Losing your money and your mind down back of the couch

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

We’ve all done it – gone off on one, accusing the world and its mother (or maybe your own mother or the mother of your children) of losing or taking something precious on us….only to find it two months later buried down the back of the couch.

That jumper that you never wore but still cherished; the ticket for the gig that you put away safely when you got it six months ago and now can’t find it because you put it away so safely; the magazine that you know you left under the TV because you knew that the rest of the papers had to be recycled before Monday.

Most of us never lost a Eurovision winner’s trophy – mainly because most of us never won the Eurovision – but Shay Healy won it and lost it.

Or so he thought.

Unfortunately for Shay, instead of merely lining up the wife and kids and trying to force a confession out of them like a member of the West Midlands police, he went public on his loss – only to discover at the end of it all that the only thing he lost was face.

For those not familiar with the saga, Shay Healy – composer of Johnny Logan’s What’s Another Year – took to Facebook to accuse a “low-life thug” of stealing his 1980 Eurovision trophy from his Dublin home.

Shay was angry and let the world – or at least his army of Facebook friends – know it.

He blamed the disappearance on “a low-down, dirty rotten, low-life thug” and lashed out at the unknown culprit for “screwing with my musical history”.

He didn’t know how long it was missing but he thought it might have been gone for some time, since a house party – although why one of our living musical legends would surround himself with low-life thugs in his own home is anyone’s guess.

Anyway Shay turned out to be as human as the rest of us – and the trophy, which he’d believed to have been taken from his bathroom, was found by his grandson Fionn, who had noticed something glinting on a shelf hidden behind a set of antique frog ornaments.

“There was no sneak thief. There was no prankster. There was just stupid old me,” Healy said. And as an added bonus, he’d found three pairs of glasses that he hadn’t seen ‘in yonks’.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.