Grant Law still recalls that first scent of an intoxicating new love, a holiday romance no less, 5,400 miles from home. It was the aroma of something very different, something enticing -- even if it came with the faintest whiff of a farmyard.
"It was football, but not as I knew it. It was mad, a culture shock. It was Mexico," he recalled with a fond shake of the head. "The first time I heard the noise in that old Jalisco Stadium in Guadalajara, I'll never forget. Nonstop. The passion, the noise in the ground never stopped.
"And then I looked behind me, and there was this guy with a live goat that he was holding by the front legs draped over his shoulders. How he'd managed to get it in the ground I've no idea, but I couldn't help smiling and thinking, 'Och, you don't see that too often at Dens Park.'"
Dens Park, the home of Dundee FC in Scotland's Premiership, was where Law had grown up on the terraces. Greater love hath no man than that for his blessed football team, so they say, and Law's love for the "Dark Blues" had been soul deep as man and boy, through thick and thin -- usually thin.
He thought of some of those bone-chilling January nights at the Park, cradling a piping hot cup of tea while the crowd of maybe 4,000 tried to huddle together just to keep warm while watching a rubbish match against Partick Thistle.
Now, though, he was flirting with an exotic potential mistress, Club Deportivo Guadalajara, known throughout the footballing world to its estimated 35 million supporters simply as Chivas, "The Goats." In the blazing sunshine amid a crowd of 60,000 fanatical followers all going gaga for Mexico's biggest club, enjoying a beer and the best atmosphere he had ever experienced at a football match, Law's head was turned.
It was the beginning of a love affair that was to quite transform his life. Chivas, a team playing half a world away in a league he couldn't see on television, became Law's glorious obsession.
So besotted did he become that even the private office at his government job became a shrine to Chivas, with posters, shirts and pennants festooning the walls. Law named one of the family cats Sanchez in honor of venerable Chivas goalkeeping hero Oswaldo Sanchez.
Law and his wife, Lynne, would scrape together every penny they earned for regular trans-Atlantic trips to watch the team play, a passion that eventually saw them take out a second mortgage on their house in Dundee to fund a home on the Mexican coast, where they now base themselves to make regular pilgrimages to Chivas matches. Bottom line: It's a love that has cost them thousands upon thousands of pounds, practically every penny they've earned.
Chivas have long attracted fans from around the world, but even by their globetrotting standards, the locals at the Estadio Chivas take rare pride in welcoming the crazy guy with the Scottish flag.
"We didn't wear kilts -- it's a bit hot for that," Law said with a laugh. "But we'd get loads of people asking to have our picture taken with us. People thought we were Americans and kept calling us gringos, even after we'd told them we were Scottish. So our friends in Guadalajara got us T-shirts made which basically said [in Spanish] on the front, 'I'm not a f---ing American -- I'm from Scotland,' and on the back, 'I support Chivas.'"
But what, I hear you ask, happened to his first love, Dundee FC, amid this torrid romance?
Well, Law was the city registrar for the city of Dundee, the man who conducted the wedding services for thousands of couples there over the 37 years until his early retirement in 2015, so you don't need to tell him about marriage vows. He would never walk out on Dundee FC.
That brings us to the 59-year-old's perfect, if slightly barmy, world today. For six months of the year, he and Lynne live in Scotland, a couple of 10-minute bus rides away from being able to watch Dundee play. For the other six, they're at the Pacific seaside resort home they bought in Puerto Vallarta, still a five-hour coach trek across the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range from the equally beloved Chivas.
It's the ideal balanced life. No work, two countries and two football teams -- a perennially unsuccessful team that hasn't won any silverware in Scottish football for 43 years and is struggling near the foot of the Premiership and another that is Mexico's answer to Manchester United or Real Madrid, with a storied, trophy-laden history and a huge global fan base.
"I think our friends in Scotland thought we were crazy, especially when we said we were going to move out here to Mexico, but I think maybe they're a bit jealous now," Law said. "We've made fantastic new friends and a new life, a good life. It's been a real adventure in Mexico."
It's an adventure that can be traced back to when Grant and Lynne were married in 1989. Their honeymoon took them to Acapulco, and after that first taste of Mexico, they were hooked.
As great football fans, they became engrossed watching Mexican matches on television in their hotel room. Then the eureka moment in 1997. While in the Holiday Inn in Puerto Vallarta, a conversation with the barman, Manuel, ended with his emotional speech to them about why Chivas are the greatest club in the world.
"Nice guy, didn't have much money, but he was determined to give us this little metal Chivas club badge," Lynne recalled. "It obviously meant a lot to him, and it probably must have taken a lot for him to give it away to us."
Coincidentally, Chivas' club colors -- red, white and blue -- happened to be the same as Dundee FC's. From that moment on, Chivas were imprinted on Grant Law's psyche.
"You see, the thing about Grant is that he's an easygoing guy. As a Dundee fan, you have to be," his brother, David, said. "After my second stroke, my doctor told me to avoid too much excitement and not go to watch Dundee play. I said 'Excitement, doctor? When did you last go to Dens Park?'
"Ah, but once Grant gets hooked on something, that's it. There's no letting go. We've watched his obsessions with a bit of amusement at times. You should have seen his office packed with Chivas stuff. God knows what the people he was marrying ever thought of it!"
Painstakingly and lovingly, Law taught himself about the club. About how they were nicknamed Chivas because in the early days after their formation in 1906, a reporter noted that they were so uncontrollably terrible that it was like watching a bunch of wild goats in a field kicking a ball about. About how they remain unique for a modern-day major sports team in allowing only players born in Mexico to represent them.
Back in those early years of the internet, though, even though there was no difficulty finding information online about European football, it took a major effort to discover what was happening in the Mexican game, which even in today's saturated international market has no TV presence in Britain.
Rodolfo Gallardo, a lifelong Chivas fan from the central Mexican city of Aguascalientes, remembers being in one of the club's internet chatrooms when he started to converse with a mysterious character from Scotland who was trying to practice his fledgling Spanish.
"That's how we met," said Gallardo, a construction worker currently based in Charleston, South Carolina. "For me, knowing that someone from a faraway country was cheering for my team, well, it was kind of awesome."
"We talked on internet and phone for two years, and finally we met up in Mexico and started going to Chivas matches together. Now, for me, he's my best friend. He's my bro."
Online, Law found himself building friendships with other Chivas fans that have since become just as lasting. He and Lynne have a network of pals across Mexico with whom they stay on match weekends.
"Many have really become like family, like Jaime and Carmen Medina in Guadalajara," Law said. "We go up on Friday to see another bunch of friends, Saturday go to the game, then usually stay over with the Medina family before coming back home on Monday."
With maybe a party thrown in for good measure, each Chivas match is not just a game for the Laws but also a happening.
By 2003, when Gallardo took his friends to their first match in the historic Azteca Stadium, Grant and Lynne were spending "every penny, every bit of flexitime, every bit of unpaid leave we could muster" to follow Chivas. How much did it cost them? Maybe £12,000 a year, until they decided to take the plunge of buying the home in Puerto Vallarta -- all for the love of Chivas.
When you meet Law, you can't help think that he's anything other than a sober, canny Scot, but you sense Mexican football has brought out a daring streak in him.
"Well, I'm reasonably sensible," he said, "but Mexico's such a great country, its football so colorful, emotional and bright, and its people so outgoing and friendly, that it's just hard not to get caught up with the place."
As for the Liga MX, Mexico's premier league, he has enjoyed two decades of experiences there that he could not have imagined after a lifetime of more prosaic footballing fare in Scotland. It's been like comparing spicy enchiladas with a plate of "mince and tatties."
The rivalry between Dundee's "Dark Blues" and United's "Tangerines" has been going strong, dividing the city and sometimes even its families, for more than 90 years. Yet even if it's a fairly civilized one by football's most hostile tribal standards, when you hear Law talk about how he "hates" United on match days, you can appreciate its power.
Then, when Law makes his regular pilgrimage to the fabled Azteca Stadium in Mexico City to watch Chivas play their greatest foes, Club America, he is plunged into a sporting feud of a completely different scale and intensity amid 105,000 fevered fans. It is, he says simply, the greatest experience of a footballing life.
"You'll see 20, 30 fans in the back of a pickup truck holding on to each other so they don't fall off," he said. "The passion is amazing. People going to the game three or four hours beforehand, having barbecues in the car park, loads of bars outside the ground, live bands, dancers. Oh, I just love the atmosphere at Mexican games. It's just incredible. There's no comparison with Scottish football whatsoever."
To illustrate his point, Grant and Lynne returned to Dundee to spend the Christmas holiday at home, and barely off the plane, one of their first ports of call was to a miserably cold and damp Dens Park to watch a fairly excruciating scoreless draw between Dundee and Ross County along with 4,740 other shivering souls.
No wonder a Scotsman's head might be a wee bit turned by a spicy alternative. Although Law will still be in Scotland this weekend when the new Liga MX season begins, it won't be long before he is reunited with his Mexican object of desire. So, come on, Grant, if you had to choose between Dundee FC and Chivas, which of the two would you give up?
"Och, don't ask me that," Law replied, his face twisted in agony at the very thought. "Friends in Dundee would never speak to me again if I said Chivas, er, so I'd have to say it's a tie. But anyway, the great thing is that I don't have to give up either. I'm a lucky man."