A wedding invitation popped through my letterbox a few months ago.   ‘You are cordially invited to the wedding of Elizabeth, only daughter of Mr. And Mrs. Thomas Joseph Taylor, to ........’

I read and reread the invitation.  I did not recognise the name.  I handed it to my wife, a league ahead of me in remembering names and faces.  She was unable to solve the mystery.  The invite contained a telephone number, also unknown.  I could not bring myself to contact the sender, simply to ask them who they were, with such an auspicious occasion pending.        

The mystery was solved a few days later when ‘Matchsticks’ sat down beside me in the canteen at work and asked if I had received the invitation to Betty’s wedding.

I first met ‘Matchsticks’ when I started work on the assembly line where he was already a well established figure.  In our subsequent and casual meetings I had never given a moment’s thought to what his first name might be.  Over many years at lunch hour, we had sat down at the same table with a group of co-workers, discussing every topic from moon walks to football.  Everyone at the table addressed him as ‘Matchsticks’, I now knew him to be Thomas Joseph.

Thomas Joseph or ‘Matchsticks’ was a country boy, in America a redneck, a culchie in Ireland.  He had moved to the big city with one clear goal in mind; to buy himself a pub back in his small home town.  His desire- he would tell anyone willing to listen- had been to return home one day as a man of reasonable wealth and the respect of his neighbours.  True to his plan, he struck out for fame and fortune, working all the hours the company would allow him.  During one of his endless spells on double shift, a colleague had handed him a box of matches and told him to use the sticks to help keep his eyes open.  ‘Matchsticks’ was born.

He did return to his home town but only for the occasional holiday.  Three years of pushing himself too hard, resulted in his being raced off to hospital and the cardiac intensive care unit.  His initial despondency when informed by the doctors that his workload would have to be drastically reduced was replaced by unexpected joy.  He left the hospital a few weeks later, not only in good health but with a pretty nurse on his arm.  He liked to recall, ‘for some reason, best known to herself, she fell for me.’ 

Betty, the daughter about to be wed, was born a few years later and the purchase of a home became more important than any pub.  ‘Matchsticks’ swopped his initial dream, for “the prettiest wife and the most beautiful daughter,” he considered it a magnificent bargain. 

I duly attended the wedding of Elizabeth and watched her being led down the aisle by Thomas Joseph.  I doubted he could have displayed a greater pride, had he been swaggering through his home town on the way to the grand opening of his dream pub.

 ‘Matchstick’s’ nickname had lasted the twenty odd years I knew him, although the crazy early work phase only lasted three.  Yet somehow his nickname suited him, it sat far better on him than Thomas Joseph. 

Friend and colleagues have a knack of getting a nickname spot on.  It is something you deserve or merit and not just have foisted on you like a birth name.  Then again it is difficult to imagine a priest pouring water on a baby’s head and solemnly declaring,

 ‘I christen this child, Matchsticks.’