Inside Track: Someone opened the door and let a good few in

My idea was to let the occasion slip by as quietly as possible. Yes, have a celebration with the next generation and the one after that, but not much more.

Maybe a bit of a meal and a few drinks, and if there’s cake, I might defy the odds by blowing out all the candles in one go.

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All went to plan for a time. There was an informal get-together on the day itself, January 8, a few of us having lunch.

There’d be around a dozen at the more formal gathering planned for a few days later, with, again, admission reserved to those belonging to the same bloodline. (None of your Wedding Feast at Cana for us, lasting days – just a confined one-off.)

Everything went well. The meal was good, the craic even better. There’s something nice about family outings. This one was good, but would have been much better had there not been a few vacant chairs.

Everyone piled in when the camera was produced. A sibling and the second generation sat in for the opening clicks, and then it was the younger lot’s turn.

No waiting around for the photos to be developed, as it was for an occasion, without which there would have been none of all that happened last week. That was over a half-century ago.

Pictures were instant, looked at, and then, I thought, put away for only family viewing. Wrong. They somehow went out for public consumption – and there was a reaction.

Thanks to all who put pen to paper, coming up with words that were flattering, but hardly deserved. Others who might have something different to say stayed quiet.

If there’s anyone perplexed by the foregoing, let me say that I had a birthday on the same day as Elvis Presley and Dave Bowie used to celebrate there’s. Stephen Hawking as well.

As this is a sports page, let me say that when a player on the oche comes up with the maximum score for three darts, the referee roars in his loudest voice: ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTEEEE.

I’ve reached the second part of that – but if the shindig had been kept under wraps, I wouldn’t have been roaring about it.

The cake, a picture of which is about here somewhere, was decorated with images of a crossword, a front page of the old Democrat, a Dundalk Gaels crest, and an Underwood typewriter, the very one which I almost battered to submission in my days on this paper’s sportsdesk.

Appropriate, I’d say, given that all have been there – and still are, in nearly all cases – in my journey to where I am today.