A few years back my wife and I gifted a pair of tickets to our 20-something son for a show by a popular singer-songwriter he and his partner have been following since the crooner’s earliest open-air sessions on Grafton Street and later in low-key London music venues.
A laudable enough parental gesture, you would think. But we were soon exposed as a couple of hapless old-timers when we opted for paper tickets over the digital form, believing a tangible expression of our benevolence and generosity, tucked inside a greeting card, would trump an online version accessible via a mobile phone app.
Our old-school gesture did not go unpunished. I’ll spare you the details but the material tickets, once posted to our home (another geriatric gaffe), suffered some moisture damage before our handing them over, requiring hours of slow drying in the upstairs hot press.
The barcodes on the tickets seemed intact, though there was always the chance they wouldn’t scan properly on the day, resulting in a potentially testy confrontation between our son and a member of the music venue’s security staff.
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Repeated exchanges with the ticket agency in question – through various channels, with a view to obtaining a digital or paper reissue of our disfigured tickets – proved fruitless and exasperating. (Apparently, the technology capable of this mind-blowing feat – cancelling one set of tickets and sending out another – has yet to be developed.)
Of course, there’s another side to this story. With digital tickets soon to become the only show in town (or at least the only means of gaining entry to one), museum curators and family archivists are losing yet another invaluable collectible. (As for personal photos, it’s been years now since anyone has bothered to print those out in material form, thus denying future generations the poignant experience of finding a forgotten box of old family snaps, as happened recently in my family.)
This lamentable situation regarding the phasing-out of paper tickets was brought home while I was hanging a framed display of sports tickets my wife had put together for our son. She was inspired by a similar exhibition we saw at her brother’s house. Gene Mehigan’s impressive montage is a sweeping record of Irish athletic contests over the decades, featuring several tickets in particular from Cork’s legendary Munster Hurling Final appearances in the 1970s and 1980s.
My son’s collected tickets are more contemporary and owe a lot to the generosity and kindness of a departed family member, my wife’s uncle Bill, who as a proud GAA supporter had a Croke Park season’s ticket package for many years.
When our son was in his early teens and developing a fondness for playing and watching hurling, I’d sometimes get a Friday morning call from Bill asking if I was interested in a pair of tickets for that weekend’s intercounty matches at Croker. My answer was always in the affirmative.
[ I had the flu recently, and it taught me the power of terrestrial daytime TVOpens in new window ]
One particular time, though, my son and I hit the GAA jackpot. Having journeyed to collect the tickets at Bill’s workplace and express my gratitude in the most profound terms, I paused on my way home because the envelope containing the tickets seemed unusually weighty. When I tore open the mini-parcel, I discovered that my son and I were in receipt of a season’s worth of premium level tickets, two hefty books of them, covering a multitude of games up to and including the football and hurling All-Ireland Finals – admission to which is usually unattainable by uninitiated mortals.
It’s a memory I’ll always regard with special affection. And needless to say, many of those handsomely-designed tickets are now under glass and on proud display.
As for other sporting mementoes: unlike his Boston-born father, who grew up at a time when you were able to follow only your hometown teams, whether in person or on TV, my 21st-century son is an all-embracing sports aficionado, an internationalist in the realm of games, viewing and sometimes even attending matches far from Dublin.
As a result, his framed ticket display testifies to his presence at Fenway Park and Boston Garden, of course, while he has a digital trail confirming his attendance at Turf Moor in Burnley and the Allianz Riviera Stadium in Nice. He also found himself in attendance at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium to watch Leinster fall to Toulouse in extra time in the 2024 ERC Cup final.
As for the fate of those damaged tickets to a sold-out Dermot Kennedy concert in Marlay Park: our drying technique worked a treat and Brian and Jane were able to gain admittance without a hitch, having offered up a couple of wrinkled paper relics to a bemused ticket inspector, no doubt.
