winner’s winner

The McElhatton clan were made a proud people last week when one of our newest, and incontestably cutest, members returned from St Joseph’s Hall having been declared a winner at the West Tyrone Feis.

The name; Luca Coyle. The game; absolutely annihilating every other pupil that dared enter the Primary One Poetry Competition.

However, this remarkable rhetorician’s victory was far from assured from the outset.

See, despite being abnormally loquacious and unsettlingly eloquent for a five-year-old, I am semi-ashamed to say that few of us held much hope for the miniature marvel heading into the competition.

But it wasn’t because we didn’t believe in her; it was because we believed even more deeply in something else.

For generations, like all other local Catholic children whom God forgot to grace with artistic gifts, when Feis season rolled around, McElhatton weins were – usually against their will – entered in the poetry competition.

For those unfamiliar with the workings of the Feis, ie, protestants, this meant standing on stage and reading a short poem from memory.

However, despite the superficially straightforward nature of our assignment, without exception, we flopped every year.

Up we would get, dry-mouthed and sweaty-backed, and stutter and stammer our way through our recitals, line after ill-delivered line, some of us manfully mumbling our way to the end, others bottling it and bailing from the stage after only a few painful syllables.

No matter how much we practiced, no matter how great the dose of diazepam our mothers snuck into our cereal on the morning of the competition, our fate was always the same; mild psychological trauma and a ‘highly commended’ certificate.

Refusing to believe we were hopelessly tongue-tied and talentless, we created a superstitious scapegoat for our family’s failings, and called it ‘The Curse of the Highly Commended’.

At some point, forgetting that it was we who had muttered our own maledictions, we started drinking our own koolaid, and began putting stock in the idea that we were, indeed, the victims of some hereditary hex.

Then along came Luca.

Last week, without a single elocution lesson or anti-anxiety tablet, she stepped on stage, took a deep breath, and delivered a performance that both decimated her tiny rivals and redefined what the world believes a five-year-old can be capable of.

Think I’m being nepotistic and over the top?

Well get this.

After covering herself – and, by extension, the wider family circle – in glory, Luca returned home from school, whereupon her mother received a phonecall from her teacher.

“Mmmm-hmmm… Yes… Of course…. I know… I know… It’s true what they say, I suppose, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree… Okay… I’ll tell her when she finishes her dinner,” said her mother cooly, before hanging up, fainting, coming too, and cracking open a bottle of champange and a purple fruit shoot.

Turns out the teacher had rang to say that Luca had earned a distinction our family hitherto did not even know existed: She had been chosen by the adjudicators as having delivered the best recital of the day, making her what we have since termed the ‘winner’s winner’ of the West Tyrone Feis.

The following day, escorted by an entourage, she swanned into St Joseph’s Hall like Beyonce to the Grammys, ready to be presented with her trophy.

If you’re wondering how chuffed she was, allow me to refer you to the picture above of her holding her cup aloft like Canavan on the steps of Croker.