Today the World Cup starts. Like J Alfred Prufrock marking out the days with coffee spoons, I can mark out the years with World Cups. Too young in 1970 to remember anything of the  beauty and brilliance of Pelé and Co as they set the standard for World Cup winners that has never been matched. In 1974 our family holiday was in Spiddal in Galway. My brothers were into their football and I have hazy but technicolour memories of the World Cup and Holland in particular. One name stood out above the rest – Johan Cruyff.

In 1978 it was Argentina. That was a seminal year in my life. My brother Peter, himself a fanatical and rabid Manchester United fan since boyhood, described as 1978 poignantly as his own personal Munich in his recent inaugural Professorial lecture. He was referring to the sudden death of our father in January 1978.

That I was enhancted by the albiceleste, the magnificent blue and white of Argentina. The ticker tape streaming from the terraces of El Monumental in Buenos Aires as Kempes, Ardiles, Passarella, Luque and Bertoni held the world in the palm of their hand with their mixture of skill, cynicism and overwhelming force. I remember the long range shooting of Holland, Archie Gemmill’s goal and Iran because we had at the time Iranian friends –  the Hesars whom I fear met their death in the Iran Iraq war. It was a funny time – my brothers would be home from Uni for part of the World Cup. I dunno if my dad would have taken much interest in it, but I will never know because he wasn’t there.

In 1982 I watched the famous France and West Germany Final from a bar in Donegal with my uncle Sean and cousins. Sean is currently an old man battling liver cancer. These were among the days of my lives and I recall vividly a classic match, Shumacher’s brutal full frontal charge on Patrick Battiston a bit of a f***ing outrage to be honest. I still feel a tear in my eye when I see Tardelli’s celebration of his goal in the final. He was like a caged animal set free. Brazil the team all the neutrals wanted to win. Unfortunately no-one told them that defenders need to defend as well as attack and Rossie taught a cruel lesson.

In 1986 my love affair with Argentina resumed, Maradona and the Hand of God, God Bless Him. I never particularly liked the wee man, he was a bit too arrogant for my liking for all his skill and pace, but by God the two goals that day set my heart racing. I would have argued gladly with any Englishman that dared that he hadn’t handled the ball. At that time I was doing my A Levels and had a girlfriend that dumped me unceremoniously during the summer. I remember more about the World Cup than I do about her. Unceremonious dumping was a feature for a while.

In 1990 I had finished my studies in Stirling and the World Cup at home offered the opportunity to celebrate Ireland’s unlikely progress. I recall listening to the Romania penalty shoot out in Belfast City airport having done the decent thing and driven my sister and her then husband back to the airport. What I should have done is told the bastard to make his own way and tell my sister to stay where she was. He was one of a number of people that I should have told what I thought of them, and still might.

In 1994 we spent part of the World Cup on a lads tour of Munster, playing music in bars for free beer. We got a lock-in in one etablishment  in Cahirciveen until seven in the morning before tumbling upstairs to bed in what doubled as a B&B. One match I remember was the US against Brazil, when the brilliant Leonardo busted a Yanks face and his own world cup dreams with an ill advised elbow. We all remember Baggio miss his penalty. I had a tenner on Italy to win, by god the gave me great value. I also had a fiver on Ireland to beat them in the opening game!

During the 1998 World Cup my stag party was on in Clare Island off the coast of Mayo. Happy times with my closest and dearest friends. It had it all, nude waterskiing, music, a hell of a wee rock band in the village marquee, my best man Brogy doing a striptease on stage, a role he reprised at my wedding to the wide eyed surprise of Sister Bernardine. We watched Beckham prove Hoddle wrong from the bar in Clare Island. A week later a national newspaper report reads Island Says No to Men Behaving Badly. Surely it couldn’t have been us. . .

2002 World Cup, our Leo was a baby and I remember less of it than the others. After Keano and Saipan I cared less. Especially when an Ireland team that could have gone further damp squibbed out to Spain.

2006 was interesting, Leo started to take an interest and out Peter, two at the time joined in the back garden playing football. For some reason he always took his clothes off before the game. Maybe he had watched too many goal celebrations. Argentine dismantled Serbia. Zidane headbutted Matterazzi. I sympathised, should have done it to that brother in law and others.

And this year, I am looking forward to it yet again. As usual my heart will be with the albiceleste, Messi, Heinze, Tevez, Veron and Co. My money will go on Spain or Italy and I will enjoy England falling at the later hurdles (fingers crossed). Anything else would be intolerable. Maybe not as intolerable as other things I have put up with recently but intolerable none the same.

A number of years ago I decided that I needed to lose some weight. There were a couple of pizza shops in the town that used to welcome me with arms wide open of a Friday evening. And, as the years passed the arms opened wider.

Typically the start to the weekend might have involved pizza, a tasty Australian (wine!), a video and planting myself on the sofa for the long haul. The resulting Saturday morning then kicked off with what my friend Marty once described to an aghast dinner lady in the Queen’s refectory as an occupied six counties fry. Oh happy days! Saturday night, maybe a night out and possibly a curry chip or some other feed on the way home.

Not feeling great, I went to the doctor and he suggested that it might be a good idea to try and lose weight. I had to say I agreed but it was easier said than done. Running the length of myself had become challenging. Once before I had taken the head staggers and decided to go to a meeting of Weight Watchers. I pictured the horrendous scenario that would unfold. Like an AA meeting “Hi, I’m Joe and I eat anything that moves”. I had walked into a meeting in a local hotel, turned, and walked straight back out again. Faced with the blank stares of a half a dozen ladies that looked like refugees from Pixar’s Wall E. The flight reaction took over. I cleared. Never again, I thought.

But, when the doc gazes at you over the top of his specs, looks solemn and tells you to lose weight, and emphasises he’s not joking, that’s the time to do something radical.

I’ve always been a sackcloth and ashes type of person and can feel very sorry for myself at times but also as I have got older I have realised in life, that what goes around comes around, especially if it’s a delivery man.

So, for all my addiction to pizza, chinese, McDonalds kebabs, and sinking pints of stout, bottles of red wine, there comes a day of reckoning. I think I have a dependence on processed foods that I partly blame on a student life eating fishfingers and Birds Eye Pancakes. To everything its place, and everything in its place. That place was my gut and I decided that whatever it took, I was going to face up to whatever it took.

Cometh the hour and cometh the man. Sheepishly. Weightwatchers took place on a Monday evening and I headed down to my first meeting. I arrived into Weightwatchers Central room feeling a fool. How low had my life descended that I had to undergo this humiliation?

There were wall-to-wall women, a number of whom I recognised from the Pizza shop, the Chinese and off licence. Some I knew by name and we mumbled acknowledgements to each other, eyes lowered as if we had each discovered the other’s guilty secret. I straightaway decided to prostrate myself at the altar of humiliation. Desperate situations and all that. . .  only by total and abject remorse, and self-vilification could I move on.

The Weight watchers lady was a cheery blondie doll called Daphne. She had definitely got with the programme and she exuded the bright enthusiasm of a true convert. She was assisted by a happy lady called Margaret, who breezily relieved me of the signing on fee and handed me a load of documentation cum propaganda. It was to become my bible for the immediate future. I looked at Daphne and tried to imagine what she looked like fat. . .

I took my place in line for the weigh in and felt excruciatingly embarrassed. This was awful, but in a perverse way I could hear my inner voice saying, serves you right you lazy shit, you think you can live like a mess without becoming one?

I could hear Daphne up ahead cluck clucking like a mother hen at those that had managed to shed a point or two and then her disapproving tut tut at some poor bastard who had erred and put on a pound. Some of the ladies looked genuinely distraught at the bad news, their week of good intentions and guilty eating in tatters. Meanwhile behind me newcomers frantically changed out of work shoes into bedroom slippers or flip-flops in a last ditch effort to beat the scales. By that stage though, the damage had usually been done.

I always marvelled at this mental approach. Surely if your diet was 100% fat the previous week, what’s the point of changing your shoes? What happened to accountability and facing your weaknesses? These people were in the crucible of shame yet they were still in denial. I’ll never f***in do that shit I told myself. As if.

And so Daphne hit me with my true weight, whatever it was. Talk about facing up to your inadequacy. It was embarrassing, humiliating – some woman I didn’t know telling me I was an overweight slob. Words like morbidly obese slurped around in my brain. In reality none of us like to face the truth and again in reality she wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. In a perverse way as each week went by I took a vicarious pleasure in the variations in my weight. Like the woman shedding her shoes, I realised taking it easy on a Monday food wise and a leisurely trip to the bog before the weigh in helped. As Al Pacino says, it’s the inches.

Occasionally I would fail miserably and Daphne would tut tut and admonish me. On these occasions I still turned up, rather then cower at home in disgrace. ‘Bad week then Joe?’ she would chirp, unaware that I had spent the previous 72 hours away with my friends in Dublin lowering stout at an alarming rate; running up a ridiculous tab in Eddie Rockets at about 4:00 in the morning, and meandering home covered from face to waist in chilli sauce from an unmanageable kebab. Try counting the points in that Daphne I thought to myself through a fugue of self-disgust.

At other times she cooed at me like a lovebird – one week I shed an alarming seven pounds having taken up running the beach and started training to play hurling. I soon then realised that the weight watchers regimen isn’t really designed for people who go on a massive calorie burn. This meant according to their points system for food, that I was so much in credit from my exercise routine that the only way I could make up the units was. . . you guessed it, to eat a pizza and drink a bottle of wine. I was still losing weight. All of a sudden a pair of jeans I hadn’t been able to get into in years were roomy indeed. People started to comment on how much weight I’d lost and how well I’d looked. They didn’t realise the shit I had to eat to look like that.

For six months other than my blowouts made possible by running and running and running the beach, my diet was tasteless. Bland. Boring. Eating is supposed to be one of life’s pleasures. For me it became a routine, a matter of no pleasure whatsoever. It was like the filling of a pail.

I would bounce into the kitchen, drink about a litre of water, eat a tin of tuna with a small amount of pasta, no sauce, maybe some parmesan. Little bread. At that time Sainsbury’s sold these big langoustine  shrimp like things called crevettes. They were delicious with chilli sauce. Each Saturday lunchtime I ate them in alarming amounts. The reason? I had discovered they were almost points free. Otherwise it was tuna. Weetabix. One biscuit. Two pieces of chocolate. All the time counting them points, counting, counting counting. Before bedtime I might discover I had three points left and enjoy the guilty pleasure of a third of a Twix. I learned that Star Bars and Snickers bars are the Divil’s own chocolate bars.

I read one time about a footballer that ate only tuna sandwiches, no Sweetcorn, onion, mayonnaise. Nothing. A fish sandwich. I thought him an extremist. I became that soldier.

So what happened? Well it was simple. I stopped going. I reckoned I could keep myself in check by self-discipline, a foolhardy promise if ever there was one. And so now I operate my own regimen. Does it work? Well I managed to restore some of the lost pounds that vanished thanks to Daphne. She could no doubt tell me where the remainder are and how I might find them.

It is a strange set up Weight Watchers – one indoctrinated you become very conscious of what you eat and how good or bad for you it can be. However a more simple approach is to use simple maths. If you put in more than you take out you become bigger. Doesn’t matter how long you sit on the bog or how weightless your bedroom slippers are. Occasionally I find one of my Weight watchers points sheets and I wistfully look back to my days as a signed up member of the faithful.

Will I ever go back? Well, you never say never. Maybe if Sainsbury’s restock them crevettes. . .  in the meantime. Anyone for a fish sandwich?

I live in Portstewart. How I got here is another story for another day. But on days like today, I can hardly think of a better place to be. The sun is shimmering on the sea, Donegal is just about visible through the hazy sun. The beach is packed  with cars, many of them day trippers down to the ‘Port’ happy to pay the £4.50 or whatever the National Trust is prepared to take off them for the privilege. Now there’s one happy charity.

The fellas and girls that work down there on the beach have a grand time, apart from the occasional time when the lifeguards might have pull people and their children out of the seas, as happened last summer. A father, three children nearly gone in one sunny afternoon due to a bit of holiday stupidity (or bravado). The lifesavers, Nicky  a young girl and Bernie went on about their business perhaps unaware of what they had just done.

Portstewart is blighted with developers. The recession has calmed some of their passion, but a couple of years back every corner in the road had a sign up saying ‘Development Opportunity’. The residents in a five or six house estate across from where I live clubbed together an interested a developer in taking their houses as a job lot in return for loadsamoney. One resident wouldn’t shift tho’ and the multimillion deal fell through. Amidst their greed the residents can sit today in the sun and wonder what might have been.

One developer has a town centre site under construction that caused the footpath to be temporarily removed. The parents in the primary school and the local community association decided to organise a demonstration on Friday afternoon to protest and demand the reinstatement of the pavements on the grounds it was unsafe for young children. It may be for the few that actually walk to and fro the school, the rest are picked up in an impressive array of 4x4s, MPVs, BMWs. And often that’s only the childminders.

One parent of my acquaintance took an active if not militant part in the protest. As I drove past on my way to the Ice cream shop with the boys – the value of the good weather is you don’t need an excuse to go to the ice cream shop – she signalled for me to honk my horn in support. That I did, more than mildly amused at the utterly middle class militancy unfolding before my eyes. Encouraged by the laughing I let rip on the horn a bit longer, and being unable to find a parking space looped the block again for a bit more hornblowing. I thought no more until I met her later dropping the weans at hurling.

‘Did you hear me on the radio’ sez she bright eyed. ‘No,’ I replied truthfully, the local radio wouldn’t be on my play list. She had been interviewed and expressed some angst at who may have heard her. Reminded of Berni from Meet the Focker (whom I referenced the other day) I asked her did she know the scene from the film and the line about the sixties. Before I had the words out she says ‘There’s no way I am burning my bra. . .’

That wasn’t the route my train of thought was taking at all. Still, if it leads to the reinstatement of the pavement it may be worth it, despite the resulting ash cloud. . . and it certainly might get a few more honks on the horn.

Tonight in Donegal a woman had her car seized for non-payment of import duties that are owing on any cars bought in the North. Last month 69 cars were seized for the same offence and 96 warnings were issued.

In highly dramatic scenes that bordered on the farcical, Customs officials who obviously had nothing better to be at, accompanied by local Gardai who looked mildly embarrassed, set about impounding the lady’s car (was it a Lexus with leather seats?).

The car owner Margaret Davorn had staged a sit down protest in her own driveway reminiscent of that scene in Meet the Fockers when the Berni character, played by Dustin Hoffman stages a similar protest in front of Robert De Niro’s huge Winnebago, saying to Gaylord: ” You weren’t around in the 60s! This is how we got things done!”

The sixties method didn’t work in Greencastle Donegal though, as the Officials made off with the car despite protestor’s best efforts. The Customs men had failed to impound the vehicle the previous day during a six hour stand off with Ms Davorn who simply refused to get out of her new car. The law apparently states that if you are in a car it can’t be impounded.

So there’s the answer folks. If you live in Donegal and drive a car bought in the North, simply move in and live in your car 24/7. The money you save on household bills etc will soon add up, allowing you to pay the duty owing on your car in no time at all. Then, simply move back into your home when you’ve paid the duty.