COMMENT: 'I picked up the awards and I could have headed back down the road but I didn't'

I met my wife fourteen years ago while we were both still in college.

We first met on the NUI Maynooth campus.

I was about to fly out to South Korea to teach English for a year and had gone up to visit a friend to say goodbye and then I met Audrey (my wife).

Some would say it was dreadful timing, but for us, it was perfect timing.

Audrey joined me out there to teach as well six months later and we ended up staying another year and travelled all over East Asia.

You might be wondering where I’m going with this, but in short, I met my wife in Maynooth and that’s important for what comes later.

No disrespect to Cashel Community School, it’s a wonderful place for so many past and present students, but I hated secondary school in general.

I just felt like I didn’t fit in, students that age are mean too, something being the “baby” of the family hadn’t prepared me for and I had no clue what I was going to do with my life and secondary school didn’t do enough to toughen me up.

I thought I wanted to be a teacher, but in truth, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. On my CAO form I put down an Arts Degree at NUI Maynooth as my first choice and I got it in the first round.

I picked the Kildare facility because very few from the school would be going there - in fact that year, I don’t know of anyone else who went.

You might think that might make it harder, but for me, a clean cut from Cashel made it easier.

I was glad to be joined by my Boherlahan neighbour Bríd Coman in subsequent years and I often drove her up to college on a Sunday evening in my turquoise 1995 Toyota Starlet.

Congratulations to Bríd also on her recent nuptials, wishing you many years of happiness, neighbour!

Anyway, back to the present day…last Thursday, I had to go to the Glenroyal Hotel in Maynooth to pick-up the Local Ireland Media Awards The Nationalist and Tipperary Star had just won.

I picked up the awards at 2pm and by 2.30pm I could have headed back down the road home, but I didn’t.

Coming out of the Glenroyal, I turned right and went into the town and towards the college. I don’t know why I did that…it was on my mind to go to one specific place on the campus.

It was a hugely successful day, both for the papers and the local teams and myself professionally and personally. I was in the mood for some nostalgia and reflection.

I wanted to go back to where in my view, it all began, and that was Riordan Hall (pictured below). I met the very best of people in that apartment, and we have all stayed friends to this day and still meet up each year.

What struck me about being back on campus, and it’s going to sound strange, but the place moved on without us.

Riordan Hall Apartment Five had new students living in it and all the faces surrounding it were unfamiliar and much younger.

Much younger than the 35-year-old newspaper editor in a dinner jacket and chinos lurking around the campus.

I sent a few pictures to the college boys and one of them wrote back: “People make places.”

And he was so right. Places don’t have memories - it’s the people that make the places and the memories. I remember what happened in that town over three years and they were some of the best years of my life.

I owe so much to what I learned in that college - not just from an academic perspective, but the life lessons and the people I met have been an invaluable addition to my life.

I met my wife in that town, the mother of my kids. My whole life and everything in it now can be traced back to that campus.

It was surreal, taking those 40 minutes to walk the old and new campuses. So much had changed, and so much had stayed the same.

But I didn’t belong there anymore.

The place that had given me so much and means so much to me in my memories, just trundled along as the next batch of students came in for their turn. It was a humbling experience. Life, much like my time at NUI Maynooth, is a transient thing.

And soon, we will be gone, and all of the places we have lived and loved will forget us and move on.

But we can only hope that the people in our lives as we pass through those landmarks remember how we made them and that they hold on to some scintilla of fond memories of us.

In between, all we can do is live the best lives we can and be kind to people.