LockerRoom:Sunday morning and it's coming down. I read recently that in Britain 70 per cent of people don't remember a thing about the weather forecast five minutes after having watched it. Perhaps this is true of anything that citizens of Britain watch but it's not true of us drip-dried peasants who live next door, especially if you are a peasant whose county is playing in Croker on Sunday afternoon. (And of course here in The Irish TimesHeights, we are, as Myles said, the "tireless champion of our peasantry".)

There's always a pregnant air to weeks when there's a big match in Croker and the weather tints all expectation. Where we live, if you stay home you can hear the roars pushed out from the stadium and the weather calibrates the sound like the tightness of a bodhrán skin. Rain is like a heckler interrupting the opera of the championship. It changes the experience.

If Meath or a northern team are playing in Croker you can gauge the crowd size by the behaviour of drivers who have come like Babe, the pig of classical myth, to the city. On a rainy day everything is different. Meath people abandon their unfeasibly large Range Rovers only reluctantly, often disgorging most of their hefty spud-fed occupants at Quinn's of Drumcondra before driving off to find a safe haven for the veh-icle. The ejected go bent and scurrying towards the GAA's house of worship.

I was in Wembley a few weeks ago and in the taxis which bore me to and from the venue in the style to which the paper is accustomed to paying for, I was reminded of something Hazlitt once said. (okay, okay, I'm not in the habit of being reminded of things Hazlitt once said but back in the day Hazlitt, Lamb and Bacon were the first three essayists on the carnivorous collection which we had to do for the Leaving and to make me feel better about being the dullard whom other dullards called the Guv'nor, it was recommended I read Hazlitt's On the Ignorance of the Learned. No, really.)

Anyway Hazlitt (Why did ya have to make such a thing about it? I feel self-conscious now. You couldn't let it lie, could you? Well it says as much about you as it does about me. Now shut up.) said that you would hear "more good things on the outside of a stage coach from London to Oxford than if you were to pass a twelve-month with the Under Graduates or Heads of Colleges of that famous university." In other words when in doubt, always quote taxi drivers.

What reminded me of Hazlitt (okay, yes, I Googled looking for quotes on taxi drivers and pretended then I had just been reminded of Hazlitt. I've read nothing more complicated than Harry Potter. Happy now?) were the comments by both taxi drivers to the effect that they had between them only seen about three games in Wembley Stadium. Both of them were devout Arsenal fans (all London taxi drivers are fans of Arsenal. Santayana, said that, I think.) In this respect Croke Park differs from almost all other major stadia.

Wembley is iconic in the English imagination but remains remote from the day to day experiences of those who sing songs pertaining to the dream of seeing their team playing there. In the breathtakingly condescending anthropology of the recent election these choristers would, I suppose, be "Breakfast Roll Men", creatures of mere instinct rather than reason. Not the sort who enjoy a healthy bit of Hazlitt on a Monday morning.

Croke Park is part of the life experience of so many of us that we take it for granted. I love that story of Pat Spillane and Páidí Ó Sé as schoolboys galloping around in the darkness on the Croke Park grass after closing time one night, dreaming the dream we all had. I liked the romance of that couple who were found in the act of making love on the same grass at roughly the same time of night. (Legal note: Not Páidí and Pat, a different couple.)

I first started going to Croker at a time when you could accessorise by tying your Dubs scarf to your wrist and buying a loose Major and a red-headed match for a penny in the little newsagents near Gaffney's.

I discovered in 1974 that Dublin had a football team. In the National League final of 1975 I learned that Meath had one too. As it says in Genesis, every Batman has his Joker. It (1975, not Genesis) was a time before counselling and therapy.

I loved being part of that vacant fervour which was the Hill in full flight, everyone being carried up the steps and down the steps with the flow of the game. Spending one half of a game looking down with concern towards Robbie Kelleher ("challenge the foundations of traditional morality and just hit him Robbie, would ya?" as Nietzsche would say) the other half wondering how Bobby Doyle got away with those solo runs.

When I got a real job in a newspaper I felt pangs of betrayal going to sit in the middle of the upper tier of the Hogan. My grandad always used to say there were three circles in the GAA and no Dublin man would ever be allowed to breach the innermost circle. From the press box, though, you could, had you the guts, jump right down on top of the innermost circle as they sat in the Ard Comhairle below. We sit in a place níos airde than the Ard Comhairle itself!

There was guilt sitting there but listen, the view, the view. There's a reason why all these colleges are cleaning up with hey presto, you're a journalist courses. Everyone wants that little NUJ card that will magic them into the press box, there to sip of stew-black tea and partake of sambos and elegant aphorism-strewn discourses on the state of the modern game.

So exciting. Every day when I get into the Hogan Stand lift on the way up to the press box for a big game I quote another favourite thinker of mine to the lift attendant. "This is going to be great," I say. "Stop saying that," says the lift attendant.

The view. I mean did any of us on the Hill really know what had happened when Mikey Sheehy chipped the ball past Paddy Cullen in 1978? We did not. We just knew that it was bad because the Hogan was in rumpus. We knew that probably there was worse to come.

There were things I missed and things I didn't miss when I deserted the Hill. Paddling in urine? Yeah I missed that but some days you'd end up penned beside some aggravating know-nothing yahoo (an ACNY as the social cataloguer McWilliams might say) whose vernacular was honed at night classes for Man Utd wannabes, a pustule whose dumb eruptions about your favourite players were popped in that style of bellowing which precludes all further discussion.

"Have a ging! Have a ging! Scream-ah. Aw. Yew waste-ah! Yew waste-ah!" All this delivered into your left ear while his gut and groin presses urgently against you from behind. Ah memories (as Streisand says), like the corners of my mind.

Of course there are other dramatic staples to an afternoon in the theatre of Croker. Goals, as Kenneth Tynan contended, are like great lines which as they are uttered tell you they are altering the course not just of the play but of our understanding (give up reading Breakfast Roll Man. You're out of your depth and it doesn't suit ya anyway.)

Sunday morning and it's coming down. The memory floods like the leaf-blocked drain down the road. It's a bit like the 12 apostles afternoon in September 1983. A bit like the day Louth and Laois fought each other the length of the field in the early 90s.

Sunday morning and it's coming down. The day could contain that class of misty water-coloured memory. Or it could be ditchwater-dull, numbing us all in our lofty press box perch. Making our chairs of privilege and learning no more exalted than what my friend Paddy Kavanagh called, a banal, bank seat for the passer-by.

Are ya gone yet, stout Breakfast Roll Man? Get brown sauce on mine.