A Chairde,

Father Megson was having a beautiful dream. Not the sort of beautiful dream he usually had, the sort that was forever getting him in trouble with his housekeeper on laundry day.  No, in this one there were no comely Irish maidens dancing at the crossroads in diaphanous shifts; no sultry cowled Scottish Widow traipsing through the heather offering to swell his emoluments for a happy old age; no beserking hordes of Viking warriors, their magnificent naked thighs offset beautifully by the phallic tilt of their horned helmets as they wreaked their rampant manhood upon the virginal nunneries of the Reeks - this last recurring one had recently earned him a stern rebuke not only from his bishop confessor but from no less a person than the vice superintendent of the Reeks, Garda Síochóna.  No, this dream was different though no less orgasmic.

In it he could see himself within the hallowed portals of the Albert Bowling Club in leafy West Didsbury.  He observed himself striding manfully forward, his timbers shivering mightily in the slipstream of his beloved Charabancs' unchecked march towards destiny and - O happy moment - towards the rostrum where a beaming Mike, gun in hand, was instructing a keening  Kieran to prepare himself to hand over the WithQuiz League trophy to the new victors.  The serried ranks of onlookers were mobbing the victorious manager - The Special One - ecstatically, and many of the women were renting their upper garments in the hope of a brief anointment as he passed among them - he would omit to mention in his next confession that The Men They Couldn't Hang were even more abandoned in their adulation than the women.  Dusty was foremost among the women, renting her garments to an extraordinary degree.  How strangely alluring she looked when you stripped away the duffel coat and the seven layers of jumpers, cardigans and assorted undergarments.  If only he had known earlier!

They were drawing ever closer to the rostrum.  It would not be long now.  Andrew, who had insisted on bringing along his trusty guitar, was just being persuaded to bring to a premature end his cheerful rendition of the Pink Floyd classic Seven Species Of Small Furry Animal Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict.  Kieran, now at knifepoint as well as at gunpoint, had magnanimously agreed to retrieve the trophy from his voluminous underpants.  He would hand it over..........any moment now...............

"Are you ready to toss yet?"

It was the judge that woke Fr Megson up.  Fr Megson's family had always been afraid of judges ever since his great grandfather had been tarred and feathered and then transported to Ladybarn for plotting to kidnap a boiled potato.  Fr Megson did not know what to say in the presence of a judge so he said nothing. 'Maintaining his right to stay silent' was what his turf accountant would have called it.  He just stood there in the Cricket club in Didsbury before the second game of the season, saying nothing, thrusting his hands ever deeper into his trouser pockets and nervously jingling his thrupenny bits.  Within an hour and a half the almost Di Canioesque brilliance of his management would count for nothing.  The ceremonial waving aloft of bloodied bedsheets would signal that his superannuated protegées had once again been well and truly deflowered at the hands of the wolfish Bards.  All his early season hopes would once more be strangled in the cot.   Presentation night would remain a dream.