will be throwing those grenades for years to come, and nobody does it better. For this, we should be thankful.

After all, putting on Keevins’s nasally voice, I will stress that it’s only an opinion.