Paul signs off... just for now!

The Blackwater river, as readers may know, runs by the side of our house. I was sitting outside the other day, on the phone, when I noticed two people in waders walking through the water, which is low at present.

They were up to their knees and by the cut of their jib, it was clear they were conducting some sort of survey.

When they got close, I said hello. “I’m sitting here years waiting for someone to walk down that river and now two come at once,” I began.

Later, my wife, who witnessed the scene and cringed, remarked that I’m getting more like my grandfather every day. Granda loved to chat to people, strangers and neighbours alike.

I mentioned him a couple of times over the years in this column, which I started writing in 2013. He was thrilled when I began in the Celt; he always said it was the best place to work in the county, that “anyone who worked in the Celt never left it”. And it was true, a lot of the staff were lifers and, the usual grumbles aside, hadn’t really a bad word to say about the place.

Granda passed away in October 2014 when I had been here for six years. I don’t know what he would make of the fact that I am leaving the job this week; I wish he was here to talk about it.

I’m writing this in my living room at home. I had my weekly shave this morning and managed to cleave off half of my left nostril, a regular occurrence. Those little nicks bleed like hell; I have a piece of tissue stuck on it at the moment.

“You look like your grandfather,” my wife said, again. Post-shaving, Granda’s mug used to resemble a papier-mâché figure at times. It was a running joke among us all.

So you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I’m feeling a bit nostalgic. This is my last Cavanman’s Diary, for now anyway.

I have loved writing this column, which I started on a whim – I think the first one was about the time myself and a friend got scammed by two travelling conmen in Dublin selling laptops – and never thought would last this long. I’ve found it has provoked more feedback than anything else I have written in the paper.

On Saturday, when it was quiet, I cleared out my desk. As a hoarder, I’d kept everything, critical, complimentary or plain daft, and it was striking to leaf back through years of letters and notes.

Feedback is part of what, in a small mostly-rural place, is a very public-facing job. I certainly fell out with a few people but I always knew that, if I was going to try do it properly, that would happen.

In the early years, covering football, I wrote like a supporter. After a while, I realised that wasn’t what I was here to do and I detached myself as best as I could.

As a columnist, it took me a while to get over the imposter syndrome, to be brave enough to throw in some humour and lose the fear of people thinking I had written mawkish rubbish.

The highlights? I won’t bore you with a greatest hits collection but being present at the Ulster final in November, 2020 – the weirdest sporting occasion I’ll ever attend - stands out.

I normally would watch a match relatively impassively; nothing looks so unprofessional as a fan with a laptop, roaring in the press box about referees and so on. That day, maybe because the place was deserted due to Covid restrictions, I lost the run of myself when Conor Madden’s late goal went in.

I wrote a piece before that game headed “Ignore the noise – Cavan are in with a huge chance”. Afterwards, I laughed when Malachy Clerkin of the Irish Times tweeted to say I wasn’t ignoring the noise, I was the noise.

My predecessor Eamonn Gaffney was in the job for 40 years; I did it for 18. When Eamonn used to come into the press box after he retired, I noticed that he would always take notes, even if he wasn’t covering the game. It was a form of institutionalisation, I suppose, something I have fallen foul of myself. I went to see my nephew play an U12 final last week for Ballinagh, sans pen and paper, and found myself detached, mentally keeping a note of the scorers and the players to remember.

From my first day, I sensed The Anglo-Celt was an institution that commanded respect. Working in this paper became a part of my identity, just as it does with many of us after a few years. It changes you; for one thing, you develop a thick skin.

I could write a lot more about highs and lows over the guts of two decades on this beat but it’s not the place, really. Has the job changed? Yes, but what job hasn’t?

The internet is the obvious transformation but there is an element of a Faustian pact there, too. Newspapers rely on social media in order to draw traffic and, as was reinforced when I was packing away my old letters, social media has greatly cheapened discourse in general.

Deadlines, Christ. I find it difficult to do anything now unless I have one hanging over me like a guillotine. In a weird way, I’ll miss having that time on a Tuesday permanently tattooed on my brain and the structure it gave me as someone with a cluttered mind. I never failed to meet one – I’m proud of that – but it was often hairy and my head would spin afterwards.

I joked to someone this week that I’m starting to feel a bit like Henry Hill at the end of Goodfellas, after he enters the Witness Protection Programme and leaves behind the fast-paced Mafia lifestyle.

“Today everything is different; there’s no action... I’m an average nobody... get to live the rest of my life like a schnook,” Ray Liotta moans. (Not that life on the sports desk of a provincial newspaper matched the glamour of the 1960s New York gangster scene but, just one more time, indulge me).

A schnook, by the way, is a Yiddish term meaning a fool or an unimportant person; the latter is the one that would give any journo the chills. We might pretend to take it all in our stride but there is clearly “a want” – another phrase of Granda’s – in a lot of us. Otherwise, why bother with by-lines at all?

There’s something counter-intuitive in that and I think a lot of journalists would recognise themselves in it; a need for attention (exhibit A – the piece you are reading), coupled with shyness. But that shyness leaves you after a while; you wouldn’t last otherwise.

Regardless of pop psychology, I know myself that I grew up in this place, in the old office at Station House and the new one on the Dublin Road. I was a self-conscious young lad when I started; now I’m a cynical 42-year-old, accosting complete strangers in the middle of the Blackwater, throwing out cheesy one-liners!

But that’s life. I’m sad to leave but excited to see what happens next. It’s been my privilege to write this column and maybe it will come back at some point. Thanks to everyone who read it, to my colleagues and all of those who assisted in getting the sports section out for 850-odd weeks.

The river keeps on flowing.