My affection for the Sperrin Mountains started during my days as a devoted, young smoker.
I’ll explain. The skylight from my attic bedroom provided a regal view of the Glenshane Pass. It also offered a convenient way of getting a smoke without leaving the house.
This was the routine. I’d place a pillow on the chest of drawers that sat under the skylight. Then I’d kneel on the pillow, popping my head out of the skylight. (Courtesy of a few informers in the houses beyond us, I later discovered that my parents knew what I was at all along).
I always put on the same song. Coney Island Baby by Lou Reed. It was on a cassette, a present from my sister, Brenda.
I could rewind the tape recorder to exactly the right place. The song lasts six minutes and 33 seconds – the length of a good smoke.
Coney Island Baby starts off slow, dreamy and soothing. It’s one of those tunes which induces a type of reverie.
On cold winter nights – Lou would be singing and I’d be puffing away, gazing at the far-off headlights coming down the Glenshane Pass.
Just lights in the distance, moving steadily. Like Gatsby on his dock. Dreaming. Blowing smoke into the night air. It was hypnotic.
God, I loved smoking.
But that shouldn’t be a surprise. I come from a family of smokers. People came to my grandparents’ house at The Wood - to smoke.
A neighbour, Kevin Scullion had Down’s Syndrome. Officially, Kevin was not allowed to smoke in his own home.
But he visited my grandparents every night of the week and smoked away to his heart’s content.
Like myself, Kevin’s parents knew the score. A supply of cigarettes was left at The Wood for him. It was just a good way to stop Kevin from smoking round the clock.
My father says he can’t remember a time when he didn’t smoke. My granda used to give him and his brothers cigarettes as, wait for it… Christmas presents.
Charlie reckons he would have been about eight years old: “We all sat round the fire on Christmas day, smoking away.”
When my late uncle Pat was a boarder at St Columb’s in Derry he got very distressed when the priests wouldn’t allow him to smoke.
Pat informed the authorities that he was allowed to smoke at home.
A letter was sent from St Columb’s to The Wood seeking to ascertain the veracity of Pat’s claim.
The response was the only time my granda, Paddy Heaney, made any intervention in the education of his children.
Not that he actually wrote a reply. This was indeed a man who would have made `smoke signals’ seem ‘noisy’.
The next food parcel sent to Derry contained a packet of Gallaher’s Blues.
When it came to developing bad habits, the eldest boy, Seamus was considered the ‘slow learner’ of the family.
Seamus didn’t start smoking until he 18 or 19. His brother Hugh had already quit by that age.
Seamus started at the wake of a neighbour who drowned in England.
It was a long wake – and these were the days when wakes were like smoking championships.
His sisters, Ann and Sheena, were truly champion smokers. Black tea and cigarettes. The family diet.
When I picture my late aunts, they’re talking, they’re happy - and they’re smoking.
Uncle Dan, the youngest of the family, never smoked. He jokes that he was told it would stunt his growth.
Dan is a few inches shorter than all his cigarette puffing brothers.
My Godfather, Uncle Colm, still smokes. Colm and myself spent the summer of ‘93 (the greatest of them all) working together at Specialist Joinery. Delivery men.
When sent on jobs down south which required an overnight stay, Colm slept with the cigarettes and lighter under his pillow. “In case of an emergency.” Enough said.
My father smoked Gallaher’s Greens. There was no butt on a Green. Unfiltered, they were very strong, which probably explains why so few people bought them.
Sadly for my father, the day came when Gallaher’s announced that they were going to cease production of his beloved Greens.
The news kick-started one of the greatest panic-buying sprees of the last century. Charlie started stockpiling. Gallaher’s Greens were stashed in every corner of our house.
And Charlie smoked them all. It took a few years. But he smoked them all. Then, one Ash Wednesday, with no more Greens left in this earthly world - he quit. And that was that.
Well, except for the time he discovered four packets that he had squirrelled away and forgotten about.
I was presented with them – and instructed to put them in safe custody. In case of an emergency!
Some of you might be reading this column and are wondering, ‘yes, but what has all this got to do with banning the back pass to the goalkeeper?’
It’s a good question, Jackie.
Well, I was out on the bike last Wednesday. Three hours. It was a great one.
Coming out of Draperstown, riding towards Tobermore, I looked to the left and was once again struck by the beauty of the snow-covered Sperrins.
I could see Carn Mountain. From head to toe, it was cloaked in the most brilliant white.
The grandeur and stillness of the scene instantly transported me back to Lou Reed, Coney Island Baby and the headlights on the Glenshane Pass.
And as I rode back to Maghera, it got me thinking about smoking.
