If I was a poet and I’m not, more’s the pity, I could write about the start of this week. What is the Zen koan ‘Chop wood, carry water.’ This morning a friend, my nephew and myself had an entirely enjoyable time chainsawing three piles of wood I had accumulated over a couple of years. I felt like the star in a Seamus Heaney poem, carrying, lifting, moving, helping as my good friend Richard Carey did the sawing and Ciaran waited for his hand to become chain-sawed!

In the current climate it’s equivalent to a day’s work in the money we saved! I feel a more subsistence based lifestyle coming on for a lot of people in the days ahead. The hens may have to up their production levels.

Getting some interesting reaction to a piece I wrote the other day. Interesting topic, challenging – made a few people a little edgy. All good. Chased up a few new clients and prepared for a visit to a another client come Wednesday.

On Saturday for reasons best known to Ulster Camogie I was at an event in a place called Madden in Armagh. Very impressed with their facilities, less so some of the tripe talked! Afterwards we headed to Monaghan for a team bonding exercise so feel duly bonded after laughing my head off all night!

Tonight it’s Monday so it must be Armagh for this course. So far been very good. Missing my ma’s birthday party to go. I’m a bad son.

On 15 August 1998 I was in a shop in Buncrana when Angela came in, in a fairly agitated state, and told me that there had been a no warning bomb in Omagh. Straight away I went to the nearest telephone box to ring my mother. There was no answer.

We had returned from Peru the previous weekend having travelled there for a holiday after getting married. We were due in Omagh that Saturday, but the weather being good my mother had decided to visit us instead earlier in the week. We recounted our tales of Peru and she returned home. Then instead of going to Omagh, on the Saturday we went with Angela’s mother to Buncrana to collect some wedding presents. The irony of being in Buncrana when the Omagh Bomb happened was not lost on me.

As we drove back to Derry and from there onwards to Portstewart, the details of the mayhem in Omagh unfolded. I had eventually got a hold of my uncle Jimmy who was able to tell me that my mother was safe. But he told me, the scenes in the town were devastating, there was blood running down the street he said. His son had witnessed the aftermath of the bomb. Things weren’t good.

When I got home the telephone lines to Omagh were still down. No-one could get through. It was a time of sheer panic. I felt removed from the scene as I no longer lived there. Angela’s brother went up from Derry to volunteer but not being a surgeon he wasn’t required.

The name of one of the casualties shared the name of a close friend, Aidan Gallagher. Over time it transpired it was a different Aidan, a casualty nonetheless. My friend Aidan’s brother had a nightmare trying to locate his mother among the carnage in the County Hospital. Turned out she had gone straight home when the bomb warning was made and was home, safe and sound.

I found it difficult to watch the television. The scenes was unbearable. The Tyrone County Hospital Grounds were like a playground to us growing up. Here they were catapulted onto the world stage as a scene from a disaster movie.

Thanks be to God no close friends or relatives were caught up in the bomb. But I still knew people who were. The Grimes from Beragh I knew at school and played football with them. They lost a mother, Mary; a sister, Avril; a one year old neice Maura, and two unborn twins. Doreen McFarland lost her teenage daughter Samantha. Doreen is now our next door neighbour in Omagh.

My mother knew Libbi Rush and I had often been in her coffee shop at the foot of the town. My friend Ann McGrath lost her father in law Sean, the last to succumb to his injuries. Several years later I met Paul Marlowe at a football function in Jordanstown. He lost his sister Jolene. Still in visits to Omagh I see people maimed or injured or carrying the mental scars.

I attended the memorial service a week after the bomb. I felt I had to be there but I felt a sense of removal and distance from the real people of the town who had lived through the previous week. One of my friends went to all the funerals. Of people he didn’t even know. He felt he had to be there.

I never really stopped to ask my mother if she was OK. I was partially numbed at the short frantic time I spent trying to locate her but I suppose I knew in my heart of hearts she was alright. I never stopped either to think what if she hadn’t, if she had changed her habits and for some reason been in the town that day. Such a simple decision. Many simple decisions that day became a matter of life and death.

My mother stoically absorbed the bomb and all its implications. An Omagh woman her entire life, like thousands of others, God knows the impact upon her. Doreen is a good friend to her, at times I think her loss overwhelms her too.

I remember walking to the memorial service with Angela. We arrived at the Bus Depot in the town. Again a familiar place to me: over there we sat one summer’s evening on the riverbank drinking a carry out. Down there I used to walk a girlfriend to the Carrickmore bus when I was at the Christian Brothers’ School. Around me hundreds of familiar faces, haunted, grief stricken. Friends looking empty, distraught. I saw Eamon Cunningham.  He just looked at me and shook his head.

The silence was unbearable. And then Juliet Turner sang Broken Things. The song hung in the air, drifted around the trees at the Tech, swooped over the Strule, and skimmed the surface of the Drumragh and the Camowen, down over the bridge towards Campsie.

Her delivery clipped, hesitant, childlike, beautiful. It was as if in all the mayhem, carnage and debris, time had stopped and the innocent, the maimed and the dead all stopped their journey to speak to each of us individually. I have never heard anything like it. I stood, a stranger in my own town and wept for the living and the dead.

Nothing compares to Omagh. Nothing.

What a wonderful life.

Went and bought new hat and gloves to work in the office. Very cold in here. There’s a draught somewhere and for two years now I haven’t been able to figure it out. Maybe it’s a poltergeist. If it is, maybe it will reveal itself, sometimes the company would be nice.

Got a bit of bad news yesterday about a close relative. Need to figure out what to do here. You can’t just phone the man up and say “I hear you’ve got cancer.”

Fox’s Chunky Extremely Chocolatey Cookies are exactly that.

I expected ice on the road to and from Armagh last night but thankfully there was none. The course provided more food for thought and more good ideas that I can use for the challenge ahead and for next season too. Are players mature enough to self evaluate? We will see. Are any of us?

Yesterday getting the children out to school I said “Coats on, it’s the coldest day of the year so far.” Leo replied, “What about January dad.” I was thinking school year, he calendar. There’s at least two perspectives on everything.

My brother came to visit us with Andrea and the three children on Sunday. The youngest, Sean Andrew and our Treasa did not hit it off. At all. ‘I don’t like THAT BOY’ she declaimed repeatedly, in a state of high agitation. The feeling was mutual. He was not impressed. Round two next weekend.

I read an article about suicide at the weekend in the Irish Times. To be in that situation where your world closes in around you, there is no escape and despair takes over. How can people get to the point of no return?

I just received a piece of disappointing news myself which is a bit of a hard blow to take and a real hard kick in the stones. However what puts it in perspective is the news I heard yesterday. Also in my mind is the optimism I had this time a year ago, only for it to be dashed leaving us bereft and utterly distraught.

“In the depths of winter I finally learned that there was was within me an invincible summer.”

Bitter cold today, chill icy wind coming in off the sea.

I may light the stove and move from the office to the kitchen for the day. Read the papers yesterday and this morning, watching the manoevrings of various politicians over the weekend.

Aung San Suu Kyi released from house arrest; Gerry Adams announced he’s moving way down south to re-invent himself as a TD; Jim Allister rages against the dying of the light. In England lightweight Liberal Nick Clegg shows he was well duped by the Tories over tuition fees. Who didn’t see that coming?

Of these the events in Burma caught the eye of the media and imagination of the world. But in reality will the release of Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest make any real difference, will it lead to regime change in Burma? Probably not.

Still, for all our criticism of the politicians that we are blessed with,  it is better to have a load of half canned students sacking an office than being gunned down in the streets for having an opinion. Western democracy was such a good idea.

From my own days as a student, demonstrations and protests were part of the craic and we weren’t a radical bunch by any means. More like a load of bollixes with nothing better to do looking an excuse to go on the beer. Anti-student loans or save our grants. Whatever the cause, they could count on us.

Off we would march from Queen’s, down past pub after tempting pub, keeping a steady course for Belfast City Hall. After the demo was over we would take ourselves down Royal Avenue and into Kelly’s Cellars and begin the serious business of pub crawling back up to the Union or home.

In no time at all, half canned, full of beans. We could have changed the world but it was easier to worry about where the next pint of stout was coming from.

Sometimes we would not even make it as far as home, ending up again in what was the old Crescent Bar in Sandy Row. A refuge for drunks, desperadoes, the last stop on the Lost Highway. More times than not an entirely forgettable night out, one merging into the next, meeting the same people over and over again.

Still, it got you out of the house, which is more than Aung San Suu Kyi could say.