Last waltz at Curran Court
by Wilfred

The problem began just as the speeches started.  The Larne dignitary Bones Anderson made a shocking faux pas...after his customary ramblings were greeted by polite silence by the members, he committed a grave error in social ways the like of which has surely never been seen or heard or thought of before.  To the obvious shock of the crowd he almost ruined the evening by forgetting to introduce the speaker!  There were audible gasps of horror from the diners, and for a minute it appeared Mr. Walsh was (justly) considering leaving the scene.  Good old Bones though redeemed the situation by some quick thinking and made some inaudible comment whilst introducing our guest speaker.
 
At this moment a taxi driver arrived to see if his fare was ready, and it seemed possible that Mr. Walsh had kept a taxi running at the door in case of an etiquette emergency...he had refused an offer from Lisburn to attend their dinner, and it seems likely he had booked the taxi with a view to switching dinners in the event of disaster at the Larne event.  Fortunately for all concerned though, Anderson was eventually compelled to sit down and the duty of speaking passed to those more suited to the task. Mr. Walsh handled some gentle heckling with perfect technique, his verbal straight bat bashing the verbal insult back the heckler in the fashion of a master batsman dealing with a medium pacer on a dry wicket.
 
One of his anecdotes concerned carnal relationships between a man and dog, and I must confess to being shocked by the story, especially when the young man beside me asked in all sincerity if he was talking about me! It was all very confusing, but pleasant in an unusual way to be addressed by such a dignitary as Mr. Walsh. One interesting thing about the evening was the way Professor Wilfred McSwiggle kept avoiding the guest speaker.  They were roughly the same age, and must surely have played together in the distant past. Yet they spoke not to each other...had the pair fallen out in previous years?  Or was there something more sinister going on between the two?
  
As the evening drew to a close and the cricketers moved back to the bar area for the last time, I found out something more of the conflict.  I had missed part of the speeches as I had to deal with an unfortunate incident involving a junior player who I had captained many times on the Fourths. His promising career had been placed in jeopardy when he was selected for the First eleven in the last match of the season.  Tragically though his head exploded the very minute he walked on the field, and he suffered near continual nose-bleeds from that moment. “Usually it takes an Ireland cap for the head to literally explode” the doctor explained to me that day.  “But sometimes First eleven cricket can do this. Put him back on the thirds for a week or two next year and he will be fine” he told us.

<--- page 1   |    page 3 --->