The ghosts of Celtic’s past decisions are coming back to haunt us.

One of my favourite novels is Peter Straub’s sensational Ghost Story, which is so dark, mysterious and odd that I have never read anything quite like it. Stephen King would later attempt something with obvious similarities in It, and as good as that book is, I think Straub’s strange novel edges it, partly because its central characters are so brilliant.

They are a group of old men living in fear, believing themselves to be haunted following the death of one of their number. Eventually they enlist the help of his nephew, a young writer whose own novel about the supernatural feels eerily similar to what they themselves are experiencing.

These old men formed a little drinking club called the Chowder Society, and one of the things Straub does magnificently is create the atmosphere not only of the town of Milburn, but of their lives within it. Every week they meet in the library of their richest member, smoke cigars, drink whiskey and tell stories. They never ask which stories are true and which are not.

But in the eighteen months before the novel begins, those stories have become progressively darker and more savage.

It began on the night after their friend’s death, when one man asked the others: what is the worst thing you have ever done?

His friend replies that he will not tell him that.

But he will tell him the worst thing that ever happened to him.

The very worst thing.

As it turns out, nobody in that room really had to ask what the worst thing they ever did was, because they already know the answer. And the consequences of that answer return to them in different forms throughout the book.

What they slowly come to understand is that, until then, they had been living something close to an idyllic existence. They had spent years largely untroubled by events in the wider world and protected by the peace and harmony of their own lives.

One of them thinks of it as a golden age.

And Straub’s insight is that a golden age is not necessarily characterised by anything spectacular. It is characterised by its ordinariness. Quiet moments. Easy routines. Long walks. Long evenings in Richard Hawthorne’s sprawling library.

Much of Ghost Story is about regret at the loss of that golden age, and one of Straub’s most haunting observations is that we rarely recognise such periods while we are actually living through them.

It is only when the golden age has passed that we realise what it was.

And once it is gone, you cannot simply summon it back.

I don’t know how else you would characterise what Celtic supporters have been living through for at least the last decade.

A golden age? Maybe. Probably. Certainly, I have never known a football club to win so many trophies in such a concentrated period. With the exception of the Covid campaign, Celtic have almost conditioned us to believe that anything less than a double constitutes a disappointing season.

A mere league title can almost be spoken about as failure now, which is objectively ridiculous. But that’s the level the bar is set at now. Yet, whatever it was that we were living through, I think it is over.

And I realise something else too, just as the Chowder Society eventually discovers in Straub’s novel; the golden age was never quite as secure as it appeared. The Sword of Damocles was hanging above them all the while.

They simply didn’t know it.

Events elsewhere were tightening the net a little further every day. It is only when Don Wanderley, the young writer, arrives that they begin to understand that the corruption they themselves were responsible for years earlier had already spread, grown and begun slowly making its way back towards them.

Our own long-term corruption has come into focus recently in a way many supporters probably never expected.

It has names. It has faces. The sins of our past, if you want to call them that, have been hanging over everything we have done since.

Allowing Dermot Desmond to accumulate so much influence over Celtic was, in hindsight, a momentous mistake. Giving Peter Lawwell enormous operational authority while still making him answerable ultimately to the man in Ireland created another dangerous concentration of power. Having the club effectively revolve around two enormous personalities always looked potentially dangerous.

But what happens when one of those personalities is no longer really in the building?

There is no balancing force. Michael Nicholson takes Lawwell’s place as chief executive but appears to possess nothing resembling Lawwell’s authority. And the man in Ireland increasingly appears able to do whatever he wants.

My considered opinion now is that Celtic’s golden age was always constructed on shaky foundations. It owed something to the collapse of the old Rangers and the years of chaos which followed across the city.

But it also owed an enormous amount to one thing Celtic got spectacularly right.

The men in the dugout. Again and again, giant structural mistakes were rescued by superlative managers.

In that regard, Celtic has been extraordinarily fortunate.

Brendan Rodgers. Ange Postecoglou. Martin O’Neill at critical moments. Managers capable of taking imperfect circumstances and producing extraordinary outcomes. But even that appears to have reached an end.

Nobody amongst the Celtic support can seriously imagine another Rodgers or another Ange eagerly walking through the door while the current structure remains in place.

Anyone who understands how Celtic operates now is going to think very carefully before agreeing to work here.

For the board itself, its golden age is also over.

No matter what happens on the pitch, the relationship with huge sections of the support has been damaged so badly that I do not believe it can be repaired while the present incumbents remain. I said last summer that anyone expecting relations simply to reset did not understand how destructive that summer had been.

We may now be entering an even more destructive phase.

If Martin O’Neill stays, I do not believe it will necessarily demonstrate some grand faith in him and his coaching staff. Let us remember that the club did not originally seem particularly enthusiastic about restoring his previous coaching setup.

If he remains, it may simply be because there is no other plan. It may be because they do not want to make another major decision, because this organisation has entered a state of paralysis in which too many people appear terrified of crossing Dermot Desmond.

And as with what befalls the Chowder Society and brings their own golden age to an end, the seeds of what is growing now were planted years ago, at a time when all these people really had to do was behave professionally and properly support good managers.

Instead, petty grievances were allowed to grow. Relationships became toxic. Trust was squandered. And part of the problem, I think, was that the people running Celtic began to believe the golden age belonged to them.

They mistook the outcomes for proof of their own brilliance.

Managers became functionaries. Hirelings. Replaceable pieces in the great machine the board believed it had constructed. Except they weren’t. They were the glue holding the machine together.

Now that illusion has been stripped away.

Last season was carnage. This season has the potential to be worse. The sins of the past are returning to haunt Celtic one at a time, some enormous and some relatively small, but all of the chickens appear to be coming home to roost at once.

The warning signs were there. Some of us spent years, even at the height of the success, warning that this could not last forever. Warning that there were structural weaknesses underneath the trophies. Warning that something bad eventually comes when success persuades people they no longer need to examine how that success is being produced.

And now, like the Chowder Society slowly does, we are coming to understand that the old way of life may genuinely be over.

The rotten support structures which kept everything standing are beginning to crumble. There is no joy in that realisation. There is only dread.

Dread about how bad things might become before this ends.

Dread about what will remain standing when it does. And perhaps, above everything else, regret. Because Peter Straub was right about golden ages.

They very rarely announce themselves. They feel ordinary while you are living through them. Another Saturday. Another trophy. Another Champions League night. Another manager somehow keeping everything moving.

You assume there will always be another one.

Until one day there isn’t, and only then do you look back and realise that what seemed ordinary was extraordinary all along … and perhaps to understand at the same time that it was all transitory precisely because of the rot at its centre, which no-one ever talked about.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” Take your pick, folks …

We are in a bad place here.

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