APPROACHING FORTY!
This poem was kindly drawn to our attention by Liam Carroll of the Marlay Park Tipsters - a touch rugby club near Dublin that pre-dates the Dodderers by some 20 years or so! Though most of us are now "approaching forty" from the wrong side.... the name has been kept in homage to the original,
All dodderers should print it out and put it where they can read it - so when you wake up on a Sunday morning and hear the rain hammering on your windows and it's blowing a gale.... and you're tempted to say "what the hell I'm having a lie in today" ..... you will be reminded "why we do it"! (Plus the fact your mates will be waiting for you!)
APPROACHING FORTY
The young men fall off on days like this:
Nobody shows at first in the teeming hail
As headlights illuminate the vacant pitch.
Slowly a handful of cars start to show.
Drivers stare out at the January gale
Then exchange looks through their windows.
Nobody in their right mind would play ball
On a morning when not even the dogs would stir,
But a car door opens and slagging voices call.
Men clamber out with strapped ankles and bad backs
To stretch, warm up, laugh at the downpour,
Knowing they won't always enjoy Sundays like that.
(Reproduced by kind permission of the young Irish Poet and Author Dermot Bolger
- may his thoughts never dry up and his knees never wear out).
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