Category: Non-Fiction Short Stories

My First Football Boots:

A Short story by: Jim Nelson

From the age of five until I realised that I was never going to be a professional player (Around the age of 40), I was obsessed with football, and when that realisation dawned upon me, I became an enthusiastic participant until I was too old to play anymore. 

Now I am just a big fan. 

Throughout my childhood I kicked the toes out of my shoes, tore the knees out of my trousers and regularly broke windows whilst indulging this obsession.

My earliest recollection of playing with a ball like object was when we visited my grandmother McGowan who lived just up the road.

There was a lawn which took up half of the long back garden, and our Nana used to roll newspaper into a ball, tie it with string and give it to us children to play kicking it around on the grass.

Continue reading “My First Football Boots.”

Diving (sports)

Some fifty five years ago, I was seven, and while on a family holiday in Killala Co Mayo, my parents bought me, after much whining on my part, a full diving kit consisting of snorkel, mask and fins.

The memory of my first diving equipment is clear. Blue rubbery type plastic, but not modern pliable rubbery plastic, the old stuff, that was almost as unflinchingly non-malleable as the material used in the making of buckets.

However they became my key to the undersea world of Jim Nelson.

Continue reading “Diving Non-professional.”

European odyssey 1981

In early August 1981, due to a failed romance I decided to join the Legion, the foreign one, not the ‘of Mary’ type.

I had heard that there was an enlistment office in Lille in northern France, so I decided to travel there and to sign up.

At that time I worked for a shipping and trucking company, so hitching a ride on one of the trucks as far as Cherbourg, as my last official duty, was no problem.

My younger brother Dessie who had been working as a carpenter in Holland for two years and felt that he deserved a break, decided to accompany me until I joined up and then he would go on a bit of a tour of Europe.

To fund my trip and a potential five years as a legionnaire, I sold my much loved Ford Capri and my collection of audiotapes for a total of £500, tapes like Blondie, Boston and Rainbow, to be played loud on the car’s stereo. There was also a whip around in work for me which generated £250 (a tidy sum back then) and at my leaving do in the office, the managing director presented me with a cheque for £100, so I was pretty well funded for five years as a legionnaire, or a year and a bit as a non-legionnaire (or a failed one).

We travelled by truck to Rosslare on Saturday morning then availed of trucker’s accommodation on the voyage from Rosslare to Cherbourg, big steak and chips dinner, a good 10 hours sleep in a driver’s cabin, and full Irish breakfast before our arrival in France.

Continue reading “European Odyssey.”

Cecil’s bar in Port Said Egypt.

I have mentioned Cecil’s bar in Port Said Egypt in one or two I of my stories before this one.

In the other tales the bar was mentioned peripherally as somewhere that expats could go for an alfresco beer in the evening.

It was a place to relax, yet experience the vibrant street life that is Port Said on a busy shopping street.

Cecil had a fenced off area where customers could sit to avoid being tormented by shop owners, seemingly desperate to sell their genuine Egyptian ‘knockoff’ papyrus and carvings to tourists  she you or oil workers like us.

This exclusion zone was very, very important when it came to the protection of Cecil’s clientele.

Continue reading “Egypt Cecil’s Bar in Port Said Egypt”

Shuaibah.

In July 1989 the diving company A, asked me to take a diving team to the Red Sea, for a civil engineering job.

I readily agreed, because a new environment would break up those excruciatingly long 110 day trips.

My day rate was increased by $50.00 as I would be supervising the job.

There was a lot of paperwork, identity passes, Saudi driver’s licenses and letters of permission to travel within the kingdom, all in Arabic with photos attached, to be applied for and secured before we could go anywhere. Those bureaucratic formalities took several weeks, but eventually the team was ready to go.

Continue reading “Saudi Arabia Shuaibah.”

Belly Dancing in Port Said Egypt.

On 1 December 1998, I and an English colleague, who lived in France and was also ‘Jim’, were called out to Egypt to do a 10 day rig move for Impresub, our Italian employer.

A rig move involves relocating a Jack up drilling rig from one subsea well head to another.

Easily said, but not so easily done, involving as it does a great deal of coordinated movement to relocate the huge structure even a couple of hundred metres.

Continue reading “Egypt Belly dancing in Port Said.”

Printing.

Written in Crescent Beach Hotel June 2013

In any worldview, printing has to be second only to the creation of writing in the top ten of humanities pivotal cultural milestones.

Can we possibly imagine a world without printing? Even in this day of instant media, e books, i pads and smart phones, could our culture have developed to the point where these innovations would have been possible without books? I doubt it; certainly our World would be a very different place without the printed word.

Continue reading “Printing”

Theory of Everything

12^th March 2003 Rocky 1 North Sea.  

Jims Theory on the Evolution and Development of Homo Sapiens  

I will write this as if I am speaking directly to you. Of course, this gives me the writer, the advantage over you, the reader (listener) because I can just keep talking without interruption on contentious points, of which there will be a few (many) I can only leave you the option to stop reading or listening.

Continue reading “A Theory of Homo Sapiens”

It was like a kick in the stomach when I received a BBC alert on my phone last year in April, telling of the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.

The Great Rose

I felt physically sick watching the news reports as the spire collapsed and the fire consumed those ancient timbers and who knows how much irreplaceable artwork. The drone shot of the entire cathedral roofless and blazing from end to end filled me with despair. I thought it was a total loss.

Continue reading “The Rose Window in Notre Dame Cathedral.”

The other day, I heard the song ‘Only a Rose’, sung by the Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling and while I listened, I was transported backwards in time to the early 1970’s, when my mother and I would listen to ‘Your Choice and Mine’, a weekly half hour Opera show on RTE radio, presented by the incomparable Tommy O’Brien.

Continue reading “Tommy O’Brien Opera for the masses. .”