I was in my first year of what was to be a very long college career when the Beatles produced Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, to my mind their best LP ever.
It was played every where, everyone loved it, I don’t remember any dissenters. We all had our favourite tracks, mine was “When I’m Sixty Four”, my friend Noel Browne loved “ I’ll get by with a little help from my friends” and he did an amazing take off of Joe Cocker’s cover, air guitar and all, and as Noel was tall and skinny with a great afro of red hair he looked better than Cocker doing it too.

It was in one of those unexpectedly pleasant mornings, a Sunday after a much anticipated party where we had stayed all night.
This Sunday morning we were lazy and hung over and, because it had not struck our young heads that there might be life after the party, we had absolutely no plans.
I remember being there with Noel and my friend Michael, still friend (god love him) forty years later, lounging around, listening to Sergeant Peppers, boredom setting in, when I decided that I would teach the two of them a dance routine to go with the very danceable “Sixty Four”
I knew my pupils, there was not going to be anything flash performed here, this was going to be a very simple soft shoe shuffle.
And very simple it turned out to be.
I discovered fairly early on that where as Noel was a natural dancer, Michael’s only experience of any type of synchronized movement was being trained in marching by the local territorial army, the FCA.
Consequently he found it impossible, for instance, to put his left hand forward at the same time as his left leg (this was not how they had trained him to march). This led to a fairly limited palette of choreographic moves.
However, at the end of the morning we had a routine together, unbelievably I can still remember some of it, it comes back, along with loads of other sadder memories, whenever I hear the song.

I don’t think we performed it much, maybe, for craic, at a night club once ? I can’t remember, but the morning became a great bonding experience and we three became great friends.

So much so that we decided to go together to California together on student visas during the summer.

I remember making plans together for this adventure, this was the end of the Sixties after all, and San Francisco was the centre of the world.

The schemes however were not to be.
The only one heading to the states at the end was Michael, Noel’s parents, ironically as it turned out, decided it would be too dangerous for him. I failed my exams and had to spend the summer swotting for my repeats.

Noel went to London, worked there for a few months and in September he rang me, he was heading off to Yugoslavia, hitching around for a few weeks, would I like to join him?
Unfortunately I hadn’t any cash so I settled for a few weeks staying with my sister in Dublin instead.

A few days before college recommenced I headed back to Cork.
This I did in the time honoured fashion of the sixties.
I got a bus out to Newlands Cross , at the start of the road to Cork, and proceeded to hitch a ride home.

I wasn’t hitching long when I noticed something familiar about a fellow hitcher, struggling awkwardly with a large suitcase, a little down the road from me.
Something about his movements made me realise that it was my old friend Michael, just back from the States and making his way home.
This was a glorious moment of serendipity, made even more so when a fellow in a huge truck stopped and offered to bring us all the way to Cork.

Something about our feeling of celebration must have communicated to the driver because we all became great friends for the journey.
So much so that we decided to stop and eat together in Portlaoise,
And to have a drink in a bar afterwards, and to stop again in Cashel and have some more.

It was just outside Cahir when the inevitable happened and the by now quite drunken driver, took a corner too fast and ploughed through a stone wall into a field.
We were all shook, but OK.

The truck couldn’t go any further though.
I remember struggling out on to the road and practically immediately getting picked up by another truck and eventually landing home.

An incredibly lucky escape for us.

Noel hadn’t been so lucky.

On the same day when were hitching through Ireland he had been hitching back through Yugoslavia and had been killed in a road accident.

Forty years later I can still see the three of us learning the routine together.
In another six years, if I’m spared I will be sixty four.