Seamus O’Rourke and the rest of Leitrim will be delighted this week. Back in division three for the first time since Jack Charlton was managing the Irish soccer team and Carrick-on-Shannon was about a decade away from its first visiting stag party. Well Terry Hyland is to Leitrim now what Jack Charlton was to Ireland back then.

Seamus was with us on Countrywide last Saturday morning to reminisce about “the men”. The men who’d gather in disparate groups outside the church door or along the chapel wall after Sunday Mass. This was in the early 1980s.

“And when we were small boys, we stood with the men after Mass...clung on to our Daddy’s coats and listened to every word and learned the art of storytelling, the amphitheatre of those Drumeela drumlins echoed every Sunday morning with guffaws of laughter and bewilderment as the stories and good ones began to flow.” Just beautiful.

I remember those Sunday mornings which Seamus remembers well, when we’d slip to the corner shop after Mass to get the paper and the jelly and ice cream and any other emergency items such as gravy or matches before the shops closed for the day. All shops closed for the day on a Sunday. My father remembers the men lined up outside the wall of the chapel in Ballyjamesduff.

One Sunday he went round them all to collect money to buy a leather football. It wasn’t for him but on behalf of the boys who kicked football in what we will call a sort of local parish league outside the auspices of the GAA.

On hot summer Sunday evenings, if my cousins weren’t around, I’d bring two calf buckets and the ball over to one of the fields freshly shorn of silage and spend ages playing a full-blown match on my own

You could say it was a 1950s version of rattling a bucket for the local youth club. And the following day my father and another boy went into John McBreen’s shop to buy the coveted leather football. The excitement. And it was the first leather football brought home to Derrylea where the local boys used to play these inter town-land matches on the flattest field they could find, a piece of commonage called “the islands” because a river ran round it.

I used to kick football near the islands when I spent my summer holidays in Ballyjamesduff. By the 1980s, it wasn’t such a big deal to possess your own leather football, although it was still something you’d mind beside the bed and clean if it got dirty.

On hot summer Sunday evenings, if my cousins weren’t around, I’d bring two calf buckets and the ball over to one of the fields freshly shorn of silage and spend ages playing a full-blown match on my own. I was brilliant, top-scorer and man of the match every time.

It may sound sad, but believe me I loved it, not least the physical endurance of running around the stubbly beige field soloing the ball before landing back to Granny’s panting and pouring in sweat. Great times.

But I can just imagine the look on my children’s faces if I regaled that story to them now. They’d disown me! I must get my father to tell them the story of collecting money for the leather football.

That would certainly get them worried about their paternal family heritage! And then there were the men outside mass.

Fooled again

Note to self. When you spot a pair of fancy-looking shoes on the internet for €49.99 and you think it’s a bargain, don’t fall for it. Because, I spotted a pair of fancy-looking shoes on the internet for €49.99 which I thought was a bargain. They arrived last week. All I’ll say is that Del Boy and Rodney wouldn’t even attempt to try and sell them on.