WET CONCRETE
I think it was the propped-up spade that grabbed my attention the most. It leant there proudly, almost on purpose, to boast of its successful role in helping lay the wet concrete just beyond the wall against which it rested. The hall itself was impossibly long, but from the front it looked tired and the hand-painted star and scruffy door gave it a DIY feel. It was all I could do to not sign my name on the glistening ground when the man responsible appeared from a parked van down the lane beside it, tasked purely with waiting until the concrete had dried a little. He struck up a conversation and I explained that it was the 15th or 16th hall I’d visited that day and was met with that characteristically bemused look. He put the original building around the 1860s, and talked about other halls in the area, even though “it wouldn’t be something I’d be into myself.” There was little to indicate either the hall’s size or age from the front, and yet the wet concrete spoke of renewal, of purpose, and seemed strangely to hold its own somehow, foregrounded against the modernity of the windmills dotting the farmland behind.
HOCKEY BUSI can remember the dread of seeing the team sheet and realising that away fixture was in Raphoe, Donegal. It was always the furthest distance we had to travel for any hockey match and by the time I was in the first XI, long journeys from Belfast to play simply meant less time on a Saturday with my girlfriend, before the suffocating schedule of an Ulster evangelical Sunday took hold and deprived me of half my weekend. Shot in abstraction, there was also something celestial about the door. I have no memory whatsoever of the town or even the bus journeys out there, other than the time it took to get there. When you’re younger places always seem further away, so I can only imagine how tedious it must’ve been trawling through the Northern Irish countryside on wet and winding roads to play hockey on a grass pitch. On reflection, I’m probably lucky I don’t remember it.