NiallOK’s Blog

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Like Damien Mulley did, I thought I’d come up with some things about me that you wouldn’t think are true, but are. It’s not as easy as it seems…

1. I was nearly a dad. When I was 17, my then girlfriend moved to England with her family and we decided to break up because of the difficulty of long distance relationships. A couple of months later, in the summer, I met up with her when she was back in Dublin for a weekend - one thing led to another and we ended up sleeping together. She went back to England and, just before I was about to start college, at the end of August, she was involved in a car crash and suffered serious injuries, which she died from a week later in hospital. Only when I got the phone call to tell me she was dead did I find out that she had been a few months pregnant and that it could only have been mine. As you can imagine I was ripped to shreds by this news.

2. My full name is Niall David Phillip O’Keeffe. No surprise there. The possibly strange part is that while my dad’s name is David and my grandad’s name is Philip (one “L”), my confirmation name (”Phillip” - 2 “L”s) wasn’t chosen because of my grandfather, but because of Phillip Schofield, who, at the time, was the presenter from the Broom Cupboard on Children’s BBC. Remember him? Remember Gordon the Gopher? I was one of his many viewers/fans (Schofields, not Gordons). Oh dear indeed.

3. I have a (probably irrational) fear of sitting with my head near an open electrical socket. Somehow I have it in my head that, as the human brain is essentially a biological computer which uses electrical impulses, the availability of an open source of electricity near my head can’t be doing my already fast dying brain cells any good. I have no idea if there’s any merit to such a fear but there it is all the same.

4. I usually get my head shaved regularly in the barbers - no. 1 all round. I don’t just do this for the sake of fashion, because of the shape of my face or just because I like how it looks, I actually suffer from male pattern baldness (despite my years of denying it) and I’m trying not to let it grow to a length where this ‘condition’ will be more obvious to the naked eye.

Y’know, I thought I’d feel better about myself after typing all this out… I thought wrong.