A Facebook plea offered up some hope. Kangaroo, Karma and Kaleidoscope were all possibilities. Kinky certainly had potential and when Ka-ching arrived courtesy of Sean Kennedy I was certain I had hit pay dirt.
Unfortunately it wasn’t just a title I needed. Usually I come up with a name based around the subject matter of the piece but sometimes I take the letter, find a word that I like and hope to get some spark from that. I was hoping this would be one of those times.
It wasn’t. Inspiration was not coming the way I needed it so Ka ching, while great was proving unusable at this point in time. This put me back to square one with this week’s blog. It was only after a conversation with an incredibly childish colleague did I come with this week’s bit.
“Knickers,” she said like an eight year old.
It was perfect. I already had a story that I told relating to underwear and it would fit rather nicely into the style that you have all become accustomed to.
I need to point out that this story is mostly true. I may have exaggerated some of the facts and added some dramatic flourishes but as some disreputable journalist may have once said, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.
This tale takes place in my youth and like all good childhood stories it happened in one of those memory lane summers, where even in Ireland, glorious sunshine baked our young faces as we ran, skipped and jumped. The evenings lasted forever and there was a real sense of community.
To emphasise both of these facts, the local community council, or the Eight Roads committee as they were known, organised an evening football tournament for all of the kids who lived on the aforementioned eight roads.
I wasn’t very good at soccer and the organiser knew it. They knew who the kids that were rubbish were and they knew who the really good ball players were. Everyone else was in between. I wasn’t privy to the team selection process but it did seem that on each team of seven, there was one really good player, one woeful incompetent like myself and five others of varying ability. So it was pretty fair.
Split into divisions based on age, each team would play each other over three weeks and the top two teams would then play again on the final day. The games were played on a grass covered roundabout on Aughavannah Road and would usually be surrounded by parents and supporters of the kids involved in any of the five games played each night.
One such evening is when my story takes place. The sun was indeed shining and the roundabout was busier than normal. My team was playing and we were kitted out in red football jerseys, to which I added football shorts and socks, a very impressive ensemble indeed. Not that it really mattered because as I said, I wasn’t very good and my ‘manager’ had decided that I should stay as a substitute.
I was ok with that, I was maybe 10 at the time and while I’m sure puberty hadn’t started yet I do remember feeling somewhat self conscious about running around in shorts and looking stupid while the people on my time refused to pass to me. So I was doing my bit for the team from the sideline
That was until; one of my team mate’s mum called him in for his tea. I’m not sure if that was what actually happened but I was sent on to replace one of the other players. I looked over and saw my mum on the other side of the pitch. She seemed so proud. The manager told me to stick up front and if the ball came near me to kick it towards the opponent’s goal. That way I couldn’t do much harm.
For the first couple of minutes everything was going fine. I stayed clear of the action as it was mostly going on down near my teams goal. I ran around a bit up front, even though the ball was in the other half. People were shouting at me from the sideline to ‘chase back’ but I was following my coach’s instruction to the letter.
Eventually our goalkeeper caught the ball and kicked it as hard as he could up the field. There was no one near it except me and the opposition goalie. I ran for the ball and so did he. I was a bit closer but he was much faster than I was. I was almost at the ball when he came behind, knocking me over and kicking the football back down the field.
My possible moment of glory gone, I picked myself up and began to run around up front again. It seemed a little harder this time like I was running against something. It appeared that the elastic that held my shorts up had snapped in the tackle. My shorts felt looser and I was aware that they were slipping down. As was everyone in the crowd of about one hundred people.
One hundred people laughing at you because your shorts are falling down is the stuff nightmares are made of, especially to 10 year old. I tried to ignore it and play on holding them up with one hand but it wouldn’t work. If I held them at the front the back would slip down and vice versa. It definitely required two hands which made it even harder to run. The raucous laughter wasn’t helping either. I had never been so humiliated.
That is until at that very moment, my mother, feeling a million types of embarrassment for son with drooping draws, ran on to the pitch, while the game was still being played, grabbed my shorts and hoisted them up as high as they would go. She then turned the tops of them into my underwear so as they would stay up. She meant well but aside from the very painful wedgy she had just inflicted on me, she had managed to make my 10 year old mortification and the laughter of the braying audience a million times worse.
So there you have my knickers story. It’s something that has haunted me every day for the last twenty five years or so. I’ve tried to laugh it off. I tell it as an ice breaker when I’m sitting with strangers at a wedding or some such event. Some laugh, some creep away. It’s understandable.
I’m not sure how I’d react to a stranger revealing such intimate and traumatic details of their life. But I wanted to share it with you my loyal readers, mostly because, therapy is really expensive. Any psychiatrist who read this story will just see cash register signs. Ka ching.
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