Memories of my own Stand By Me Day in a country graveyard

I would dearly like to know who coined this expression about pneumonia being the old man’s friend. I suffered a bout recently and let me tell you there is no such thing as some sort of intervention which makes it all so much easier.

I must assume that the piece of advice was coined by some old retainer who was watching a potentate gradually sinking in the bed and thought what a blessing it might be that things might not be too prolonged. Believe me, you don’t want to go, no matter what condition is allegedly making the departure easier.

However, enough about that – can I say that I used the occasion of the illness to catch up on the mysteries of the iPod generation when a few of the family thought it might be a good idea to put some of my favourite music on to the system . . . having first explained to me the sheer power of the tiny machine which was made available by the billionaire who found out just a few weeks ago that you can’t buy an hour at the end of it all!

Amidst hours of music downloaded, one of my helpers had driven one of my favourite Stephen King novels on to the system – Salem’s Lot, the story of a tiny town invaded by vampires and the return of a writer to face the terrors of the town where children were dying of pernicious anemia, where the adults were being found dead out under the morning light, and where two strange partners had taken over the local antiques store.

This dramatisation by the BBC, which could not compare with a version made some years ago which starred David Soul, took me straight back to the fact of the extraordinary childhood which Stephen King must have had . . . for much of the fabulous storytelling has to have come from those childhood dreams, except that his came in night terrors and stories that would want to make you wish for simpler things.

Partly because I was tired, and partly because I was slightly scared by the story, I fell asleep, only to wake up maybe an hour later and become aware of voices in the room. The iPod was still running and I put the earphone in place only to hear the vampire threatening one of the children . . . ‘you are a brave boy . . . but you shall cry’.

I hurriedly turned it off, but could not resist recalling the day when a bunch of us went on our very own Stand-By-Me style adventure to a tiny, near-abandoned graveyard called Creevaghbawn, a few miles from Tuam, where we had heard that the tombs were falling-in and you could see the bones and coffins.

Sounds a gory business now, but we were led by a fearless youngster called Paul who simply feared nothing . . . and we did not know that, in some way, we might be reflecting the style of adventure described by Stephen King in the short story which starred people like River Phoenix and Kiefer Sutherland and which was directed by Rob Reiner.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.