It felt like I had only just closed my eyes when I heard Jimmy banging on the door of our room, telling us that it was 7.30 and time to get up and face the day. We had the breakfast, orange juice, cornflakes, tea and toast, sure it wouldn’t be any better at home. The bus picked us up at 8.45 to bring us to the playing arena. We were to be training there after lunch, at 2 in the afternoon. But before all that we had the hectic rigmaroll of the chair check. We got our 8 rugby chairs and lined them up in the warm up area so that the officials could go through the motions of measuring and safety checks. Looking back on it now, our chairs lined up there with chairs from the other countries, they were like Morris Minors (ours) parked beside Ferraris and Porches but like the Morris Minor, our chairs get us up and down the court and I’m sure that people scored in the Morris Minor in their time too.

Of course there had to be problems with our chairs and the specifications, nothing was going to be easy. Only 3 out of the 8 chairs fully passed the checks. The other 5 needed fixing, 3 of them were major jobs, way beyond our normal lump hammer stage. Christ, where’s that welder that they promised? After all that, we got changed and were on court by 2 pm, ready to go with our first training session. We had an audience watching us limber up and go through a few moves, none were more interested than the Dutch team, who were to be our opponents in our second match. Their coach was taking notes goodo and on one occasion our coach, Martin Baxter, was passing him and jokingly mentioned the notetaking to which the Dutch coach replied that he had us all sussed out. When I heard this I turned to the Big Man (Garrett Culliton) and said to him that that was great because now he could come and explain it all to us, sure we hadn’t a clue what we were at most of the time.

That evening we all headed down for our meal together. The meals were grand, they were in a buffet style, self service with a little Dana thrown in (All Kinds of Everything). There was fish, pasta, meatballs, lasagne, chips, mashed spuds and stuff like that there, followed by the ice cream cones or the mousse. There was music there every evening and we often stayed on for an hour or so after our meal to enjoy the ceol but when the musicians started brutalising some of the songs then it was time to head back to the chalet and hit the sack. I rang home to see how things were and could tell in the voices that I was being missed. 2 days down, only 6 more to go.