Saturday Interview: Candid Cronin still fired by spirit of Scottish rugby's greatest triumph

"Monday, spinning, Tuesday, spinning, Wednesday ... in fact it's spinning five nights a week at the moment, although I really can't be bothered with the Friday class. It's – there's no other word and I prefer the Scottish vernacular – shite."

English-bred Cronin isn't adding the extra "e" to ingratiate himself to a visiting Scot keen to hear his stories of rugby heroics, drinking heroics and how he reclaims oak for rock star's floors (his trade these days). With 45 Scotland caps to his name, his role in the 1990 Slam and – almost as important – an image as one of our emblematic socks-round-ankles sporting heroes alongside Jimmy Johnstone, he doesn't have to prove his credentials to anyone.

I'm surprised, however, to learn that his life contains so much repetition. Especially when he will tell me – repeatedly – that he never liked it at training or anywhere else. He will also tell me that another of his least favourite words is "intense" and, given that it's the one which best sums up his Friday instructor, it's easy to visualise a full and frank exchange of views down the health club, with exercise balls as ammunition, sometime soon.

But the truth is that Cronin is a very mellow individual. We should not confuse an independent mind with an aversion to the team ethic. Nor should we assume, because of a fundamental dislike of blazers and ties, that he doesn't ever do what he's told. When he needs to listen and take everything in, he does.

Like in his grand flagstone kitchen where the fitness changeover is under way and his wife Lou, tracksuited for her evening jog, cuts short another pongy anecdote from a muddy field to steer him towards the Aga and issue key instructions. "Now it's curry," she says. "When the timer goes off, put the rice on. And don't forget the pakora." Cronin, who at 6ft 6ins towers over "Boo", is paying attention in a way he never did at school but, you imagine, always did when Jim Telfer was barking orders.

"And I never forgot the pakora," he says, returning to his theme. "When we had Scotland training on Sunday mornings, I'd fly up from wherever I was playing in the south, maybe not get to (Edinburgh's] Carlton Highland until 10 on the Saturday night, but still dump my bag and head straight out with whoever was up for it. The superb licensing laws meant we could go to Harry's Bar, then L'Attache, until gone 5am. But I always made a point of bringing back a kebab and six pakora for whoever I was rooming with. If they didn't want it, I'd eat it."

See, told you he was a team player. But this seems an appropriate moment to bring up an old quote of his, delivered in his usual bluff manner: "If it wasn't for the fags and the booze, what a player I'd be." He laughs and admits there were times when he underperformed.

"A graph of my playing career would have all those wildly fluctuating ups and downs like the Keynsian theory of economics, knowarramean? Every time I hit a peak I'd stop, admire the view if you like, have a few beers and let things slip. Now, red or white?"

He returns from his cellar, checking the rice en route. "I liked being in the comfort zone. And as a player I loved the drinking; still do." But surely in the amateur days – Cronin only managed two years as a pro before his knees gave up on him – he wasn't alone in that? "No, but others were more disciplined than me. Guys like Finlay Calder and David Sole were so consistent and JJ (John Jeffrey] was lucky. He had no red blood cells because he was so white so he could drink and play, both of them brilliantly. Lucky b*****d."

But when Cronin hit a down-curve and resolved to climb back out, give the beer a rest as well as the fatty foods – "I always thought Kenny Milne was luckiest of us all; he worked in a pie factory" – then he could be more than decent as Scotland's running, chip-kicking, try-scoring lock. For ten years in the dark blue he was a bit of everything, just like now, as he ducks and dives through the dusty world of architectural salvage, with each change of direction requiring new business cards and a different nickname: Del Boy, Lovejoy, Cronin the Antiquarian.

He points to the bench underneath the breakfast bar: it's a cut-down vaulting horse retrieved from the gymnasium of an old school. It cost him forty quid and he's got four like it. If you're after something quirkily different in the way of fixtures and fittings, call Cronin. Sting did, and having laid a floor at the rocker's Bucks mansion a few years ago, Del Boy's back there in the morning to sort out the old millhouse.

The self-employed, laidback, shorts-and-boots, definitely non-intense lifestyle suits Cronin, a man whose yellowing cuttings from his playing days throw up more than one reference to "anti-authority". Where did that come from? Born in West Germany, the son of a doctor, he says he was the "runt of the litter" whose five siblings would all high-achieve as lawyers and kidney specialists while academically he was too fond of his comfort zones.

"I didn't do very well as at school and when I left, my mum wanted me to go to college but that would have been too much pressure, so I washed dishes in a restaurant in Bath and eventually ended up running the place. Then I ran a nightclub, the Island Club, which because it was dug out of two lovely Georgian loos – beautiful staircases with balustrading, lovely Bath stone – was known as Bog Island. And Wednesday nights were student nights, full of birds, fantastic ... "

Just then, Lou returns from her run. "I met you at Bog Island, didn't I Boo?" he says. "No you didn't, I was still at school."

"Oh yeah, that's right. But I was thinking of you ... " Lou is his second wife and in total he has six children, five of them girls. The chicken korma is served and, accompanied by the odd giggle from the missus, he continues with the character study of a quirkily different rugby hero.

"My dad was a rugby fanatic, got me membership of Ilford Wanderers when I was two, and was on the touchline at every school game I played, shouting 'Go, go, go Day' – my nickname at the time – when he should have been opening up his GP practice. Lateness, I'm afraid, is a Cronin trait.

"So I loved rugby, almost as much as Dad, right from the start but I suppose I was a non-conformist from an early age, too. I'd be late for school 33 days out of 44, I'd come 99th out of 99 in Latin – and I'd have to write lots of letters of apology to parents for smacking their boys on the pitch."

Cronin, who played his club rugby in England and France, had a granny who hailed from Musselburgh and his father was thrilled when he first got selected for Scotland in 1988. Cronin's accent certainly isn't Honest Toun and I can't help wondering how his thick Essex tones were received when the new cap was unveiled.

"One journo asked me: 'Yes, but how Scottish do you feel? ... ' I said: 'When you've got 80,000 people roaring you on, how Scottish do you think?' Knowing me I'll have added: 'Not that you'll ever know what that's like.' But the minute I'd made up my mind to play for Scotland, that was it. Not once did I wish I was pulling on a white shirt. As soon as you commit to a team, trust in them, you're theirs for ever."

Cronin's rugby era, the last hurrah for amateurism, threw up many colourful stories, some gobsmackingly lurid, others surely just too fanciful, and the identities of the culprits are still being disputed. For instance, I'd been told before meeting Cronin that he'd once silenced Jim Telfer by hanging him on a dressing-room peg.

"No, but I did it to David Leslie before an Anglos game. David was intense – a reader, a deep person – and he was waving a newspaper which said something uncomplimentary about me. I wasn't bothered so he started having a go at the Anglos badge: 'What's with the thistle and the rose being together like that?' He was really intense now and I guess his problem with me was my complete lack of intensity. But at no time had I been intense. Rugby was important to me but I always wanted it to be fun as well. So I popped him on a hook."

Maybe, come 17 March, 1990, Cronin popped some secret intensity-substitute. Or maybe he just wanted to win that Grand Slam decider against England as much as the rest of the country. His memories of the game are burned in the mind and he's soon moving antique pepperpots and now-empty pakora dishes round the table to illustrate that Brian Moore was wrong when to claim our only tactic was to have a poll tax-tested home support roar their disgruntlement from first whistle to last.

"Our try was a planned move and it was fantastic to see it come to fruition. Just as well Tony Stanger is as tall as he is and that we didn't use Iwan Tukalo for it. And I happen to believe that Brian lost the match for England. Beforehand, he thought they were going to walk it. And during the game he effectively took the captaincy away from Will Carling by opting to keep scrummaging and scrummaging when England could have scored 12 points off Rob Andrew's kicking, no problem. He was so mad that day, such an angry person, although his book (and its revelations of childhood sex abuse] maybe explains why he's the way he is.

"England were over-confident, definitely. We thought we could do it but all week in the build-up the guys were told, if anyone asked, to say: 'England are a very good team and they should win.' Training was incredible, I think we did 200 scrums on the Tuesday night alone, and I remember Jim Telfer whacking Derek White to the ground and shouting at Finlay and JJ: 'F****n' run over the top of him!' A lovely bloke, Creamy, he really mellowed later.

"But when it came to the day of the game I don't think I've ever seen someone want anything more. He'd already played the match six times in his head. He'd have been playing it with us if we'd said: 'Derek Turnbull's injured, get your kit on'."

"Most Scotland games for me passed so quickly but that one seemed to last a whole week. I remember Paul Burnell telling me: 'Today of all days, just make sure in the scrum that you hold on to my shorts with more than just the one finger.' I remember handing someone off, maybe it was Mooro – I was pretty good at that – and David Sole yelling: 'F****n' brilliant!' And the noise of the crowd – from our walk-out and right through to the end – was just incredible.

"There were so many people on the streets, spilling out of the pubs, that it took forever for the team bus to get through town – but I was so pleased to see my Dad waiting at the entrance to our hotel looking super-chuffed because it was him that got me into this bloody game in the first place, knowarramean?"

Cronin says he thinks about 1990 a lot, and more so recently as the 20th anniversary approaches. "It's mostly when I'm driving. I think of the fact that all 15 of us played well that day, we had to. But I also think of all the guys who never got a game, who turned up at training every time and never quite made the team – all the backroom staff and all the lads that Creamy mustered from somewhere, who just got battered in practice matches. I was younger then – I was fit, hungry, brash and arrogant and I probably didn't show my gratitude – but they all played their part."

Damian Cronin, he's just a southern softie. He laughs, but not as much as Lou does. "I'll tell you what I was that day, though, for the first and only time in my life ... "

I already know the answer: intense.