The advice went that if you wanted to sprout hair in a particular area of your body then the best way to stimulate the follicles was by cutting back any existing hair – scant as it may be. It's a long game. For bushy growth one must raze the hair back to the skin and endure a period of no hair where hair is most desired. I have heard tales – and they may be apocryphal, or else I might just outright deny them – of impressionable young Oasis fans in the mid-90's who shaved the lonesome wisps above the bridge of their nose in the hope of transforming a sparse tundra in to a rich forest of Gallagher mono-brow. That some of these pioneering galoots ended up looking more like Bert from Sesame Street than madferit rock'n'roll revivalists was a near inevitable side effect of tampering with Mother Nature's fuzz rationing.
The method may have been ill-judged, but I expect there are few among us who have not at one time or another sought to steer our appearance in to the slipstream of those we admire.
Now its all good and well trying to look like your favourite footballer or musician, but what I eventually came round to thinking was pretty weird was when the sportswear manufacturers pitched the garb of middle aged men to teenage boys.
Ladies and gentlemen, the manager's jacket.
They were big and warm, they staved off the biting winds and protected to a reasonable degree against the rain - your mother approved of these things. Yet she did not think it weird that you sought to carry yourself in the fashion of men of her own generation: Jack Charlton, Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger. Me and my mate managed to sell our parents on the thermal benefits. These ill fitting boiler jackets - bought over-sized to allow for growing space of course - did the promised job of staving off the elements, but there is absolutely no doubt in my now matured mind that this benefit was completely out weighed by the fact we looked like fucking dorks.
Sadder still was that we were oblivious to this glaring truth.
What amazes me most in hindsight is that when coming home from Friday night matches around the parts of the city where being streetwise and fleet of foot were worthier assets than a warm coat, is how we weren't kicked very hard in the nuts and got our bus fare stolen more frequently than we did.
Pricey as these coats were, it one day became very clear that the premium was paid on branding rather than any breathtaking exposition of tailoring.
It was a Sunday afternoon, and Pats were playing a 'home' fixture in Harolds Cross. Finding nobody who could muster the same levels of enthusiasm as myself towards this 'Group B' fixture, I decided to take a solo venture out to the 'Theatre of Uncomfortable Flashbacks'. These were the festering laundry days of the mid-season league split, and the horrific drudgery of being in the lower tier; robbed of the big games that lightened the load of supporting a prospectless team.
The trip from Coolock to Harolds Cross was one requiring two buses and a bit of footwork between them. My pocket money just about covered the four bus fares of the round trip, a match programme, £2 admission and a few pence for a packet of crisps and a chocolate bar. The quaint naivety of it all is hard for me to reckon with - it sounds like something from a colliery town in the post-war years but that's exactly how it was in 1992. I was 13 years old and the delicious vices of distraction that preoccupy the teenage mind had yet to penetrate my love of going to watch football. I seldom missed a bad game.
On this particular day all was going swimmingly until I got to the double jobbing greyhound racing track. Approaching the turnstile I felt around my pockets for the required funds. Not that pocket...erm, not that one either, must be the inside one...no...maybe zipped in my tracksuit bottoms...hmmph, no. Nowhere.
I stepped out of the not very long turnstile queue so I could have my own fluster space. I performed the gawky chicken dance as only a teenager feverishly rummaging for misplaced money in a too large jacket can. My discomfort simmered towards a burning panic as I realised the scale of predicament unfolding. I knew absolutely nobody at the game. Even if I did, the turnstile guy was unlikely to embrace a 'lost my money heartbreak serenade' to help me out. I hadn't even got 20p to call home and get me out of this far-side-of-the-city fiasco.
The situation improved with the passing minutes as I figured out that the money had slipped through my pocket and in to the inner lining of the jacket. All was not lost, but I had coins rolling all round the seams at the back of the enormous jacket where no coins should be. I tried to chase them back through the hole from whence they came.
They were large pockets, though infuriatingly distant from the bottom of the coat. There was much space to navigate to carefully guide each coin with your fingertips. Like a Saturday night gameshow challenge the coins slipped away again and again before I could locate the hole in the pocket. I twitched my fingers, coat and body in to all combinations of contortions and convulsions desperately trying to liberate the damned four pound odd. Had I left a cap on the ground in front of me I'd easily have covered the lost coins in donations for the one boy freak show I was putting on. Oh for the small mercy of it being the days before cameraphones and youtube.
Plan A was not working, and was never likely to work. Plan B involved ripping the lining of my new – and in my mind – very dapper middle aged mans training ground attire. This I tried. And this too I failed at.
No luck. I needed someone to help me. The only face I recognised was that of an elderly one-eyed man who used to stand near the turnstiles. He was perhaps some manner of a bib-less match steward. I didn't know him whatsoever, but I always wondered what fun and games he was having before he lost the eye. To recap: I was 13, he was old and had one eye. Likely conversation partners we were not.
He had little interest in pulling apart the jacket of a pubescent boy in full view of the queueing matchgoers. In hindsight I can acknowledge he had a point.
In true Bosco storybook fashion my predicament was resolved with the aid of a member of An Garda Siochana. An apologetic improvisation on the coat lining with a nail clippers saw that - unlike many - I did not lose my money at the dog track, and bucking the trend of media reports I become one of the few League of Ireland fans who was ever assisted in to a match by our state police.
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