Locker Room/Tom Humphries: There are things in life which your children like to be spared seeing you do. Studiously examining newly plucked nasal hair.
Being midlife-crisis flirty with checkout girls. Wearing Speedos. Being midlife-crisis flirty with checkout girls while wearing Speedos. Rolling joints. Inappropriately using the words "dude" or "cool" or "wassup". Texting.
Texting makes them cringe. In much the way that saying "I’ll text you" feels not quite right to us (who would have thought Text would become a verb so late in life?), seeing us text seems not quite right to them. We look pathetic. To somebody who can hold three of four separate text conversations while keeping eyes glued to the television, we look textually challenged.
There are few things more traumatic for your child than seeing your pudgy old fingers crawl hesitantly across the minute keys, creating a message at the appropriate speed with which a page of the Books of Kels was produced. A message made all the more cringeful and embarrassing by its author’s inability to use text language, or txt lnge.
Even receiving text messages from the infirm and elderly can make a child uncomfortable in front of his or her friends. This is an unusual phenomenon. A perfectly functional if long-winded message to the effect that the parent who acts as a taxi has been stuck in traffic and has pulled in to write this message but will be rejoining traffic soon and will be there to provide lifts anytime to the young people, who shouldn’t talk to strangers while waiting and who we hope are wearing their new coats causes red faces all around.
And yet a long and profound textual exchange between two juvenile texters may run along the lines of Wot u doing? - Wtchg Frends. U? - Me 2? - Cool! - Yeh!
I've noticed too that young people don't suffer the embarrassments caused by befuddlement in the elderly. They are spared that whole business of being involved in a titillating backbiting exchange of texts about a third party and that party being on your mind so much that in your excitement you unaccountably pick their name from the list and send them a text about them being two faced and then have to pass it off as a big joke while texting your original correspondent to explain exactly what has been going on. When the third party is your editor it elevates texting to the excitement level of Russian roulette.
Unfortunately I like texting. Prefer it to conversation or meetings or apologising face to face. I enjoy the risks involved in there being no typeface called irony. Or sarcasm. Or seductive. And I like the dimension it brings to sports.
Texting is not just the one good and useful thing mobile phones have brought to our lives. Texting has changed the already nerve-tingling existence of the hardcore sports fan. I think up to 40 per cent less time is actually spent watching sporting events while being in attendance at them - all as a consequence of the joy of text.
What with flashing score updates to your friends and inquiries as to where they are and receiving score updates from elsewhere and relaying them to the people around you and then following instructions to ask who got the last point and if so-and-so is playing well and has your man's brother been put on yet and any sign of a row and is it raining there and did they take the M50 when they were leaving Dublin and will they be stopping somewhere afterwards.
Matches become secondary.
Not only did Brian woo Roy with his fine textmanship but in match-day situations texting has become a valuable resource and a great leveller.
Oftentimes I find I am in the same ground and at the same match as somebody texting me updates but it would be indecent and rude to cut them off so you use them for a second opinion. Is Shefflin going well? Who got the second point? In the final stages of World Cup qualifiers millionaire managers have their mobile sets on vibrate and tucked in their pockets to keep track of the game running simultaneously. You'll see them remove the phone from their pocket at the precise time that phones all over the ground begin beeping.
Not just managerial millionaires either. On Saturday we were about camogie Feile business. Some of us were in Ballinteer (which used to be the sort of place people ate their young and other people emigrated to and were never seen again, but is now surprisingly more civilised and adjacent) and some of us were in Marino (the cradle of modern civilisation), but the miracle of texting made it seem like we weren’t even separated by the length of the M50. Not a sparrow fell or a knuckle got grazed in either venue without the airwaves (or whatever they are) crackling.
It was a slightly odd experience. Texting makes it possible for people like us to live two lives, their real-time life and their text life. Neither of them that exciting, but still. You can return from matches in Ballinteer and have no news to exchange with the people who have been watching matches in Marino. It's like everyone has been at both matches.
You say, "Still three points in it?" by way of checking on any developments in scoring during the 30 seconds which have elapsed between receiving your last score-update text and actually parking your car, and they’ll nod and say. "Your game finished handy enough?" and you’’ nod and say, "So-and-so is still playing well?" and they’ll nod and say "Yeah, her sister got two points for ye in the first game."
Sometimes the flow of texts is an invaluable lifeline. Those of us forced to cover the World Cup in Japan and South Korea a couple of years ago found that Sundays got off to a better start when you knew all the GAA results when you woke up in the morning. You wake up in Seoul and imagine yourself in Clones. Who hasn’t dreamed of that?
It's all so useful that you can't help thinking that the mobile phone has come too late in the history of the world. (Okay, Mr Beckham, point noted. By the way, in case you’re interested, we sports hacks are inundated with requests by groupies for text sex relationships but our dependency on sports cliches kills it all early doors. Gutted.)
Would texting not have balanced things up when the Christians were on that long losing streak to the lions (Wtch his rght. Gd lck!) or when England lost that famous game of soccer to the US in Belo Horizonte and those reading the wire service assumed the ticker wire must have been incorrect and the score was actually 10-0 to the Empire? Surely we could have all joined the Americans in their celebrations had we been alerted textually.
We live in an age of trivia and that's the drawback for the sports fan. There's too much trivia out there, especially sporting trivia, for it to be wholesome. Through the wrappers of fizzy drinks bottles one of my daughters recently awarded me a free trial of sports-fan bulletins, which come parp-parping into my mobile phone with depressing regularity but minimum topicality.
Biggest Crowd at an All -Ireland final. A soccer result from a match that ended three hours ago. A banal quote from the GAA denying a report that was parp-parped to you yesterday. And so on. A series of anti-climaxes added to the day.
It’s a small price to play for a fuller, more rewarding existence though. Not saying I didn’t live a full and exciting life beforehand, but u no.
