43 years with the same bird; Brian Reade on his love affair with Liverpool FC.

IT has been a lifelong romance - and like any love affair, it's had its moments of joy and misery. Here we publish extracts from Daily Mirror columnist Brian Reade's brilliant new book on his life as a Liverpool fan...

1965 MY FIRST GAME, AT BOLTON

I WAS perched on my dad's shoulders at the back of a sprawling terrace surveying a sea of heads: flat-capped, bald, plastered with grease, flowing for what seemed like miles down to a bright green carpet.

I spent most of the time entranced by the white brilliance of the floodlights, staring at the pigeons chasing each other across the stand roof, wondering if everyone else was as bored as me.

In the early months of 1965 football was about as appealing as Winston Churchill's funeral. Actually, not quite as appealing. When that long, dirgeful parade unfolded on my Irish nana's telly she made me howl with laughter by yelling "Go od riddance, you dirty whore-master."

Agoal was scrambled and we were sucked a dozen yards down the terrace, Reg swaying like barley in a hurricane, shifting his balance from right foot to left in an attempt to keep me on his shoulders. It was the first thrill of the afternoon.

"How long left?" I asked. But by now only groans were leaving his mouth. He'd slipped a disc and had to put me down.

And there I stood in a black world of my own, staring at a man's overcoat which smelt of pipes and dogs, catching hairs in my mouth, gutted that Ian St John hadn't scored with a spectacular diving header I could recreate in the playground.

Reconstructing a fluke that went in off Ian Callaghan's arse didn't carry quite the same kudos.

My Dad slipped a disc and had to put me down

1989 RETURNING HOME FROM HILLSBOROUGH

THE anger spilled out and I just started yelling at the telly. I screamed about people being dead because they didn't count.

About kids turning blue as they begged to be let out of cages and being ignored because police had been conditioned to view them as criminals.

I screamed about alsatian dogs making it into the ground but not ambulances. About the instinctive reaction being to keep the animals segregated and in their pens.

That way if there's any trouble the ones who'll get hurt will be their own kind. And they're only football fans.

I had the worst sleep of my life in which I seemed to sweat out my body weight. A recurring dream started, which would stay with me for months, in which black figures shaped like Edvard Munch's The Scream were being sucked up to the sky, gathering above and looking down at me in total silence.

I tried to climb up to them but couldn't.

When I awoke it felt as though a juggernaut had been driven into my central nervous system. Complete lethargy hit my body. I didn't want to read anything or speak to anyone. I just wanted to be on my own with my desolation.

I still let it out occasionally when no one is looking. Not at anything as specific as the anniversary but at random, unrelated things which remind me of that day.

They come at you sideways, these little prompts, and catch you unawares. You don't see them until it's too late. And then, like the wind, they're gone. A sunny spring morning. A Bangles song. A digital clock showing 3.06. A 96 bus.

Seeing the excitement on kids' faces as their pace picks up when the gates of a football stadium loom into view.

I let it out for all those young people we left behind in Sheffield - more than 80 per cent of the 96 were under 30 - and their families who've been saddled with such an awful burden ever since.

And I hope I always will.

Complete lethargy hit me. I didn't want to read anything or speak to anyone

1971 MEETING THE MESSIAH

BILL Shankly's bare manhood stood three feet away from me. OK, stood is an exaggeration. We were getting on well, but not that well.

Slacks with a crease that could shave a werewolf's four-day shadow had been removed and placed on a dressing-room hook with his left hand. In his right was a pair of crumpled shorts so old you could smell the Boot Room on them. Then a question: "What school are you from again, son?"

"De La Salle."

And the shorts, which had made their way to the expectant toes of his left foot, were abruptly pulled away.

"A rugby school?"

"No. Football."

Relief. Then animation.

"Thank Christ for that. I hate rugby. I remember turning up at a new Air Force post inWales and asking for a football. This officer says to me 'We don't play football here, only rugby.' So I says right, give me a rugby ball and I'll squeeze it intee a fitball."

He burst into a raucous laugh and began to squeeze an imaginary oval ball into around shape. "Christ, it's funny what things come back to you. I'd forgotten all about that."

Let's get this straight. I'm joshing away with Bill Shankly at Melwood training ground like a groom and best man before a stag night.

I've been in his company only five minutes and he's already told me a story nobody has ever heard before. Granted, in the league table of Shankly anecdotes it's six points behind Stenhousemuir. But it's mine to drop casually into conversations for eternity.

As this dawns on me a shiver jolts the blood.

There's a sigh I have to emit in short bursts for fear of being sucked inside out. Fear drifts from my brain, spreading down to feet doing epileptic taps. It's a feeling I would experience over the next 30 years of professional life before doing an interview.

But I would never feel the pure rush of pride I felt that June morning, knowing that whatever miserable hand life might deal, my self-esteem would never scrape a barrel's bottom. I would always be able to look a boss, a foe or a put-down merchant in the eye and tell them that Bill Shankly once shared a unique anecdote with me.

With his pride and joy dangling in my eye-line. At 17, life could only go downhill. PS: Huge. Obviously.

I only met him five minutes ago and already he's told me a story no one's heard before

1994 FINDING OUT YOUR SON'S A BLUE

NOTHING can prepare you for that conversation with your son about the pivotal facts of life. No booklet, friend, shrink or agony aunt.

You just have to take it in your stride and flounder.

"Dad," said seven-year-old Phil, pulling back my duvet and interrupting a mind locked deep into slumber after a six-hour Friday night drive back from London.

"I've got something to tell you."

"What is it, son?" I mumble.

"I'm an Everton fan."

My head froze. "And I want the kit." My heart stopped.

"Can we go to the Everton shop today?"

My sphincter snapped.

He'd decided on a lifetime's loyalty to Everton in the days I'd been down in London.

A lifetime's sharing all of Liverpool's highs and lows lost for ever.

Why did I overlook a father's most basic task of ensuring his son enters the correct faith? I'd tried to get him interested in football, but when he didn't bite I thought better than to push it on to him.

So I'd played it cool and assumed his love for Liverpool would find him as it found me. It was such rampant neglect I should have been hauled away by social services.

I lay in bed trying to salvage something from the wreck that was my existence. It wasn't that bad. At least he liked football.

I decided it was on a par with him telling me he was gay. I'm shocked and saddened now at the inevitable future pleasures I'll be deprived of, but it might just be a phase. A scream for attention from a confused kid.

He needed my full support.

However painful it might seem, I was taking him to the Goodison Megastore. Even if he went for the double of kicking me in the balls and the wallet by asking for the name CADAMARTERI on the back his shirt.

DON'T worry - a few years later he saw the light.

2005 ISTANBUL - THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE

PANDEMONIUM. Grown men tumbling over plastic seats, falling and not caring where they land.

A mother in tears, shaking, clutching her hyp er - ventilating daughter.

Shirtless men, heads between their knees. Crashing music.

Fireworks.

A blinding headache.

Being stood on, not caring, kissing someone I had never seen before and never will again.

Down on the pitch, men in red, some on their haunches, alone in thought, others vaulting advertising hoardings and diving into the fans. Players in white, collapsed on the turf.

A scoreboard, high above now-deserted Milan seats. A blazing neon sheet, blocking out stars in the dark sky above a wasteland somewhere outside the old city of Constantinople. A clock moving towards one o'clock.

I'd never passed on the facts of life, or laid down the law about men having to do what they had to do. But there and then, I felt the most important piece of advice a father could ever pass on to his son speeding from my brain to my lips.

I pulled Phil so close his face touched mine.

"Look at that scoreboard: '3-3. Liverpool, champions.' And remember how it looked at half-time.

And how you were dead inside. And whenever you feel life's beaten you, think of this scoreboard and realise that anything, anything is possible. Will you do that for me?"

He nodded. I gulped.

Think of this scoreboard and realise anything is possible

43 Years With The Same Bird by Brian Reade, published by Macmillan on July 4 at pounds 12.99. Available by special offer to Mirror readers at pounds 10.99 inc p&p by calling 01256 302699 and quoting code Z58

CAPTION(S):

FLUKE Ian St John celebrates in 1965; FIELD OF BLOOMS Floral tributes to the Hillsborough victims cover the pitch at Anfield; THE KING AND I Me with the great Bill Shankly; COMING ON MONDAY: Paisley, Souness, Dalglish and me; TRIP OF A LIFETIME Me and my son Phil out in Istanbul