Seeking solace in a digital (middle) age

Locker Room: Brace your self Bridie. Imminent disclosures. I met Nuala O' Faolain once at a Journalist and the Law training course in town. She wrote a bestselling autobiography afterwards. I'm still repeating the course.

And I met Nell McCafferty once at a snooker tournament in Goffs when she was hoping, as was I, to speak with Alex Higgins. He urinated in a flowerpot instead but even that colourful detail isn't enough to impress publishers who are doubtful about the sample chapter I have been toting for my own, otherwise relentlessly dull and glamour free, autobiography, Nuala, Nell and Me.

Retirement thus being postponed for another while (or until I am found out) I have been looking at other ways to divert myself during the long, dog days of middle age.

They say that the memory is the first thing to go, which of course is rubbish. The athletic figure, the virtue, the hope of getting a respectable job, and that other thing I can't think of right now, they all go first. Life's breathtaking shortness is advertised in tons of different ways before the memory gets wiped. Acne lingers until your first grey hairs arrive and you go from playing with red Matchbox toys on the carpet to having a mid-life yearning for a red sporty number which your ass would crush just like a matchstick toy on the carpet. The memory though starts to trip you up and for a sports hack this is especially embarrassing. I recently sought to refer in print to the old Waterford hurler Austin Flynn but recalled instead the name of the old Irish Press photographer Austin Finn and ran happily with it in print.

There have been worse solecisms and worse embarrassments just about every time I partake in a pub quiz and the word comes over the PA that this next round is a sports round and three faces, eager for the first prize of matching duvets, all turn to me expectantly not realising that while I can recall the faces and architecturally pioneering hairdos of most of the players who fleshed out the English First Division of 1973, I've become so old and so bored that I hardly know my Thierry Ennui from my David O'Weary.

I have been bothering the Credit Union for the €180,000 it will take to purchase that little red sports car which, like compact newspapers, will be inappropriate but, uhm, convenient. Especially for me when I'm taking my teenage supermodel mistress to glamorous shoots in places like Birr or Bruff where I will be covering games and claiming mileage into the bargain.

With regard to the loan, while I don't accept that the words "go ask me ass" are standard business form I have become familiar enough with them to accept that perhaps the times are changing and I'm just being left behind.

Anyhow, back to the point, because I vaguely remember having one. The Nell/Nuala/Me thing not having worked out I've settled for even more vicarious pleasure. I recently nervously approached the smirking young assistant behind the desk and shyly bought a copy of FIFA Football 2005, a home video game which promised not only "fluid football" but the chance to master my first touch (at last, at last) to enter the creation zone (well I'm getting this column out of it) and less appealing for a hack, authenticity as standard and a comprehensive career mode. Ho hum to those two.

The game also boasts precisely two zillion real-life teams including all their players and likenesses of many of the stars. I've always wanted to see what Willo Flood looks like close up (weeping willo or pussy willo? The difference could be crucial) and FIFA 2005 would give me that opportunity. Soon I would be dazzling friends and pub quiz colleagues with my uncanny knowledge of the playing staff of European and South American soccer leagues and my vague, nebulous knowledge of just about everything else. And of course there'd be the hours of entertainment, sitting there playing like a three-year-old. As the people at EA Sports, who make FIFA 2005, like to say, "It's In The Game".

Needless to say, my old steam-driven computer (ireality the techno love child derived from the primitive coupling of a typewriter and a pocket calculator) is too old and decrepit to handle the massive megabyte requirements of a game/aide de memoire like FIFA 2005. It won't show any real action but is happy to continually simulate games and generate what, for all I know, could be random results. It's a symptom of my condition that, even though this is less fulfilling than a Saturday afternoon obsessively going through teletext, I find this mesmerising.

In three games how would Chiapas of Mexico do against Borussia Dortmund. The simulation is accompanied by no action pictures (like those BBC reports on Saturdays) but the phrase "hits the woodwork" flashes up with such frequency that you know you are missing an absolute thriller.

I'm sufficiently far into my dotage to be able to fondly reminisce that "absolute thrillers" played no part in the sports games of my youth and the only real tension that I can recall from those times was that edgy atmosphere created on otherwise drowsy afternoons when we would play flick football on the school desk with the inkwell holes as goals, while the Brother stood over us angrily parsing a three-clause sentence which we had no interest in hearing let alone parsing. That was tense.

Otherwise, the greatest drama which occurred was when in a fit of excitement you knelt on a Subbuteo player, or in the case of several tragedies which still haunt, when your mother marched in and wiped out an entire promising midfield with one careless footstep. For that reason we never had team huddles before games. Somebody had to survive to carry on the tradition, like Manchester United after the Munich Air Crash, except the survivors weren't re-assembled with Bostik.

Subbuteo came later of course. Late 20s in my case (as a reward for passing the Leaving, so there) and before that there were all manner of even more inferior experiences.

There was a blow football game with (evocatively) a red straw and a blue straw, two small plastic goalposts which looked as if they'd been stolen from some boy's birthday cake and a little lightweight ball which never rolled quite so true after it had passed through the mouth and intestines of the dog and came out the other side. I tried telling my kids about blow football recently and they looked at me with such pity in their eyes that I just know that they went away and spoke to each other about putting me in a home for the befuddled.

When it was deemed that you were a bright child and too advanced for blow football you got onto the mechanical games of which I had two, both equally pointless.

First there was a man about six inches tall who had an unconvincing neck, not in the Liam Lawlor sense - which is to have neck while being unconvincing - but in the physiological sense. He was frozen like a statue his face defined by a half goofy , half stern rictus which suggested that if he weren't made of plastic he might have made a life for himself.

Anyway his right leg was cocked, (preferably over a ball as opposed to against a lamppost) and when, godlike, you pressed down on his blond head, his right leg would move stiffly and kick a little plastic ball. In an era when they were putting men on the moon it seemed like a cruel joke, even to a seven-year-old but it was all we had.

Then of course there was the subbuteo precursor, a truly lethal game as any survivors will tell you. Lethal but affordable which meant that regardless of the risks most of us got one when we hassled Santa remorselessly for a Subbuteo set. "Oh, he must have got mixed up" being the first clue as to fallibility.

The game consisted of a small, green plastic pitch upon which were set 20 hard plastic players who appeared to hover above the earth on beach balls. Upon closer inspection it transpired that the beach balls were set into springs which in turn were set into dimples in the hard plastic pitch. The ball, (and here's why you don't see the game anymore except in the orphanages of eastern Europe) was a steel ball bearing and if it rolled into the dimple beneath the beach ball, beneath the feet of one of your players, you were entitled to grab the head of that player and bend it backwards in a way that created a great, forward-thrusting energy when you released the head. This energy would impact on the ball bearing and send it either scudding down the pitch and just wide or directly at the head of your opponent. Ah.

After the guide dog arrived this game was replaced in our house by the mother of all tedious soccer games, the name of which I forget but it consisted of a paper pitch marked off in squares, a tiddlywink instead of a ball and a deck of playing cards which players would take it in turns to lift until such time as they lost possession. A card might say backpass and you'd move your tiddlywink back a prescribed number of squares. It was an innocent time and there were no cards reading 'Cocaine Use' or ones for roasting young ones.

I notice, however, that FIFA 2005 lacks those elements also, at least in the simulated versions. That's a drawback. Why not more like real life? Why not cut to a half time panel with Nell 'n' Nuala, the Dunphy and Giles of Sapphu. I'm old but I still have the odd brainwave you know.