I don’t go in much for fads or gimmicks. When roller skates were all the go, I never bothered with them even though my friends scooted around the place on the contraptions like experts. I suppose I had more respect for my arse, I didn’t want it broken on a regular basis.

Well, actually, I tell a white lie – I did try it once. Cantwell and Quirke convinced me to go down the hill at the back of Main Street, but I was scared out of my wits and flailing around to keep my balance. My flailing acted as a sort of propulsion and the skates went into overdrive.

As I gathered speed, I was heading fast for the Clonmel road when the creamery lorry came alongside as it overtook me and I grabbed a hold of the tailboard for dear life. I presumed the lorry would be stopping somewhere nearby to pick up milk but Mick the Milk was finished his run and had a full load on.

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He didn’t stop ’till he got to Mullinahone. As he pulled up in the middle of the co-op yard, people came running from all directions when they saw me hanging on to the lorry. It nearly took a blow lamp to make me let go.

The BMX bike craze passed me by as well, as did the Beatles, the Bee Gees and Big Tom. However, my fad was serving Mass, I loved it and I could do it in English or Latin, no bother to me. I was the favourite altar boy for all the ceremonies, I was the only one who could keep the thurible lighting and was always sent for to serve at funerals. They were guaranteed a good smoky send-off when I was on duty.

I was a humdinger altogether at benediction, the king of the Tantum Ergo, but my speciality was the rosary and the trimmings for the rosary. Of course, there’s a whole generation growing up now for whom benediction is completely alien and for whom the decade of the rosary said at funerals is akin to a curious oriental chant. In my day, everyone knew their joyful, glorious and sorrowful mysteries, but I was the leader of the pack when it came to the trimmings.

To explain, the trimmings were an addition to the rosary proper, like the spoiler on the back of a boy racer’s Honda Civic, or a homemade cab on a Ferguson 35. They took the form of a litany at the end of the five decades where people prayed to particular saints or particular manifestations of God or his mother. Very often, they were locally tweeked to include local saints and people took great pride in their own litany. I was one of the few people who knew the trimmings as they were recited in Killdicken, Honetyne and Glengooley – I even knew the Bally litany, which contained semi-murderous references to the neighbouring parishes. I suppose I was a liturgical multi-linguist.

Everyone was convinced I was going to be a priest, they kept telling the Mother she’d have a man of the cloth under her roof, but she knew me too well.

“There’s too much of the divil in him,” she’d say. And I have to admit she was right. As time went on, I took to inventing my own version of the litanies and added in bits when I thought no one was listening. So, along with “St John of Thebes, pray for us,” “Our Lady of the Highway, pray for us,” you might hear me say, “Blessed Georgie Best, pray for us,” or “Saint Michael Jagger, pray for us”.

The more I got away with it, the more I added in. I had people praying to Nelson’s Pillar, Tuskar Rock, Loop Head, and other places of note like Semple Stadium, Lansdowne Road and Tolka Park.

My devilment remained undiscovered ’till I was saying the rosary at the wake of a prominent Blueshirt in Honetyne. In the course of the trimmings, the devilment got the better of me and I strayed into the political sphere asking “Blessed Eamon De Valera” to pray for us. If I did, the Civil War broke out again.

Mag Delaney was the first to notice: “What did that little hoor say,” says she, “in the middle of the rosary he had us praying to the antichrist in the Áras.”

As I ran out the door, I realised what was meant by the maxim that religion and politics shouldn’t be mixed.

The next day the Mother had a visit from the PP who suspended me from the altar boys and barred me from saying the rosary. I was sorry then I’d never got into the Beatles or the Bee Gees because I had nothing to fall back on. That’s when my steady decline into local politics began.