THE HEARTBEAT of Tuesday Wednesday Football Club was a strapping centre-half in the mould of Steve Bruce, right the way up to his bent, broken (and re-broken) nose. Every Saturday morning, Duncan would wedge himself into his mum's tiny white Subaru Signet and hammer it down the dual carriageway en route to the match, topless, his long hair tied back with a shoe lace, listening to Zeppelin and rolling a smoke at the traffic lights.
Even by the standards of college football, Tuesday Wednesday were not Manchester United, and the comparison between Duncan and their former captain also fails because Steve Bruce did not begin to giggle after beating the first man and continue giggling while slaloming past players two, three, four and five. Duncan did though, and even though this mucky, bedraggled "libero" was a superb football player, he wasn't laughing at the opposition chasing earnestly after him in their clean, expensive gear.
He just understood the absurdity of things that other people thought were serious. Worrying about winning some game, caring about what people thought, being stressed about what the future might hold. The more serious something was, the funnier he honestly found it to be.
For the duration of our third-level education, we waged an epic battle for supremacy at Bomb Jack, an arcade game outside the toilet on the mezzanine floor of the three-storey UCD student canteen, in which a winged goblin flew around the screen eating explosive devices and collecting gold. The bleeping sound effects and nagging theme tune turned us on to dance music as the console drained hours of our study time.
Duncan would stick out his tongue and contort his body as he wrenched the joystick before, during and after lectures, laughing as the high score was approached, equalled and overtaken. By second year in college, we had made it to level 230-something on Bomb Jack and decided to give up - not because of the strain on our learning but because of all the golden 20ps we had dispatched into the bowels of the game. In his own terms, tubes of lager and tins of Bulmers would not buy themselves, and as a student of economics, he felt the pinch of opportunity cost just as I did, only he was able to put a name on it.
Walking past Bomb Jack on our way to the canteen on the lower floor, we cast a longing glance over at the screen and something caught Duncan's eye. The front of the coin slot had worked itself free and there was a wrist-sized gap through which we could see a bucket of glinting gold. Having spent a small fortune propelling winged goblins around the screen in search of treasure, we were uniquely trained to respond. This was a 3-D version of Bomb Jack and we filled our bags with about forty quid worth of 20p coins. Only one goblin was worried about getting caught.
Even though I knew him since the age of 12, my memory of Duncan is frozen in this time; in all the myriad ways there were of not worrying about anything.
When the time came to study and everyone else pulled their hair out, Duncan got his exams without any of the look-at-me angst. We went our separate ways and he moved to London. There was no doubt that someone as smart as him was going to end up in a fantastic career, but during those wasteland years immediately after college, I heard he was driving a bus out of Westbourne Park Garage.
The word "carefree" is over used, and devalued by application in the wrong context. People use it to describe someone who behaves outrageously; dressing oddly, speaking without editing what they are saying to fit the company they keep, bucking convention in many tiny ways.
It seems to me that seeking a different reaction to that which the conformist receives, but in an equally concerted way, can be the opposite of carefree. People also ascribe the word to those who are happy, but I'm not sure about that either; those who aren't carefree can sometimes be happy, whereas those who are carefree are always happy. In my lifetime, I have only ever met one person who was emphatically free of care, and in October, it'll be a decade since he was among us.
It's a frustrating paradox of human life that those with the greatest joie de vivre tend to leave the earliest, and those who find living to be the most serious thing of all get to do the longest stretch on our dumb planet. One could argue that this worrying gene keeps us alive, but can fretting about potential hazards really be considered living life to its fullest extent? Doesn't everyone who has experienced what it's like to jump out of a plane say that they felt more alive than ever? Nobody forgets a person but the memory of a personality can become buried in the darker earth of the past.
Not one day passes where I don't think about him, as do the rest of his many friends, and it's worth recalling a unique personality and visualising Duncan in the world today, at 35. If ever sadness was inappropriate it is here.
Those of us left down here worrying about money and wasting time trying to future-proof against the inevitable can console ourselves with the fact that Duncan is still laughing. He got the best joke long before us.