Nobody has a real name in North Otago. They go by nicknames bestowed in childhood, are called Pooser (that's Dr Pooser to you), Gastro, Tub, Bounce. They are the sum of what they were, as we all are. I am still that shy girl who thwarted the bullies by being funny, and the woman I've become. If you bullied her, you'd be picking up your teeth with broken fingers. Time means nothing, really. Your hair goes wispy, you get fatter, more wrinkled about the eyes, but essentially stay the same, just get better at letting stuff go and more likely to be listening to Joseph's Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat on LP in front of the fire at 10pm instead of running from the cops.
This doesn't mean there isn't room for firsts. Last week I attended the first rugby game I have ever enjoyed. My first, but in fact the 84th time Waitaki Boys' High School 1st XV has played St Kevin's College 1st XV on the last Friday of term. That's every year since 1934, except 1938, when an outbreak of polio rudely interrupted.
Waitaki Boys' is a state school, St Kevin's is Catholic: the game is the mud-covered embodiment of decades-long rivalry between "nuts" and "dools", called the Blood Match.
A grey mist settled over the cape, fuzzing the branches of the elms around Centennial Park. Under umbrellas, family had come home, generations called to come out on a cold day. In the past there was literally blood, fights breaking out between the old boys of various teams, but that was then.
However, as the drizzle drifted on to bare trees, men in their 50s were heard to say things like, "You couldn't get a better guy, but he's a f****** Doolan", proving some enmities are like tattoos: they fade, lose the aggression of their colours, yet remain. My blue jacket didn't go unnoticed. I didn't mean anything by it, it was simply my warmest, but in hindsight I was secretly pleased to have worn it, because I'm a Dool. Nuns taught me everything I know about human reproduction, using frogs as an example.
Once the biggest day of the year, the Blood Match is still big; town would be jumping tonight. The touch judge, "No Eyes", surveyed the scoreboard. Half-time and it was 14-nil to the Catholics. About time we had a win, I thought, always being an archbishop away from a child abuse scandal these days.
Stamping like bulls, faces contorted, the young men under the scoreboard wore their old high school blazers and smoked with sexual frustration. The mountain man's blazer wouldn't touch the sides of him when he'd tried it on earlier that week, but he was nevertheless touched that his mother had kept it.
A tribal atmosphere prevailed. Its chieftains, the 1st XV of '98, were reuniting in the corporate box, proudly wearing old-fashioned caps with gold tassels. "They dust off the cap every 20 years," said a wife. "It's the only thing that still fits."
I could make jokes about glory days, quote Bruce Springsteen - "time slips away and leaves you with nothing but boring stories of ..." - point out that nostalgia saw these men return to the days of nicknames and conquests, a re-establishment of the old pecking order, but actually, the experience left me feeling more than a little envious.
How many chances do any of us ever get to revisit our youth, to retrace steps and stand in the same place, on the same day, at the same game? To go back to those years when never again would we be so fit, so fast, our bodies impervious to pies and hangovers.
Never would there be so much hair on heads, parties where you knew hundreds of people and your father plunging the toilet while shouting, "No. More. Parties!". The glory of the day was really in the privilege of being able to fit back into the person suit you wore as a young man.
A last-minute penalty, and cheers brought blood to the faces of men lucky enough to be reliving a marvellous youth while wearing their children on their shoulders. Living in the past, if just for a day, because they carried it with them in their hearts.
