LockerRoom/Tom Humphries: This won't mean a lot to you, in fact I don't know why I bring it up, but I met Freddie White once. It was the cursed late 1980s and myself and some associates had gone skinny broke from trying to promote music, comedy and anything else which needed our suffocating touch.

If you wanted proof that the brightest and the best had all emigrated we were it. With petrol in one hand and matches in the other we couldn't have promoted the use of a fire door.

I knew Freddie White would work though because less than a decade earlier if you could get a woman into your mildewed bedsit in Ranelagh you would woo her sideways with a little Freddie White. Freddie made you interesting by proxy. He sent out the message that you were an heroically melancholic soul concerned with so much more than, well, just the usual thing. And if she went home before the usual thing, sure you had the carry-out and Freddie's voice and some roll-up to get you through the night.

Then there were the gigs, one light shining on this man in a denim shirt, this guy who knew songs from places and people you didn't know existed. He knew people called Fats and Hoagy and Randy and he looked like he'd lived 20 lives already.

So I signed Freddie up for (bizarrely) a lunchtime college gig because, well that guitar, that voice, that jutted stance, those songs, Ranelagh, he was a hero. Three people turned up. I lacked the touch when it came to promoting.

So red-faced and broke I stared at Freddie White across a not very crowded room above a bar off Mountjoy Square. He stared back and shook his head. I could only assume he'd met some chancers in his day and he'd met some gobshites too, but he'd never met the whole package before.

And then Freddie White took out his guitar and played for three people and some staff for 70 minutes, during which time we experienced phenomena like hair standing up on the backs of our necks and lumps invading our throats and eyes welling.

That type of thing.

Finally, Freddie White took from me the 12 quid I'd taken at the door and took also from me a cheque with which he could have played squash. He put the 12 quid behind the bar, barter for a bottle of Smirnoff. Then he and I sat on high stools till the bottle was empty. By then I'd heard many good yarns and he'd heard several bad excuses. I'd seen him play live a hundred times in every sort of place. After that I never saw him again. It wasn't his time anymore.

Still that voice and those songs of his have more clarity than old photos. To hear Freddie White brings me right back to the summer when myself and Sean K. were so flat broke that we shoplifted tins of sardines and packets of sausages for two months just to live. I hear Freddie White and I'm belching John West.

Few things in life have that redolence. For some people it is scents. Or places. For me it is voices. I hear Mick McCarthy's voice and I think of 1990. Not just that mad summer but the innocent build-up which preceded it, the impossibly dull friendlies of that spring. What was the sound that you could hear all over Lansdowne Road? Mick McCarthy's voice. Foghorn Leghorn at the back. That bluntness, a second blade of it behind Charlton's, it seemed indicative of our proud defiance.

I WAS just trying my hand at being a sports journalist back then. Not long before I'd gone to droll Mr Carville in the bank and whined for a loan of £1,000 because I was going to sign off the dole and dive wholesale into the world of sports hackery. Mr C made a good and cautionary point: last time you came in here it was to be a promoter, he said, and now it's to be a hack. I'll tell you now, because it's the next thing, I don't lend money to pimps or pushers.

For me, McCarthy always seemed stapled to that good and happy time. A big reliable man with the dopey Captain Fantastic tag wrapped around his neck like a St Bernard's brandy barrel. I could never have imagined that in this lifetime I would hear him booed in Lansdowne Road or that I would be scribbling pieces suggesting he leave his job as Irish manager. Not three months after seeing him lead us in a World Cup. The booing at Lansdowne Road last Wednesday night was ugly and the onslaught on Mick McCarthy this weekend was bloody.

There's great sadness in it because you know Mick McCarthy loved the good days in Lansdowne Road as much as another man loved playing a guitar in front of an audience. But when you put yourself out there on the highwire of public life you take the risk that you might never hear applause at all or that one day shockingly it might stop. It just won't be your time anymore but what you'll be left with is the game you loved or the music you loved and the memories you stored.

Mick McCarthy had that summer of 1990 as a player and in a more complicated way he had the summer of 2002 as a manager. That's a whole lot of good times. To see him losing his grip and his perspective, to see his proper place in the affections of the football public vanishing is hard but it's the flip side of the adulation.

ONLY Mick McCarthy can deal with it. He has earned the right, I think, not to be sacked but he has an obligation to himself and the national team he serves to take himself out of the way if the atmosphere around him is being poisoned by his situation. He has made big mistakes and stubbornly he stands over them. The stubbornness more than the mistakes is the current difficulty.

In years to come I think if Mick McCarthy is granted perspective and serenity he'll see that he made a lot of lousy decisions this year. Those decisions aren't the point here, though. The point is he should get out with the good things he has got, let the best days speak for him again.

About two months ago, feeling the big boulder of middle age being levered onto me from behind, I started looking around for Freddie White's first two albums. Some guys get red sports cars, flashy mistresses or Seamanesque ponytails. I get music that makes me sentimental for other days. (Yes, that's how deep and interesting I am, gals.) I still had the old vinyl copies but owned nothing to play them on so I haunted the record shops and searched the net and asked around and everywhere felt like that poor old man looking for his fly-fishing book in the old Golden Pages ads.

Then last Wednesday I found those two albums re-issued, re-mastered and freshly coralled into one handsome gatefold sleeve. No explanation for this good deed. None needed. Just a lot of people out there with boulders rolling over them, I would imagine.

I'm no expert but be assured that the sparse and haunting, Live on Tour - Freddie White's 1979 album - is still among the greatest Irish albums of all time. Do You Do swings and struts just as profoundly. Imagine those two little cuts of vinyl made two decades ago, they still stand as perfection, the high point of an epic career.

And that's the message for Mick McCarthy. All things pass. Don't battle it. Take a high stool, take a bottle of vodka, stick on Freddie at the start. Po-Jama People. Then get yourself lost down in all the mellow that follows. Your time comes and your time goes but what you did is what you did, what you achieved is immutable. Two great moments. Enjoy that. Let the affection come back.

Move on. Stay sane. Get happy.