"Hey, that looks like Seamus Heaney!" I looked more carefully at the stocky, grey-haired man a few feet in front of me, walking up Tara Street towards the Liffey in the mild night-air.
People were coming and going on all sides, with no one heeding anyone else. I was rushing for a train due to leave in about 10 minutes, my mind absorbed in the task of heading home. But then this. I quickened my pace to get ahead of him and the man accompanying him. A glance back showed me that it was indeed our Nobel Laureate. An autograph hunter's dream!
But hold on a minute. Surely I'm not going to ask him for his autograph? Me, a grown-up man in his middle years, suddenly repossessed by all the whirling emotions of decades ago. Hadn't I given up this kind of foolishness long ago?
Dublin county players
When did it all start? I travel back mentally to St Anne's Park, Dublin, up the road from where we lived, where St Vincent's and Clanna Gael were playing one Sunday morning in the late 1950s. I was in primary school still. People were saying that some Dublin county players were there that morning: John and Joe Timmons, Lar and Des Foley. Dublin players! Was it then that I saw for the first time, as I searched about for some scrap of paper, what was called an "autograph album" in more experienced hands? I vaguely remember joining in the throng round big burly John Timmons after the game and he, good-natured as he was, bent once more to the task of signing his name again and again in this strange, briefly intimate, wholly anonymous ritual of encounter.
Some people lament their ill-spent youth passed in billiard halls and such places. Sometimes I have the feeling I have wasted my youth waiting for hours for famous people of all sorts to suddenly emerge from dressing-rooms, hotel foyers, airport lounges.
As the few years passed, the definition of being famous changed, so that it was not as easy as before to enter my hall of fame. I had spent enough hours outside Croke Park, Dalymount Park, Lansdowne Road. Was it really such an achievement, I dimly asked myself, to get the almost indecipherable autographs of the players of Botov Plovdiv (Bulgaria), or those of Swindon Town, whom I tracked down and finally ambushed in the Central Hotel late one night? Degrees of fame and greatness began to be distinguished and only really famous people were to count from now on.
Forgive me, all you decent and compliant sport stars who once stopped in your onward rush to take the proffered pen and leave me, as I realise now, with the signature of your wonderful, immeasurably valuable name, but alas, then not of such lustre as to save you from the ignominious fate of being covered up with a newspaper photo of someone more illustrious whose autograph lay opposite or on the following page.
Padraic Colum
Such obliteration didn't happen to, say, Padraic Colum. He had given out his address quite innocently the previous evening while being interviewed on the Late Late Show, thus sparing my twin brother and me what was always the major difficulty in these matters: planning the right moment for waylaying the star, whether outside the hotel (if known), at the airport (if time of arrival was known), or outside the venue (if performing). So out we went out to Ranelagh by bus on a Sunday afternoon in the winter of '64, and knocked on the door. I can still see the sitting-room where we met the poet: a fire burning, the settee drawn up near it, a book open.
He asked us a question we had never been asked before: what did we want his autograph for? Might this, I fleetingly thought, be a ploy for refusing to sign? Happily, we were able to plead our case by appealing in awkward but genuine homage to the poems of his we had learned in school. Something remains from all these hectic forays, then, something that comes to mind whenever I visit Sutton cemetery where my father is buried and I wander across to Padraic Colum's grave nearby: "Think of me there in the stirless air, Beyond the seagull's range. . ." - as well as of him there in Ranelagh, that winter afternoon.
On Sunday evening, June 2nd, 1963, a small old man with dark glasses emerged from the VIP lounge of Dublin Airport and made his way with the help of a walking-stick across the pavement to a waiting Austin Princess. Two young autograph hunters, the only ones there, stopped in their tracks, not daring to approach the frail figure, resigning themselves for once to the role of onlookers and wavers-off. But, once seated in the back, the man signalled for the albums to be handed in, and signed: Igor Stravinsky.
Scent of the chase
This was all those years ago, in my teens, and long since over and done with, so I thought. But the old scent of the chase came back powerfully that night in Tara Street. You wouldn't mind getting a book signed, the acceptable form of autograph-hunting for adults, but I had no volume of Heaney's on me, unfortunately. What was I to do? But blast it, what was I doing anyway?
I pulled out a loose-leaf jotter from my case, found a clean page, and turned round to meet the approaching poet. But he wasn't there! He must be going back up the street. I was torn for a moment between missing my train and missing that golden opportunity. But hold on, surely I wasn't going to horribly regress to that long-lost practice of actually chasing the quarry?
No, I somehow decided. So I sheepishly put away the jotter and headed for my train.