I JOINED Gerry McLaughlin in a Belfast bar recently - and drank one pint more than him.
Once that would have been a claim to fame, but the boul' Gerry is teetotal now.
He remains as full of fun and fiery spirit as ever though, a roguish charmer.
We talked poetry, politics, geography, history, newspapers, and sang the praises of our wonderful wives. The GAA managed to get a brief mention.
I know Gerry as a sports journalist, but I don't know the 32th of him, never mind the half nor the quarter.
He deserves a book to be written about him, and he's written a few himself, but this Friday night he launches his first poetry collection, entitled 'The Breed of Me'.
As well as 'wine, women, and song', Gerry's loves are the land, language, laughter - and hurling.
Twenty-two years he wielded the ash for his home county Fermanagh, from 1975 to 1997, although he's actually a native of Donegal, born in the townland of Meenaleck, in the Rosses, in 1958.
His roving nature (and eye), took him around Ireland, hurling in seven counties in all, including in two cities, for eight different sides: Aodh Ruadh, Ballyshannon (Donegal), Erne Gaels, Belleek (Fermanagh), UCG and Liam Mellow's (Galway), Melvin Gaels (Leitrim), Commercials (Dublin), St Paul's (Antrim), and Naomh Eoin (Sligo). He also played minor football and handball for Fermanagh.
He only hung up his hurl in 2003, at the age of 45.
The times he has had, though, the tales he has to tell…
The funniest part of his story, for those who know him? His mother wanted him to be a 'Brother', like her uncle Maurice, so he was went off to a De La Salle boarding school. He spent time in Castletown, Laois, then a year in Waterford.
"It was great for the hurling and handball," recalls Gerry, "but I rapidly lost my vocation after a debate with the Convent in Ferrybank, Waterford in the summer of '74 and a young red-haired lady was partly to blame…
"We were allowed to cycle into Waterford from the monastery in Faithlegg, told to be back by midnight. But I did not get back to 2am as the debate went into extra time with that charming red-head. …So 'Cinders' McLaughlin was sent home."
'The Breed Of Me' will be unveiled in Rockfield Community Hall, Ballyshannon, Donegal, on the site of Gerry's former primary school, from 7.30 pm this Friday.
The collection will be launched by two of his old hurling friends, former Galway captain Joe Connolly and a fiery poet from Connemara called Sean O'Coistealbha, while another hurling pal, Conor Hayes, will also be a special guest.
There are more than 60 poems in the collection, many of them are tributes to those who have passed on, to Gerry's family, friends, neighbours and figures in the GAA who made a big impression on him growing up on the Donegal/Fermanagh border in the 1960s and 1970s and in his long, long playing career.
There are also poems about places that he will forever hold in his heart, like Meenaleck in the Rosses where he was the first of Willie and Rose's children to "see the light of a Gaeltacht morning", after three miscarriages and a death, and Cloghore, where he grew up and played football and hurling on the green - "where Donegal were never defeated."
There are tributes to his mother Rose (McGuire)'s home in the hills of west Fermanagh in Tullygrevagh, Gerry's "long-stepping ancestors", and about his granny Tessie Ward's people, who were and are the bards who will always inspire him.
Poems too about UCG and Galway, that eternal city of his youth - and one about Belfast in the dark days when he worked as a young(-ish) reporter with The Irish News.
Most of all they're about Corlea "the world's loveliest townland to where my father Willie McLaughlin came to in 1925.
"The poems are rooted in history, a subject I loved in UCG; they're about ordinary, real people who had an extraordinary effect on me.
"I suppose you could call it folk poetry - and, no, I did not spend hours agonising over a word but I think some of them must have come to me when the moon was in a dangerous position."
Gerry started to write poems as a way of coping with grief at the loss of his parents Rose and Willie, who died in 2017 and 2018 within nine months of each other.
"I began to think about them and the qualities they gave us, our own people, 'The Breed Of Me', my father Willie who filled my world with songs, stories and tales of GAA giants he played with…
"My mother was a queen of the land of books, but had to work from a very young age. She gave me a love of words, and she was wise and witty but, above all, kind."
Gerry still wields the pen, a hack for hire since the late Eighties, with a woman to blame/ thank for that, as he explains: "In 1987 I was warbling at a folk festival in Derrygonnelly, county Fermanagh when I met a female reporter called Eileen McCabe who told me if I was half as good at writing as I was at bullsh*tting then I should take up the writing.
"Well, I had to check this out, so I started writing notes for her and the Fermanagh Herald then went to UCG to do a post-grad in journalism in 1988/1989."
Gerry spent "five great years in Belfast in the office of the Irish News" - and often in the bars of the city, from 1989 to 1994, writing GAA and also as Irish Language editor.
Fearless in the stories he wrote, including front page story about ticket touts "which did not endear me to the GAA 'College of Cardinals'"; he also referred disparagingly to Clones as 'Tiernassic Park'.
One classic anecdote from 30 years ago: "I had a front page exclusive on a player from Omagh called Eddie Duffy who made history by becoming the first player to be sent off in TWO different countries on the same day.
"He was sent off while playing as a ringer for a club in London and then sent off while playing against Ardboe, later that evening.
"He apologised to his marker before lamping him in the game in London as he needed to get to the airport to get back to play for Omagh that evening!"
Gerry's time on the Irish News staff was perfect: "Great days - Down won the All-Ireland in 1991 and the late Ambrose Rodgers put me sitting in the Sam Maguire Cup in a Dublin hotel.
"Donegal won the All-Ireland in 1992…magic in the press box and I was cushioned from the crowd by a good- natured Armagh female reporter…
"1993, Derry win the All-Ireland and then I met a young Fermanagh lady and had to make a choice between Belfast and Belleek - and the latter won and I set up as freelance."
Unfortunately my Irish is extremely limited - but I do know that Gerry is some craic.
The GAA is about playing, on and off the pitch, and about a sense of place, or places.
Gerry McLaughlin embodies all that. Friday night will surely be worth a few more poems of its own.
