Something for everyone in the small ads

HAVE you ever browsed through the wanted section of the local newspaper, the small ads in the back of a magazine or clicked through pages of auction websites and thought: who the hell is selling that? Well I have — and this week I tried to get to the bottom of a few of those little human mini-stories which are camouflaged in prosaic vocabulary and practical information like contact details and measurements and framed in a certain acronym-heavy language: think c/h, GSOH, NCT, WLTB.

As Raymond Chandler — the writer not the bookie — said: “They write them long because they can’t write them short. Well, crowbar open these tightly-crafted pay-by-the-word lids and you’ll plunge into a drama as dense as any of America’s great novels. That was the theory.

So, those time wasters the vendors warn should not get in touch — especially outside office hours? That’s me. And like JR Hartley looking for a certain out-of-print book on fly fishing, I was not taking no for an answer.

Roger Cahill picks up the phone on the northside of Cork city — but his accent sounds more Seskin Hill than Shandon Bells.

A Waterford man, he says he’s been into cycling for a long time. “As soon as I could walk”, as he puts it — after a pause in which I can picture him in the front hall of his home thinking back to the first time he climbed over a crossbar.

Then he pointed the bike towards the road. He joined Comeragh Cycling Club and later pulled on the famous jerseys of Carrick Wheelers, who spin out of Sean Kelly’s hometown so often and for so long.

This was the height of cycling’s popularity in this corner of the world, with the aforementioned world champion from the Tipp-Waterford border, as well as a certain Stephen Roche from Dublin and a knot of other pros like Paul Kimmage and Martin Early wending up climbs and down descents throughout Europe.

Back in Waterford, a young Cahill started to collect every bit of cycling journalism that crossed the Irish Sea and turned up on his local newsagent’s shelf or the Book Centre in Waterford city. Winners magazine, which was very popular back then he tells me, was a favourite as well as the now defunct Irish Cycling Review and later programmes from classics around Europe and events like the Rás from the 1930s. When auction sites like eBay flicked the ‘open’ sign on their virtual door, like-minded collectors from the Basque country to the US west coast congregated online to share well-thumbed cycling publications. A few packages dropped through Cahill’s letterbox.

Now he’s bundled them all together — along with hard-back books by Lance Armstrong and David Millar — taken a picture, written a sales pitch and posted them on an adverts website for the princely sum of €100.

Or, I should say, for €100 or one mountain bike. I love that symmetrical detail.

“I just figured it was time to let go,” he explains evenly. “They’re just in a box out in the shed and someone else might enjoy them more. But there’s some great stuff in there.”

And the mountain bike? “Well I still get out on the road a bit and I go to Ballyhoura [a mountain bike trail in north Cork] and elsewhere and I just put that down to entice people in. I doubt if that’ll work out.”

Elsewhere on newspaper ad pages this week — particularly in the capital — many Dubs are offering tickets to Sunday’s final to the highest bidder.

They say, the same way you should never see how a sausage is made, it’s best not to witness how legislators create new law. It’s true too in the case of the many happy faces you’ll see in the background as 30 men follow the Artane Band around the Croke Park pitch this weekend. You don’t want to know the mucky process in which many engaged to get a ticket.

Each one will have a tale of how they got there come Sunday.

After several fruitless calls to lads who wouldn’t know Pat Gilroy from Bet Gilroy, I have to say, one intriguing little ad caught my eye. ‘Turn the hill blue this weekend. Get your poncho for the big day’.

“I don’t know where they come from,” the seller tells me helpfully, “they’re spot-on, blue plastic.”

Ideal for the few cans through the turnstile, next year’s young entrepreneur of year adds later after some back-and-forth. I told him the forecast was good for Sunday.

- Twitter: @adrianrussell; [e-mail]