It’s all about you this week!

This week, dear reader, YCBS is all about someone you know well… yourself!

We start here this weekly effort with a blank white sheet of paper as we have done for the last 20 years. As is sometimes the case, I start off not knowing what I will write about. The funny thing is that I need a deadline to reboot the brain, and I need you, the most important part of the story!

I often picture a few of our regular readers in order to get the ink flowing. You see, we are in this together, and apart from wishing you a happy Christmas, I don’t think we have ever written about our reader. You are the other half of this story – and the most essential part. Without you there would be no YCBS to write. I want to thank you for reading this and I especially thank a few people I know who specifically get this paper to read this column.

Thank you to all the people I meet on the street… and especially at funerals (for some reason!) who tell me how much they enjoy the column. I have often remarked to the editor that readers who like YCBS tell me, and those who don’t like it tell him!

But I sincerely wish to thank also those who don’t like something I write, because they too have read it. I remember being annoyed with an editor one time, who didn’t publish a very critical ‘Letter to the Editor’ about me. My belief is that everything should be published and let the reader decide.

We are often a wee bit controversial and provocative. I try to write as if I was just talking to you and starting a conversation rather than closing an argument. Taking a bit of journalist privilege with the Lads and the Gorls is fair game. The goal is to engage or entertain you. You see, again, it is all about you.

Those of us who enjoy this privileged platform every week have to be opinionated and able to ‘stir the thing up’. We are part reporter, part referee, part problem-solver, often accurate, but really most of the time this work involves being a bit of a‘s##t-disturber’! We don’t sit on the fence, everyone knows that anyone can opt out of an issue by stating the obvious ‘there are two sides to it’ and we don’t go that route. Fence-sitting bores people.

Readers regularly ask how I come up with something different each week. That is easy. We are all creatures of habit and my sub-conscious is always tuned in to watching out for a subject I can latch on to. And no, I don’t have them stacked up and only rarely keep one in reserve. When a YCBS is written, I find it hard to do another until the ‘send’ button is hit and I never look back on them. Also, I need a deadline to concentrate the mind.

A columnist will take heed of the throwaway remark and see the little things that everybody else walks past. I sometimes make a note, mental or otherwise, and as soon as I get the first line of an article written, I’m suckin’ diesel. Very often I head off in some non-predetermined direction and don’t refer at all to the notes I have jotted down. Some little morsel lodged at the back of my brain will come to the front and needless to say, it is so easy these days to Google dates and facts to make even an ordinary yahoo look smart. I write about lived experience and therefore can defend what is after all, only my opinion.

But it is open to you, dear reader to make up your own mind.

Coming back to criticism, which is a big and accepted part of the job. As the man in the valley says, ‘Sher anyone could write that sort of s###e’! If every reader agreed with me, I would probably be writing about the beauty of flowers or something like that. I believe that most of my following buy the actual paper, rather than read it online, which I suppose, tells us another story.

You don’t get a moral lecture here and I know that an awful lot of you are smarter than me. You don’t get talked down to and you are treated as a 50/50 partner in this slot. So there you have it, dear reader, another blank, white A4 page has been scribbled and later on I’ll type it up and submit. Another job done and between us we have filled this space with something for you to read and God willing – and for better or worse, we’ll come up with something again next week. Thank you!

Don’t Forget

Hurling, the greatest game in the world, has been damaged by simplicity being coached out of the game. Nothing wrong with Westmeath football though! Well done to all involved…