Let me put you in the picture

Let me put you in the picture


C’mere ‘til I tell ya
Daniel Carey

USUALLY, hearing a song called ‘40 Stone’ by an Irish acoustic punk band named Spud Nigger would constitute the weirdest aspect of any evening. But that ditty, in which a drunk man describes the dangers of bringing an overweight woman home from the pub, was only the start of a memorable musical night in Athlone.
I also attended an intimate gig by an American called Felix Sonnyboy, who gave us such wonderful lyrics as ‘Electricity, you mean so much to me’ and ‘Talky talky talky talky talky talky talky talky – CRASH! No more talking’. That was after a concert by local songwriter Ciaran Flynn, who recalled once going into the house of a neighbour who had a framed photograph of the RTÉ newsreader Anne Doyle. Not everybody worshipped Dev and the Sacred Heart in those days.
A picture, they say, paints a thousand words. So unsurprisingly, many people applied to the RTÉ show No Experience Required in 2006 which offered a job with the Inpho sports photography agency to the winner. The candidate I remember best was not the eventual victor James Crombie, but the man who was asked what he would do if he had a million pounds. His reply? “I’d build a mansion, and I’d get loads of secret entrances, and a bat-cave, and at night I’d go around fighting crime!” Photography sounds quite tame by comparison.
Relations between photographers and sporting organisations in Mayo are generally cordial, but this is not always the case elsewhere. The Northern Echo newspaper was recently banned from sending ‘snappers’ to Hartlepool United home games, so instead of match photos, it published a Roy of the Rovers-style cartoon.
Graphic artist Chris Moran went along to the matches to create the strip in ‘real time’, and the feature has proven so popular that the newspaper is thinking about making the strip a regular feature, whether the paper is welcomed back into Hartlepool United or not.
The desire to capture a still image proved advantageous to an American golfer who arrived at the Muirfield club in Scotland with no previous arrangements to play. King Edward VIII was once denied permission to play Muirfield, so turning up without an appointment was, as Dermot Gilleece put it in the Sunday Independent, tantamount to a woman attempting to visit the Vatican dressed as a Playboy Club hostess.
“I told him he couldn’t get on, but he hung around all morning to see if there were any cancellations,” recalled then club secretary PWT Hammer, who insisted that even if there were, he still couldn’t play. “After lunch, this fellow was still there and he came round with a camera and said he wanted to take my picture. I asked him why and he said he wanted to show the folks at home a picture of the man who had kept him off Muirfield. I thought that was the best story I’d heard in all my time. I told him to get his kit and go out and play.”