So I was reading emails that I have received from people that have been reading the blog. I got one from Shane Boland who is living in Australia I think. He was saying that I'm not really The Ardee Man because i am from outside the town and that where I grew up was like the O.C and that real Ardonians live in The De La Salle Ghettos. It got me think how innocent things actually where.
I was great friends with Bobby Dunne when we where young til we hit about sixteen. He lived in the town and I wasn't really aloud to go into the town. As if Ardee twenty years ago was like going into the slums in Brazil, the Flats in Dublin or the Harlem ghettos. No it was Ardee but none the less I could have been kidnapped by some maniac farmer in a tractor going about twenty miles an hour and the Ardee Guarde following like the O.J Simpson chase.
So anyway, as I couldn't leave the comfort of my house or grannys field which was next door to my house we had to do something to make things interesting. The Field was a cool field, if you can describe a field as being cool. You see the field was a quarry years ago but when the Dunleer road was built the quarry was cut in half and no water remained. But what did remain was half a quarry with about a twenty foot slope which curled around half of the field. It made great camps for the Star Wars figures. The other half was a slope which led from the quarry the the back of my house.
The field was where I spent alot of my days roaming around and trying to imagine that I was Robin Hood or Mac Ivor, Believe it, how innocent.
In the field there where chickens and cows, I would collect the eggs from the chickens for my granny but it was the cows that made The Field so deadly.
So Bobby Dunne would cycle up on Saturdays and being young pups all we wanted to do was get up to some sort of shite, but all we had was the toys we played with a million times and the dog Reuben which we used to chase around the garden and that got tired fast.
The only thing that could be in some way dangerous and my mother wouldn't be suspicious was The Field and the cows. It's mad how innocent we where, we came up with a game where we would find a fresh cow shite and then one of us would place our foot on the shite and apply some pressure. You see about a half hour after the cow makes the shite it starts to develop a hard outer layer which hardens by the hour. But if you found the right shite the game could be played. So one of us would place our foot on the shite and apply the pressure, then the next had to apply more pressure and so on and so on until the shell of shite broke which made you the loser.
The real craic started when we decided to mess with the cows, cows are so stupid that if you make some noise and get there attention. One will start to look over and then they all look over. At this point they start to make there way toward you and this was what we where looking for. If you can imagine me and Dunney about one hundred pound in weight each and about forty cows weighing in at about two fifty each coming toward us. It was great, the state of them, with spits and the snot running from there nose's like the water flows in the Dee.
We would hunker down as the cows would come toward us and then wait for the plan. Stupid as they are they would come slowly and take position in a surrounding circle like the Indians trying to raid a convoy of cowboys moving from one town to another.
If you can imagine being thirteen years of age and weighing one hundred pounds being surrounded by about two thousand pounds of pissed of cows, quite scary. We waited til all forty cows where in position and we where firmly surrounded from all angles.
So forty big cows heads looking straight at ya wanting to stomp on you and rip you to shreds and us there in fits of laughter because they look so stupid. We would then start to stand up and watch the cows part like the red sea but yet they would come closer again being a curious beast, then we would stomp our feet and make noise which would begin to piss them off alot. We would do this for about ten minutes to make sure they where ready to explode.
Then with a tear we would part the bovine hoodlums and make a run for it, about two seconds later we would look around and see the mass of stupid cows coming after us. This is what we where looking for. As you run from the cows the feeling of fear, laughter and just the state of them tearing after you was just deadly. If you fell you where fucked basically, for we just pissed them off for ten minutes and surly we would be stomped. We would tear down the field and try to make it to my garden before getting trampled by the savage beasts. Thankfully we where very fast and never got caught but it would be close, many times we would just about make it over the fence to safety and leave the egits in our dust.
Now I'm thinking should I post this as it will make me seem like a total goon. It's the truth so I don't care. God be with the days when all I had to worry about was not getting caught by cows.
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