Parochial Hall, Cork

Set off at 6.30am and drove 3 hours in the dark with only the noise of the rain and wipers... and the silence of 3 sleeping boys..... in the car for company. It turns out that 14 year old boys sleep very still, without any shuffling, snorting or sighing. Later in life they will be lambasted by their partners for a variety of sleep/noise crimes, chiefly snoring, and I would love to bottle these hours so that they could produce evidence that they once slept innocently*.

The Parochial Hall has seen better days. Today there is a basketball tournament and 9 teams from around the country have gathered under the dim lights to fight it out. Liffey Celtics lose their first game narrowly and know immediately that the way the draw has fallen, they have no chance of progressing from their group, which also contains All-Ireland Champions, Neptune. No one is too concerned by this & we enjoy the rest of the day - a comfortable win against Maree of Galway and honour in defeat to Neptune.

We hit the long road home half an hour before the sun sets, at which point the boys promptly return to their slumbers. The only difference this time is that before sleeping one of the boys has plugged a speaker into his mobile phone and the car is filled with badly amplified teen pop. The phone & speaker are just out of my reach and thus I have to endure the entire content of his phone's playlists. I begin to question my earlier musings on the innocence of youth and consider instead the fortification of character that compulsory military service might provide....