The third round of the FA Cup: that moment when the minnows meet the giants, that weekend when there is the occasional triumph of unrealistic hopes over the oppressive steamroller of reality.

The big match tomorrow afternoon is the one that kicks off at 5.45 pm, the timing means it will be televised live. Yeovil Town will run out against AFC Bournemouth (does the BBC Sports Report results reader still do as James Alexander Gordon did and give Bournemouth their official name when reading the FA Cup results?).

It is a weekend when there is a sense of the old FA Cup magic still being present and memories of the scent of Bovril in the nostrils.

Being honest, I have no recall of ever drinking a mug of Bovril, but it has acquired mythological status in my consciousness. Its associations are standing on the concrete terraces of miscellaneous football grounds around England, terraces at the sort of grounds where Yeovil might play.

It brings the warmth of the camaraderie and laughter of those occasions; it spells the ease of Saturday afternoons with nothing needing to be done on Sundays. It goes with the smells of beery breath and sweat and the sounds of banter. It goes with the bone chilling coldness of damp English winter days.

Bovril may now seems as archaic as jellied eels and pie and mash shops, but I remember a sense of delight when being at Huish Park one day and seeing a man come back to his seat with a cardboard cup of Bovril.

Perhaps the working class world of Bovril and meat pies was never a secure environment. Perhaps the men who stood around on the terraces had as many anxieties and fears as their counterparts in the Twenty-First Century who stand watching matches on a big screen in the local pub, but maybe there was a solidarity in those times that has disappeared in a fragmented society.

The smell of Bovril evokes happy thoughts, feelings of well-being and stability and security. It is evocative of an age when anything seemed possible; well, at least, anything seemed possible at the beginning of the match.

Perhaps things only become symbols in retrospect.  Perhaps it is only in looking backwards that we project onto objects or experiences meanings and associations that they never carried at the time. Perhaps, forty years ago, the idea that a mug of Bovril would attain some symbolic status would have been laughable.

I wonder what the symbols of security will be in the future. Will there be objects and experiences from these times that I might remember if I ever become an eighty year old? Or is security something one can only feel when one is young? Once gone, gone forever?