Sunday Game legend Michael Lyster begins his new monthly column in Ireland’s Own

I don’t know about you but every so often I like to revisit old diaries (which I keep carefully) just to see what I was doing ten years ago, twenty years ago and so on.

Just recently, on a lovely spring day with the smell of grass in the air, I was looking back to this time last year when we were up to our knees in snow with a wind chill factor that had the effectiveness of a bacon slicer, and I remember looking down the road as this small hillock that actually had my car somewhere in the middle of it!

As it turned out we were rewarded with one of the best summers we’ve had in a long time; when skipping down the road to Magheramore Beach in Wicklow became a weekly norm instead of a twice-in-the-year exception, and sitting in beer gardens was a natural way to relax as opposed to the act of a deluded lunatic.

Needless to say the doom and gloom merchants are out early this year; “that’s our lot now, we won’t see another good summer for the next ten years” etc. Well, if it’s all the same to some of you I’ll hold out decent hope for the months ahead.

Okay, we have to accept that 2018 was an exception but, sure look – wouldn’t even a bit of that do us going forward? Anyway, there’s nothing to stop us heading off to Lanzarote or somewhere next October or November!

Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own