A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The two astronauts who went to space for eight days and came back nine months later might have struck the rest of the world as remarkable – but Irish lads have been pulling strokes like that for years.

The astronauts’ elongated adventure immediately brought to mind a former colleague of mine, now deceased, who once turned up at home – and there’s no other way of putting it – well-inebriated, to find he couldn’t get the key into the front door.

His then-wife, later separated, answered the door to let him with what you might call more of an observation than a greeting.

“You’re drunk,” she said.

“Drunk? I’ll show you ‘drunk’,” he replied. And he turned on his heels into the night, to arrive back three days later.

The only thing he shared with US astronaut Butch Wilmore was that, on his eventual splashdown, my old friend also found he was struggling with the pull of gravity, having lost some of the normal function in his legs.

It’s fair to say that this wasn’t his first rodeo, because on a previous occasion, he’d been sick on his good suit.

But having found the coast clear when he got home that time, he had a brainwave . . . the kind of brainwave that you have after eight pints.

He decided to put the suit into the washing machine so it would be grand and clean by the time that his wife came home.

And indeed it was clean, as a new pin; a very small new pin because it had, not surprisingly, shrunk several sizes in the wash – to the point that it wouldn’t have fitted his small son were he making his First Communion.

It will surprise no one that my friend was a journalist, albeit from a different era — as were two of the three brothers I bumped into, gingerly making their way through Athlone on a midweek afternoon some years back.

None of them lived anywhere near Athlone, but they’d been at a family funeral of a relative who had settled some years earlier in Roscommon.

He had opted to be buried in his adopted home county on his death – which had been four days earlier. His cousins had given him a great send-off but if they’d gone on much longer, they’d have been still around for his Month’s Mind.