I fell in love again; all things go, all things go

I'm not sure why I'm committing this to blog, but it seems right, so let's run with it and ignore the fact that it's been well over a year since my last post.



This is a song which I have forgotten for 5 years and accidentally remembered tonight. I was youtubing (surely this is a genuine verb at this point?) the equally brilliant Chicago (the band), and I noticed this song underneath the first few entries. Memories came flooding back.

2005, possibly the best year of my life so far, the first half spent in TY with friends which I still hang out with and insult to pass the days and weeks; the second half spent taking the lessons learned from TY into a year of 4th year students who decided not to do TY (idiots), and actually fitting in.

The summer between these two periods was also fantastic in my mind, although I have no doubt the fuzzy glasses of my memory tint it in a much better light than it deserves. It was a summer spent playing pool and using a broken Nokia 3310 as the cue deposit. It may have been a dank, horrible upstairs pool hall, but it was our dank, horrible upstairs pool hall. But not even the rosy tint of yesterday could enhance my playing ability, because I was, as my friend Neil used to elegantly and regularly describe me, "shit".

That summer, my older brother had taken to lending me CDs he thought I would like (or more likely, CDs he wanted me to like). Among those CDs were "Funeral" by some band named "Arcade Fire" (I don't think they ever made it), "King's of Leon"- Aha Shake Heartbreak (saaaaalty leave), and a little album called "Illinois" by one Sufjan Stevens which I remember listening to, maybe twice. Except for one song which for some reason resonated with me: Chicago. I must have listened to that song maybe 50 times in the first week alone.

Some of you may remember it was used in an RTE GAA promotional , in which a list of TV and sports personalities were telling us why they loved GAA so much. To this date, I think it's probably one of the best things RTE have ever made. The line

"A kaleidoscope of colour, a cacophony of sound"

uttered by someone long faded from my memory, still rings in my ear with an odd clarity after all these years...

A line, an advert, an album, a pool hall, a summer, a year, long since banished to the annals of my mind, all brought back by one song I accidentally stumbled upon on youtube. My tangled web of memories brought me a smile tonight, and with it, an album I need to listen to again

Paul (random numbers)