Let’s take it back a few years.
March 5 1997. North Belfast. No Doubt’s Don’t Speak is top of the charts for the third week running. Forestside shopping centre is about to open and the Notorious B.I.G has unknowingly entered the last week of his life.
The red half of Manchester has filled Old Trafford to capacity for their Champions League quarter-final against a rampant F.C Porto and in a front room halfway between the Shore Road and the Antrim Road, I am glued to the ITV coverage and the purring commentary of Brian Moore and Ron Atkinson, running down the stairs from my room as soon as Handel’s Zadok the Priest announces the start of the coverage. United are in their mid-90s pomp, led by the insouciant and marauding Eric Cantona, white and grey contrast collar turned up, apocryphally suggested to be hiding a Leeds tattoo on his neck.
I like to think that sport’s hold on my emotional status has long receded (somewhere around the time that ego kicked in and I realised that most professionals were now much younger than I was.) However this night gave birth to a much greater passion; the written word and its ability to entertain and document; to take hold of memory and experience and catalogue them in ways that surprise, even decades after the fact.
It is this feeling, this wave of nostalgia that greets me upon finding a ‘match report’ I had been asked to write by a family friend, an English teacher, about the game in question, years later, in a box prepped for moving house. I want a full report on my desk tomorrow morning she had thrown back at me over her shoulder as I politely said goodbye at our front door in my pyjamas. At this point in time, I was only allowed to watch the first half of matches live, getting up at the scrake of dawn to fast-forward through the VHS-ed second half before heading to school to relive and re-create all the key moments in the playground. The report dutifully followed, a child-like recreation of the newspaper articles I would pour over for days after a big match. Photos were found, stolen, cut and pasted from the Belfast Telegraph, statistics about the attendance and nationality of the referee garnered from the far reaches of Ceefax.
I can’t remember if the English teacher ever saw the report. But it sparked something in me that has never left.
Ed: double-spaced and all caps please!
Jump forward a few decades and I am now a graduate of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Creative Writing at Queen’s, having studied the life of Irish rebel-turned-newspaper mogul John Boyle O’Reilly for my PhD (fun fact: you’ll know him from this bottle of wine.) I have had poems published in leading journals such as the Rialto and Poetry Ireland Review. I have written a million-stream-hitting pop song. I have led creative writing workshops in India, performed at SXSW in Austin and followed the subject of my PhD to the beaches of Perth and Fremantle. Most fulfilling of all? I now have the joy of inducting my own children into the world of the creative arts, hoping they will feel as connected to the written word as that 8-year-old boy did, sat in the good room, watching his heroes and unwittingly documenting their actions (and his own childhood) for posterity.
Top: Reading at story-telling event, Seanchoíche
Bottom: Playing at SXSW, Austin, TX.