great moments in sport

It was the dulcet Summer of 1976.
Me and my brother Barn were staying for a week's holiday at our friend Daragh Murphy's house in the Dublin suburb of Tallaght.
I was ten years old and the brother was eight.
The stay at Murphys was a bit of an adventure.
We didn't do much but everything we did seemed imbued with childhood magic.
At least it does in my memory.
This was the Summer when Mr Murphy, Daragh's Dad, oversaw our marathon five hour efforts to put up a tent on the front lawn.
When I say he oversaw us, I mean he sat on the front porch shouting encouragement.
He was from Cork and had a finely honed sense of the ridiculous.
I seemed to inspire him to the heights of eloquence and wit.
As we struggled to erect the tent, I remember the stream of comments rising from the porch.
He delivered each remark in a ringing invectival Corkonian voice: "Jamie Healy! I hear about you building passenger aeroplanes, and rockets, and jet fighters, and you can't even put up a tent! Jamie Healy, what's all this about your space ships and your ray guns and your Tardis and your time tunnel! And you can't even put up a tent! Jamie Healy, aren't you the leader of the pack? The head of the gang. The guy who creates new animals by crossbreeding rabbits with hens. The one who causes all the mischief. And you can't even put up a tent."
You get the picture.
Halcyon days indeed.
Thank heavens no one had told him about our helicopter that runs on water programme.
He'd have gotten great mileage out of that.
And I don't mean air miles.
Also resident in the house was Daragh's teenage sister Blathnaid.
Blathnaid is an Irish name meaning flower or flowery.
She wasn't quite as gorgeous as Juanita Kennedy who lived at the end of the road but she had a certain something.
Proximity.
By the way, Juanita was the daughter of a tough Glasgow woman and Mike Kennedy the famous Irish champion jockey.
She didn't look like their daughter let it be said.
She looked like something out of heaven.
The name they had given her was Spanish though it was far from Spain her parents had been reared.
If I remember rightly, on Main Street Tallaght, Juanita's name was pronounced One-Eee-ther.
Rich Dublinese.
Crumbs she was a honey.
Juanita had looked unremarkable for much of our early childhood.
Then suddenly, boom.
With her lustrously shining waist length brown hair, soulful brown eyes, lissom limbs, etc etc, she looked not like a creature of the earth and yet was on it, etc etc, et elle me faisait rever des choses inconnues etc etc.
Well you know what I mean.
She was gorgeous.
And unattainable.
Blathnaid was not nearly as gorgeous.
But Blathnaid was nearby.
Staying in the same house as we were.
And Blathnaid acted gorgeous.
With her big bouncy blonde hair and swirly skirts that looked like something out of our sister's Jackie magazine.
Yes Blathnaid's name meant flower.
(Or flowery.)
And she seemed a very womanly sort of flower to our innocent eyes, if not quite in the Juanita Kennedy league.
Her Dublin accent rendered her dangerously exotic in my febrile imagination.
She was the only one of the Murphy children to have the real city accent even though the rest of the family had also been raised in Dublin.
Barn and me had Oxbridge accents.
Even then.
And we'd been raised in Dublin too.
God had obviously already destined Doctor Barn for great things by giving him that accent and was apparently just having the crack with me.
Anyhoo.
Blathnaid's Dublin accent seemed tremendously different and wildly sensual to us.
Okay.
To me.
My voracious appetite for Enid Blyton books meant I already knew words like sensual and how they might be applied.
Ah, the lefties were right to ban her.
She was a sex maniac, was Enid Blyton.
But I digress.
Me and Barn were staying at the Murphys. Nothing much was happening. It was all fairly magical. Blathnaid made me hunger for things unknown.
That's the way things stood.
Barn and I had a room to ourselves with bunk beds.
One night I woke in the wee small hours.
The eight year old child who would later be Doctor Barn was returning to the room.
He looked a bit shook as he shut the door.
"Where were you?" sez the ten year old me.
"I was going to the toilet," replies he in a shaky voice.
"What's wrong with you?" sez me.
"When I was coming back I went into Blathnaid's room by mistake," quoth he.
I sat bolt upright in the bed.
"Why did you do that?" sez I with Shakespearian incredulity.
"I was sleepy, I got mixed up," explains he.
"What happened?" sez I.
My little brother's pallor became positively tragic.
"I went to get into the bed," he managed. "As I pulled back the blanket, Blathnaid rolled over and just stared at me."
"Wow," sez I.
"Yes," he agreed bitterly.
"Did she say anything?" wondereth I
"She said in that big Dublin accent of hers: Bairrnaird Healy, where do you think you're goin!" groaned he disconsolately.
The upper bunk shook as I began to laugh.
It was five minutes before I regained control.
"And you really expect me to believe you went in there by accident?" I ventured.
"Of course it was an accident," exploded Barn with pretty good venom for an eight year old.
I required a renewed laughter intermission which took another five minutes.
When it ended, I stared at Barn.
He stared back.
In that moment he seemed to have a premonition.
He seemed to see years and years of me laughing and making jokes about this very night.
"You're not going to keep going on about this?" he asked poignantly.
"Don't worry," I reassured him. "I should be over it in about ten years."
Boy, was I wrong.