I have arrived in Omagh. In my bedroom there is the sound of an irritating irregular incessant drip.
Drip. Drip. Drip…. Drip drip drip. Drip. Drip drip…………..drip….. Drip… Drip drip drip….Aghhh
In a shithole flat I once lived in, Eglantine Avenue to be exact, a bird once got stuck in the attic and pitter pattered about. It was annoying. Only annoyed me though, other boys rooms were at rear of the flat.
Drip. Drip drip drip…..drip.
Fuckin annoying thing.
Driving to Omagh detour outside Desertmartin via Magherafelt to Moneymore. The dreary shires of planted South Derry. On through Cookstown.
As we approached Teebane Crossroads and the vandalized monument to the workers shot there my mind moved on to Kathleen O’Hagan.
Shot dead by Billy Wright’s compadres on along that road in 1994. Seven months pregnant she was. Her husband Patrick returned to the house to find his four older sons aged 8 to 4 cradling her body. I remember reading the reports in the Herald when I came home, similar to today and feeling physically upset.
In reality we have little to bother us.
The drip continues.
Back in this room where I grew up, played, listened to my brothers when they thought I asleep. Where I studied, dreamed, read, longed for girlfriends, smoked out the window, cried for my granny.
Why is this house different now. What had happened it. What has happened me. The drip continues. I must investigate. Maybe there lies the answer.

I can’t remember when I first started having difficulties but before I ever did I had heard the horror stories of friends. This awful ingrowing hair jobbie at the foot of your spine/top of your buttocks that kept burrowing away and growing like a demented White Rabbit on Speed.

Pointed in the wrong direction it took on a life of its own, and the human body’s only way of responding to this arse attack of its own was to create a big cyst. I had heard how in cutting out the cyst a large circular gaping wound was left that had to be bathed every day and packed with some sort of gauze like treatment to allow it to heal from the bottom out. Someone made the analogy of scooping the inside out of a hard boiled egg. Sounded horrendous anyway for the poor bastard that had it. He was off work for six weeks as the district nurse painstakingly reconstructed his mid cheek area to working order.

Even more horrendously I heard this had happened to a girl I knew. She was attractive too, how could such a savage infliction descend on her derriere? It was horrific. But as usual, in them days I passed on to other things such as whether my paltry salary would keep me in beer until the end of the week and what I was doing at the weekend.

And then, it happened. I started to get a serious dose of numb butt when I sat for long periods of time. At the time we used to venture south for the craic staying in the trailer tent. Without divulging the secrets of the tent, a lot of time would have been spent before and after the bar sitting in it having the craic. The numb butt was becoming more of a problem and I became aware of a hard lump northwards of my ass at the foot of my spine.

I took myself to the doctor. After examining it carefully, proding here and there, and no doubt admiring the whole show on display, she authoritively announced with obvious enjoyment and unnecessary relish: As I thought, Pilonidal Sinus – you’ll have to have that removed.

Fuckkkkkkk I roared into myself, externally whimpering, you’re joking. I felt like the bogeymen of my childhood were coming. The gaping hole in my hole, the packing, the harridan district nurse, My mother, my mother for God’s sake taking responsibility for bathing the incapacitated-me. I couldn’t hack this at all. The doctor showed little mercy and referred me for surgery. My friend who had previously had the procedure of course saw the opportunity for revenge after all the mirth I had drawn from his misfortune. Size of your arse, they’ll be at it for days he would remark. God knows what they’ll find in there.

Aye right. Bastard.

Time passed, as it does, the offending lump got no bigger but the numb butt continued. Sitting in the one position for long periods for example on bar stools and in my office seat meant my lower back become numb. Unable to sit for long, I would wander about work and the Bot seeking people to talk to. Next thing I applied to and was accepted for a position in the University. And, low and behold the next thing that happened was I got a date for my operation. I hadn’t been there long and although the staff were friendly I didn’t relish telling my new found colleagues I had a big cyst on my ass. This in hindsight was a mistake which I will reveal later. The difficulty was passed off as a procedure on my lower back. One time the Vice Chancellor Trevor Smith a doting old English Twat asked me about my lower back problem and started telling me about a chiropractor he knew. I hadn’t the heart to tell him the truth.

My friend that had previously laughed became more sympathetic. When they offer you pain relief, he said take it. It’s morphine. Some fucking job. I had heard about morphine, extreme pain relief. How bad must this be if you need bloody hard drugs to alleviate the pain?

The build up to the operation was interesting. Having acquired a new dressing gown (I don’t know where my mother thought I was going to be going) and new pyjamas, I also had to stop on the Lisburn Road in Belfast to buy a pair of bedroom slippers with my brother Peter. He found this inordinately funny too the bastard.

Having despatched me in the tower of the City Hospital, also his place of work, he said he would come back later. In the meantime I was left in the tender care of a few nurses, none of whom I recognised thanks be to God and some rookie doctors. One of the latter approached me later that evening and his opening gambit was as follows:

Mr Passmore. Are you anything to Dr Peter Passmore?

I replied warily Yes, he’s my brother. Why? This could be good. Or it could be bad.

He taught me there during the year, sez yer man full of himself.

It was early September. This fella had just qualified. I knew enough about junior doctors and medical students to know this guy tending to me could be dangerous. Shit.

So you’ve just qualified then? I stated, trying to see if I recognised him

Yes he beamed. I’m just gonna take your blood here.

Great.

Ten minutes and numerous pin pricks later, he had a full phial of my blood and I had emptied the patience tank. Hopefully he was off for a few days leaving me like something from Panic in Needle Park.

There was nothing otherly remarkable about the evening other than the patient opposite me who was curled up in the foetal position in pain, groaning alarmingly and generally doing my head in.

Can you not do anything about him. I enquired of the nurse. She glared at him and me and didn’t answer.

The next morning I was woken early and carted off to the operating theatre. I found this to be a bit stressful. I had listened to a news item that had reported that a high percentage of people receiving general anaesthetics in the operating theatre can still feel everything, the anaesthesia only having the effect of rendering you incapable of speech. The lady anesthetist was very nice and my last memory was of her asking me to count downwards from. I do recall getting to seven. Thankfully I wasn’t one of the percentage of people that are rendered speechless by anaesthesia but still fee . . .

I came around a while later conscious of people in the room. I can’t remember what they were talking about but I recall butting in with some coarse interjection. This was the signal to cart me back upstairs. I was aware of a very very throbbing pain in my lower back. I was still groggy but this was for real.

Up in the ward my friend opposite was still writhing about in agony whatever the hell was his problem. I was more concerned with my own situation. The nurses told me not too try to move much. The doctor appeared, the proper doctor that is, and told me that my lump hadn’t required the hard-boiled excavation a la Hadrian’s wall. Rather a straight incision had done the trick therefore I hadn’t needed all the open wound packing malarkey and I would get out the next day. He smiled and headed off.

Getting more and more uncomfortable I was very pleased to see the nurse appear pushing the medicine cart. As she made her way down the ward calling out Pain relief? I was reminded of the smug expectation you felt when the air hostess approached your seat and you were about to ask for a large one.

She came to my bed. Pain relief?

Yes I replied.

Tablet or injection she barked.

Injection I answered remembering my friend’s advice.

OK she replied. Pull down your pyjama bottoms.

That I did. Willingly, enthusiastically.

She jammed the morphine needle a little too gleefully into my buttock and said, Now wiggle your toes.

As I wiggled she said: Make the best of that, it’s the only one you’re getting adding that patients like me only got one of these injections and the next time it would be some oul tablet.

No problem I replied meekly.

Meanwhile the guy opposite writhed in agony and torment.

Pain relief she asked.

No he replied.

Ah for fuck’s sake I thought, I’m gonna have to listen to that boy moaning and rolling about, but as this thought entered my mind and stayed there, very perceptably and quickly I no longer gave a toss what he did. Likewise, the pain in my ass, whilst there and very real no longer bothered me.

My mind began to meander hither and thither. I laughed a bit to myself, maybe hiccupped. Total euphoria descended or maybe ascended. I floated in a sort of neither here nor there world where I honestly didn’t give a toss. My brother arrived to see how I was getting on and left fairly quickly. You were talking pure shite he advised me afterwards. I knew I was but. I. Just. Didn’t. Care.

Dozing in and out of consciousness for god knows how long I was eventually awoken by a nurse asking me if I wanted tea and toast. The pain had started to become real again and I wasn’t too happy at the thought of it getting worse. The girl was pleasant enough she asked me how I felt. Grand I replied, a bit sore. Aye that stuff wears off she says and sort of smiled wistfully.

A while later, the familiar trolley arrived on the scene again.

Pain relief went the familiar cry.

She came to my bed. Yes I replied. She looked at the chart and looked at me. Tablet or injection she inquired. Should I let on I had already had my dose. Nah bollocks to that.

Injection I replied.

This doll had the measure of me. Maybe the boyfriend had dumped her. Maybe her mother wasn’t well. Maybe it was PMT but she obviously didn’t want me interfering with her nightshift.

OK she replied. Take your bottoms down.

As she plunged the second payload into my buttock, she said, enjoy. And off she went. When yer man opposite saw the cut of her Jib there was a bit less writhing around.

But again….. I didn’t care. Off I went again, floating round and round and round. The familiar throb throb throb but it was as if it belonged to someone else. Maybe the fucker across the way except I didn’t care. Again the awareness of pain but a lack of concern. I could see the appeal of being a junkie, less so the slice at the top of my sheugh.

* * *

I was released from the City Hospital into the caring embrace of my brother Peter. Sympathy isn’t necessarily the word I would use but he did show a mild concern in a medical sort of way.

After spending a night in his house, it was the turn of my friend Aidy Gallagher to drive me home to Omagh. In retrospect, and as with all these things, the drive home was not a good idea. Being arse inhibited I had to wedge myself between the floor of the passenger side and the back of the seat, keeping myself in a sort of rigid plank position for the duration of the journey. My wound wasn’t sore by the time I arrived in Omagh but my back was seriously FUBAR. Gallagher found the whole thing highly amusing and hit every bump with relish.

I was returned to my mother. I thanked God I didn’t have to pack a wound – that would have been the final indignity. I settled down for a three weeks R&R, with my ma bringing me breakfast in bed.

The whole affair was amusing enough until one evening the door knocked and a girl called Angela from Derry arrived at the door. I knew her in passing though her sister with whom I worked at the Uni. She had kindly dispatched her sister up to drop off a bottle of something anaesthetic. It was not until we started going out together about a year and a half later that the subject of my wounded arse came up in conversation. Angela had thought I was laid up with a bad case of haemorrhoids when despatched by her sister having been told that was the reason for my immobilisation.

Literally, she could have been excused for thinking I was a right arsehole. Instead, we laughed and laughed. To this day though, I don’t think her sister knows the truth. Long may it continue.

Piece Written as Part of CopyWriting Pitch for Exhibition on Local Music Scene.

We didn’t get it. Their loss!

* * *

Alternative Ulster

“It Doesn’t Get Any Better than This. . .”

John Peel

Bombs, bullets and bigotry provided one soundtrack to twenty-five years of Troubles in Northern Ireland. That was for the rest of the world. But here, there was an Alternative Ulster. Forget the Armalite and the ballot box; we’re talking an underground music revolution with a telecaster in one hand and an AC30 Vox amp in the other.

Inspiring Suspect Device and Teenage Kicks, yep, it was so good they played it twice. Gigs, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, navigated the Troubles through the rubble on the streets, escaping politics through music was normal.

From Cyprus Avenue, to the Trident in Bangor, the Casbah in Derry and the Harp and back to the Pound in Belfast’s docklands.

The sounds of Rudi, the Outcasts, Sweet Savage, the Exdreamysts echoed down the deserted night streets of Belfast. Outside it was quiet, inside the clubs, a different story. There, it wasn’t about politics, it was about music. Stiff Little Fingers and the Undertones escaped, making it across the water.

Life normal, as we knew it – bank holiday train trips to Portrush and Bangor.  Parkas and Vespas. Braving near-curfews and no-go areas for a gig. And the uniform? Same as everywhere else.  Leather biker jackets, jeans, 14 hole DMs. Safety pins, tartan, razor blades, bike chains and spiked dog collars commonplace on Saturday afternoons round the Cornmarket.

As Terri Hooley lamented: “It just shows you what we chucked away when we started shooting each other.”

But something else was gained. Riots not over sectarianism, but because the Clash were playing in Belfast. SS RUC ringing in their ears as the police used riot gear to disperse a crowd of Punks at a Rudi gig. Nothing sectarian about it, just good old fashioned Rock ‘n’ Roll Northern Ireland-style.

Teenage Kicks so Hard to Beat, everytime you walk down the street. Doesn’t get any better than this does it? So good they had to play it twice. We all did.

I am reluctant to write anything about any coaching I do because being a paranoid person I don’t particularly want to give away any of my trade secrets. But the fact of the matter is that there are few secrets these days. So I dunno what I’m worried about really. The secret ingredient is the players you have to work with. And as far as the Eoghan Rua camogie team, we are talking an exceptional group.

Some guy whose name I forget and couldn’t be bothered looking up has brought out a book about GAA management called Can You Manage. My reaction having read it the cheap way – on two consecutive visits to Easons – is that if you are a total novice then buy this book.

But for me anyway, if you are interested in being any sort of serious coach then you need to keep adding fresh ideas to the bank of knowledge that you already have. Funnily enough although I do that satisfactorily in relation to my coaching capability – I am due to do a Level 2 course which will hopefully keep me going over the winter – I don’t do it in other aspects of life. I do harbour hopes to attend a John Simmons writing clinic at some stage for the experience.

Also, in my opinion any coach should be like a sponge, picking up ideas and wee ideas here and there. If you are talking to another sports coach about training and coaching, whether it is swimming, cycling , soccer, rugby, whatever and at some stage in the conversation you don’t think Jayze that’s a good idea, then the chances are you are talking but not listening. You should be open to pick up something everywhere you go

McLernon tells me he has written a piece for the proposed Eoghan Rua book about last year’s camogie campaign. What he won’t get for publication are the notes to myself, including a series of direct written questions I posed to myself to get over a serious and severe of pre match nerves last campaign, when I felt physically sick at the thought of losing.

It was all entirely irrational of course, and it was Sean McGoldrick that put it into perspective when he said if you do everything you can but meet a team better and better prepared then there is nothing more you could have done.

We were well prepared, we still are well prepared. Every time we go out. Personally it is my way of challenging myself, gazing down the barrel of the gun, confronting myself with a serious of ultra-critical questions. I know my own vulnerabilities, my foibles, what I think about when the lights go out, when I’m alone, when I’m driving alone to matches which I prefer to do unless travelling by bus. I’ve learned that, question everything. Give yourself a hard time. You soon see the cracks and having seen them you can start to fill them in or rebuild what is particularly badly undermined. Hence my visit to talk to Paddy Tally two years ago, and I still credit Paddy with changing my approach. I was gonna say philosophy, but we’re only talking about sport here.

Going back to gutting myself, undermining what I’m doing, asking the uncomfortable questions, I don’t necessarily like or appreciate others doing it; it gnaws at my own insecurity, the sense that I’m a fraud and I have inherited a set of good players that will perform regardless. And actually at this stage I think that is true. But I realised last week when I was driving somewhere that in my working life at one time I managed over 24 people. Women and men of all ages, I did leadership and management courses and I suppose a lot of that pays off in the team context.

For example the University of Ulster dragged us off to the Slieve Russell Hotel to take part in Grid Leadership training. This was top class stuff, the problem being the University Senior management weren’t on the same planet let alone the same page. The scheme foundered but the tools and skills are perfect for managing and coaching teams. One of the key components is in enabling people to take responsibility for their own actions. So if someone doesn’t attend training, that’s their choice, but they can’t then having made that choice complain about not being picked. The Grid also focuses on individual behaviour so you focus in how your behaviour affects others and not vice versa. As part of the scheme we had to undergo a 360 critique and feedback process which was challenging. We also got to the stage where we could confidently critique other people without being personal, rather focusing on specific behaviour.

That perhaps explains why I no longer do things like keep a record of training. Why bother? If I know why someone isn’t there that’s enough for me. If I think there is a problem I will deal with it my way.

Many times I think I’m into the last home straight in coaching at any level. I increasingly feel a Beckettian futility with the whole thing in that I no longer see the point of bollocking people at training. I still do it but I increasingly think it is a waste of time because unless through repetition you can purge errors and fault then you cannot eradicate them by shouting and giving out. Also, it is a fact that humans will make mistakes. Take carrying the ball on the stick. Some players don’t even realise they are doing it, yet they have been coached from an early age as soon as the gather a ball to place on the stick.

I may decide to give it up at any stage. That shall be at my time and of my choosing based on what the players want. These are conversations that are still to be had.

“She hates her life,

and what she’s done to it”

Rockin in the Free World

Neil Young

The rain of the last few days has been interminable. Apocalyptic even. I read a prophesy that before the end of the world Ireland would be under water for seven days.

The fantastical and tragic truth of a Garda washed away as he tried to help people. The film Se7en featured incessant rain as a background. As the perpetrator carried out murders in the form of the seven deadly sins the background theme was rain and more rain. In Insomnia the Al Pacino becomes increasingly disoriented and confused as his lack of sleep starts to take a toll.

For the last three weeks I seem to have entered a tunnel period in my life where there is a consistent stream of challenging news. At one stage it necessitated repeated trips to hospital in Derry and back to visit my mother who was suffering a chronic stomach ailment. The drives seem to be conducted entirely in the rain and the dark or both. My memory of the visits is wet feet crossing the highly unsatisfactory car parks at Altnagelvin and sitting talking to my mother feeling damp.

The apocalyptic weather and the disruptive interruption to my daily routine meant that at a time when I was building a seam of work I had to continually step away to carry out other duties. To the detriment of both I would add. It was highly frustrating. Even trying to describe this I can’t articulate what I mean.

I will start again elsewhere.

Students.

When I returned to Queen’s at the start of second year, my mother brought me and my gear down to Belfast. Myself and four other lads had rented a house down near the bottom of Dunluce Avenue. It was an awful place. Damp and fairly cold. Last year I had a series of dreams in which I was back in the house, it was awful, I could still smell the damp and feel the coldness upstairs.

When my mother dropped me off she came into the house and had a look around. It was the last time she ever set foot in a rented house I lived in. I think she fully realised the sorts of shit holes we inhabited. Then the landlords were probably as unscrupulous towards students as they are nowadays. Certainly they provided the bare minimum of comfort, the sofas were typically decrepit affairs, saggy and stinking from years of students’ arses perched on them and god knows what else.

As for the beds and mattresses in particular. Well. When I think about that my stomach churns, in each rented room the surface tapestry on show revealing scenes of emissions, no doubt accompanied and unaccompanied, night-time drooling, alcohol fuelled incontinence. Disgusting it was. They should each have been incinerated at the end of a year’s action. There’s only so much one can absorb impact and otherwise.

Around that time Dolmio came on the market. It may already have been on the market but it became known to us. We would prepare huge hulges of spaghetti Bolognese accompanied by loaves of garlic bread. The whole affair would be washed down with cheap wine, usually Bulgarian if I remember correctly. Then, after sinking a load of tins of cheap beer off we would go seeking a bit of what passed for debauchery in the Students’ Union, the Elms and wherever else we might roam.

One of the boys made a girl physically sick one night in the Union when talking to her. The reek of garlic off him after our spaghetti fest was too much and she turned away to vomit nauseated by the stench. The same fella had a regular handy tackle up the top of the street with whom he pursued an interesting relationship. He couldn’t pass the front door without calling and eventually became quite attached to the same girl. For a while anyway.

We once had a visit from the Police on behalf of the neighbours to complain about noise. This was before wardens and vans with CCTV on board such as they have now. The message was simple.

The big RUC man stood in the living room and calmly told us that our neighbour had told him if we didn’t keep the noise down they knew people who would make us keep it down. When I politely asked were these ‘people’ the police or some other anonymous grouping he told me to shut up and stop being smart. The previous year a student house had been petrol bombed. Point taken.

The lad in our downstairs front room thereafter kept a bucket of water in his room just to be safe. Occasionally we would come in full drunk and trip over it. I think he may have changed to sand when we pointed out water wasn’t the right job for petrol. This was in 1987 when the lower side off the Lisburn road wasn’t the trendy suburban thoroughfare with fancy shops that it has become. It was dark, unfriendly, too close to the Village for comfort, yet we came and went oblivious to any danger. The most threatening encounter was this visit by the law.

But then in those days the RUC played a wearisome game of cat and mouse with students. Regularly shutting down parties. A few years later, a big peeler said to me one night after he raided a house in which we were playing guitar ‘Not you again.’ He despatched me home, guitar and all with a laugh about it all. Wasn’t always the case. Once they arrived at a friends house after a front door pane of glass was broken. The rookie in the squad confidently announced that the glass had been broken from the inside to which was heard the response from one of the wits from Lurgan “Aye right Sherlock!” accompanied by school boy sniggers. The crime remains unsolved.

The house in Dunluce deteriorated further over the course of the year. We had a house rule about dinner plates. To stop boys using other people’s plates the rule was you were responsible for your own plate and, if you should have food prepared and some other lad was using the plate, you were entitled to empty his dinner off on to another plate so as you could use your own. How we managed to live in that wonderful squalor remains a mystery.

Our premises were no better than any others and in fact I can think of several that were much worse. Our final year wasn’t much better but that’s a story for another day.