On Wednesday afternoon I made an idiot of myself.
I did something completely childish. I dressed up, covering my body in an ill-fitting maroon coloured suit, placed an unkempt black wig on my head and sang an old Sam Cooke song to a live audience. (Well, they were live when I started).
It undoubtedly goes without saying that it wasn’t particularly impressive, quite the opposite in probable fact, but regardless of the lack of quality in the quality contained therein, the whole affair was surprisingly enjoyable and irresistibly liberating.
It was my initial intention here to state that at this particular stage of my life I do not feel required to go exploring the need for liberation, but that would not necessarily be a true statement because self-exploration is the final frontier, the epic journey that reveals the greatest distance we have to cover lies within us.
Thus, any occasion that grants an opportunity to behave in a manner that is contradictory to the limiting regimes of protocol that dictate so much of our lives, that are far too restrictive and all too often a hindrance to our understanding of the child inside, is to me an opportunity that must be grasped and implemented with untactful joy.
There is a wonderfully bountiful feature attached to reaching the autumn of ones life.
Just like you and that fellow sitting across from you, I always, as a young man, considered the stage of life I have now reached to be the precursor of old age.
But I now know that old has nothing to do with age.
I am not on the threshold of old, because I realise there is no age to the spirit.
Autumn is simply the season of fruitful returns. The continuous, relentless wandering of the human mind, the vast experiences accumulated and unearthed from trawling through the soil of life, begin to yield their benefits when you allow your life the time to be grateful.
A career in professional football is exceedingly capable of encouraging an individual to take himself too seriously.
It is easy in pro football to fall in love with your talents, to succumb to the temptations of flattery and to believe that you are something or somebody special.
But longevity in the game forces on one a comprehension that very little in the football world around us is interminable no more than it is in life itself.
Contained in this is the understanding that moments and days, be they good or bad, pass quickly and when they go they are gone forever.
Thus, when in the last MNS Show on RTE 2 in a couple of weeks you witness my childlike antics I know fully that your disparaging thoughts will fade with the swift flow of time.
The cast, panellists, has-beens, call us what you will that populate the couch on Monday evenings throughout the League of Ireland season congregated in the bowels of an anonymous football stadium in Dublin to record a karaoke session.
Each individual had to perform an unrehearsed piece, wearing an unmeasured outfit, before an unmerciful audience and it was uplifting to observe how each individual parked his self-conscious outer self on the hook on the dressing room wall and gave his all to the team.
It would have been easy, and understandable, to refrain from participating. Indeed, I had meditated on the impropriety of my musical talent and the ignominious reaction it would in all probability engender.
However, I have been involved with too many teams down the years to harbour any profound thoughts of abstaining.
It is always a pleasure, a privilege even, to be part of something that requires an input of unreserved commitment to the cause in hand.
My commitment in particular had to be unreserved. When talent is conspicuous by its absence, enthusiasm is invariably the very next best resource one can offer.
If there was a remnant of consolatory solace for my lack of talent it was the irrefutable fact that it was not the worst on offer.
However, it would be distinctly inauspicious on my part to malign the genuine efforts of others so I will offer no mention of the words Murphy or Con that may derogatorily influence your own contemplations when the big night arrives.
Suffice to say that I believe you will not be disappointed by the overall standard, as there were those who portrayed vocal agility and a physical nimbleness that elicited the admiration and applause of the massive audience.
