For as long as I can remember, we always got two daily newspapers in our house. The News Letter often arrived at our front door long before I was getting up for school, dropped there by a man called Davy, though I don't ever recall hearing his second name. He must have left Belfast very early in the morning and his job was to deliver to all the shops in the towns and villages around our area but he had got to know one of my mum's brothers, who lived near him and so every morning, as he made his way from one village to another, he took a short detour along our road and delivered the early morning news, often before we had heard it on the first radio bulletin. I always knew the sound of his Ford Transit van as he stopped at the little T junction above our house and then started off again and as he passed by our house on his left, he flung the newspaper, rolled up and secured with a rubber band, out of his driver's window and over the top of the van to hit the front door with a thud. He rarely missed and the biggest problem for mum was usually getting him stopped to pay him at the end of the month. The arrangement went on for years, until eventually the whole delivery service was changed and Davy no longer made the journey down the motorway. After that, dad had to go into our local village every morning but I guess he didn't mind, for it gave him a chance to have a natter with one or two locals.But he did go into the village to get the Belfast Telegraph every night and though he often complained that there was never any news in it and he threatened on many occasions to stop buying it, he never did. It was just a sort of ritual that he couldn't break and anyway, most nights he always seemed to find something to read in its pages. Originally, both papers were broadsheets and for a kid of ten or eleven, a bit hard to handle, but I'll always have memories of him, lying in a chair with his shoeless feet up on the cooker rail, the Telegraph opened out wide and his glasses perched precariously on his nose and often with only one leg still in place or the other 'secured' with some sellotape. And the newspapers did serve their purpose for both mum and dad religiously scanned the 'deaths' column every day to see if they knew anyone who had passed on. I always considered this a bizarre ritual to undertake, if you'll pardon the pun, but now I find that I am also strangely drawn to the very same columns almost on a daily basis, now that they have passed on and are no longer able to furnish me with such information.
Anyway for me, the main purpose of the newspaper at the time was to find out what was happening in the sporting world and, I suppose, like father, like son, I read the newspaper, starting at the back page and working my way forward and I still do.
And while the local papers provided plenty of coverage of the football scene in our province, already I was starting to look further afield for reports of the English League. I think I started to buy the Mirror when I was about sixteen or seventeen and though it may be a paper which supports a political party that doesn't always be in line with my thinking, I enjoyed their football coverage and that overlooked anything else that the paper reported. Over the years, I have been drawn to many other titles, but for some reason, I still buy it on Saturday and never seem to get beyond the back few pages and the football supplement!
Mum had two or three old scrapbooks at home in which she kept cuttings about any of the family when our names or photos appeared in the local weekly papers and also kept interesting snippets about other friends and neighbours. And one of my most prized possessions is a notebook that I filled in 1972 with newspaper cuttings about matches involving Liverpool FC during that season, a year when they won both the League and the UEFA Cup. But another neighbour and friend has a whole collection of scrapbooks containing cuttings that reads like a whole history of our village and surrounding countryside for the last fifty years.
One thing I've never done on any regular basis is to bother with Sunday newspapers. I guess mum always frowned on that and though I have no guilt about buying one or see any problem with those who do, it has just never really become important to me. An old teaching colleague once told me that he liked nothing better than to get about five newspapers on a Sunday morning and just spend the whole day, from breakfast, reading them at his leisure. And I suppose I am often reminded about that when I think of all the things that take God's place in our lives and effectively push Him out. God is pretty specific, right from the time of Israel in the wilderness when He said 'You shall have no other gods before me' and there are constant references about how it not only saddens Him but also angers Him when we put other things in the place where He should be. Again He tells Israel 'But you have forsaken me and served other gods, so I will no longer save you. Go and cry out to the gods you have chosen. Let them save you when you are in trouble!' And it doesn't have to be newspapers on a Sunday, keeping us away from church, praying or reading His word.There are any number of things like sport, family, work, leisure and possessions which, while maybe not attaining god-like status in our lives, take up enough of our time to cause God to be relegated far away from first place. Remember, God should be a HEADLINE in your life, not a supplement.
