There is no book. There is instructive text drawn from his thoughts. There is no literary finger which has been traced over his life. No anthology of the anecdotes. No album of bon mots. No record of the days.

Life of Quinny, it remains to be written. Here he is, delivering his twilight sonata, and we have no libretto.

"I'd have to tell too many lies," he says with a grin.

There should be a book though. The Disco Pants Years. And it should be the primer for every kid who ever puts pen to paper at a big soccer club. Oh Lucky Man! Why? Well in this bespoke world of swaddled millionaires where you are judged by the size of your wad and the cut of your pout they should all be reading Quinny. Blessed in a football nation where young lads can nurse a grievance against the whole world for victimising them with money, success and fulfilment, there should be a book. I've Been in Fortune's Kitchen and I've Licked Out All the Pots.

"How's it goin' Niall."

"Great," he grins, "very well indeed."

He walks into a room and his smile hangs the sun above everyone. He's 35 today. Thirty-Bloody-Five! A man still leading the boy's dream life. Unimaginable.

He's 35 today and because dreams have always crystallised for him he allowed himself this dream two years ago when he saw the fixture list: On the day he was 35 he might be playing in this fixture at Landsowne Road with the World Cup a possibility and with the chance to get the all-time Irish goal-scoring record for himself.

What a way to pass the half-way mark in your three score years and 10. That was the dream.

And here he is fitter than he has felt in years and the table is spread before him. Blow out the candles, ripple the net, accept the love. Just another perfect day strung onto a necklace of them.

You look at him in wonder. How come he's still here? This great lank whom we all went to see at Highbury in the bad old emigration days of the '80s. Never mind where he picked up all the skill and all the character, how has his unlikely body survived?

His knees were betraying him a few years ago. His back has a long running industrial action against him.

Well, thank you for asking. His knees are obedient. His back feels good. As he told an audience recently, his back is behind him.

"I never gave the back a chance," he says apologetically. "Never took six weeks off or did the things that normal players did. Sunderland were always playing big games and I was saying well, I mightn't be around to play another one of these next year. With Ireland I was trying to make the bigger games. I was getting treatment all week, hopping off the table to play on Saturday. Everything went down, performance, fitness confidence ... Am I offering enough to justify being around?

"In the back of my mind, I said if I can still do it after six weeks off, I'll come back. I did that in the summer. Villa on a Sunday, Spurs on a Wednesday, Charlton on Saturday and another away from home last weekend. Four games like that. Three years ago I'd be hauled off. To get through them was great."

Niall Quinn at 35. Last man standing from the Euro 1988 adventure. The siren song of another World Cup calling him home to a retirement which he won't resent or resist. He's had the best time, enough of it to stretch to the moon and back. So every day he stretches his muscles and thanks the silent heavens for his fortune.

He never thought he'd be here. In those coltish early days at Highbury when he was all legs and elbows he never dared look forward to a day when he would be a beloved old war horse.

He likes his old story about George Graham talking to the boys one day back in that time of big dreams and bigger hair. George was talking about lads getting a hold of themselves, about being fit and clean living and responsible. And people like Tony Adams and Paul Merson were there gazing back at George who looked around, and Niall can remember this perfectly, looked around and said: "do that and some of you, you'll play till you're 35."

Solemn nods. And then George, he added the rider: "Well maybe not you Quinny."

So now, Quinny looks back and thinks: "Hang on I made it!" He pinches himself.

"I could never get upset about anything footballwise to be honest because it's been so good. I've been so blessed."

You look at him and you think: Niall, Niall, Niall. Where did it all go wrong? Where did you learn to audit your blessings? How does a top class player wind up being a world class human being, equipped with things like perspective, gratitude and consideration.

Even rival fans love him. The downtrodden, browbeaten, millionaires of the big leagues must resent the sheer amateurishness of his gratitude.

And his perspective. They must loathe that.

Think back. At this stage of the World Cup campaign eight years ago you travelled to Maine Road in the city of Manchester to talk to Niall Quinn. He arrived late, drenching everyone in apologies. Not at all, not at all, you said.

Ireland had one qualifying game left and Niall Quinn was a star. He had started every match and would start that last one in Windsor Park too. Along the way he'd scored a couple of goals including the equaliser against Denmark which would prove vital. He spoke that day in Maine Road about luck and taking care and the possibility that perhaps if he tended to both matters he might end up playing in four World Cups.

That bird fell from the sky. Famously he spent the 1994 World Cup finals on the airless press bus. His season ended in injury and despite his best efforts and letters from surgeons Manchester City point blank refused to permit him to play in the finals.

Eight years on exactly you ask him about this. Here surely was something which he could allow fester into a grievance, into a full blown tumour of bitterness and victimhood. Now that he has another World Cup within his reach, he should be showing us how he is still twisted and convulsed by bitterness over it all. My Private Pain is what the headline will say.

Nope. He hasn't the energy. Or the will. Or the inclination.

"To be involved in making something good is something to be proud of. I took a lot out of that in 1994, even though I missed out. I started every qualifying game and scored the odd goal and I felt content. As a professional you don't stop and stand still at a particular point.

"Roy will get to a cup final and United will win it and Roy will be thinking afterwards in the dressing-room about mistakes and his head will be moving onto the next one. Even though I didn't play I knew I had done what I had done. I was delighted for everyone to get there. Anyway I got to spend five weeks with Brendan O'Carroll (working for RT╔). You couldn't feel sorry for yourself. We had a laugh. It was enjoyable."

Enjoyment! Grandad where do you get these notions from. Enjoyment!!! That's an Antique's Roadshow one. Next you'll tell us that it was cool and groovy. You endure success nowadays. You put up with it. It's worse than poverty. It's a blight.

The fellas have changed alright. Football is a different town now, a changed place. He notices it but doesn't mind. Everyone has more and enjoys it less. He doesn't judge them for it but he remembers the old days with the music on the bus and the songs and the cards and the chatter. He misses that but if you stay in the same game long enough things will change. That's the price. Living to 100 ain't the same as getting to be 20 and staying that way for 80 years.

You have an old picture of him in your head. At Belfast airport in November 1993. Ireland have just got a point against the North in a night crackling with hatred. They are going to the World Cup but for now the team is fleeing, flying back to Dublin. Hectic. And he is standing in a small queue of journalists and players at a public phone waiting to ring his wife.

Alan McLoughlin is in front talking to his own wife. As other journalists pass by Niall is thanking them for various pieces that have appeared about him. And you think: "Thanking journalists?" Verily it was a time before mobile phones even. A good time too.

"We were naive before," he says. "Through that, there was a greater sense of fun - maybe that's too strong. There was a great sense of enjoyment though. Everything is regimented now. If you want to speak to somebody, well talk to my agent, there's his number. That used not exist. It was like the musketeers, all for one and one for all.

"We'd talk to anyone and if somebody wrote or said something wrong about one of us, 20 of us wouldn't talk to him. Now the agent is on the phone and says there's a cheque in it if you talk to him. Every dressing-room has changed in that way.

"We used to speak more about football. Now on the bus the lads have earphones on and they are watching DVDs. You're looking around for somebody who still likes just having a conversation. Huge change."

And the odd regret. The realisation that when your number is up, it gets dark very quickly. People forget, brush you away like gossamer from their faces.

"Everyone remembers Paul McGrath, say, because Paul was outstanding. But there were others. Ray Houghton was world class. Absolutely. You wonder if the guys I play with realise how good he was. We know Roy is a world class player, because he does what he does but I sometimes wonder how quickly we forget guys. Even Roy. That's a bit sentimental but that's why I like playing. When you cross that line you are forgotten about. The show goes on."

These days he rooms with Kevin Kilbane all the time. Somebody said to him that Kilbane is the type of bloke you'd like your daughter to marry. He hasn't mentioned it to young Aisling Quinn but generally Niall agrees.

"I enjoy him because he is so sincere. He came in today in CityWest. Our room has a double bed and a single bed and he got there before me. He's got to the stage where he's nearly going to take the double bed. He's thinking about it. He's put his bag on it but when I came in he took his bag off and went to the other one. He's starting to come good. Before he wouldn't even have put the bag there. That's Kevin. When he gets his full confidence he'll be a huge player for Ireland and Sunderland."

For now though young Kilbane can just bask in the sun. He can watch Niall Quinn get ready and wonder if he'll tell his own kids about the time Quinny broke the record.

The last Niall Quinn goal for Ireland, the 20th, was a while back in Giants Stadium, New Jersey, the winner in a three-goal divvy-up with South Africa. That was June 2000. Can it really be true that we haven't seen him score a home goal since 12 months before that. June 1999 against Macedonia?

He approaches the 21-goal milestone with humility. He tells stories about baggage handlers at Dublin airport pulling his tail about the record, about his friends bursting into spontaneous chant You'll Never Get the Record! You'll Never Get the Record!

Humility and respect and a bit of fun. It's Frank Stapleton's record mainly. And before that Don Givens. You tread softly on memories like that. You pay your dues.

"I've stumbled across 20 goals really. I'm not a natural goalscorer. I've been a player who's had to show and lay it off. I never saw myself as threatening the record even but I've been in a successful team. Frank only had that at the tail end."

Don? Look at what he got. Less time and less space even.

"Yeah. Frank leads you to Don. For me anyway. How great was Don Givens to have the old record, 19 goals, with 20 games less than Frank, playing in a team which, with respect, had moral victories as their aims. People who played with, him, they all say he was a sublime, elegant footballer. If Don played with the team-mates I had he'd have got double."

It's about respect. It's about memory. The family of Irish soccer. Passing it down, hand to hand, hero to hero. Don's hat-trick against Russia on the day that Liam Brady made his debut? Where were you? Niall Quinn has a pure memory of it. He was there in the sway of grimy old Dalymount inhaling the delirium.

"Yeah I was. I was at the match. In Manortown we'd get tickets and some coaches would bring the kids, we'd clamour to go to the Wednesday afternoon games to get off school. It was brilliant. That hat-trick. Don was a hero for me and then, later, watching the Cup finals in the late 70s, Frank replaced him. From about 13 or so, Frank was a big hero."

God how long ago was all that. Funny, he only had Match of the Day (versus Gaybo) and The Big Match (Sunday lunchtime). Now football is force fed seven days a week but, tell you something, the kids know less.

"We knew everything. We talked about who did what, how they did it, we wrote away to find out to get stuff, we got programmes, we had football cards. Everything."

Now sometimes at Sunderland the coach Bobby Saxton (there's a name from the days) will start soccer quizzes on the bus mainly with the other coaching staff and the older guys who aren't playing with the DVDs. And Niall will draw down an answer from the recesses and they scratch their heads and ask: "So Niall just how old are you?" And he'll explain. "Growing up. We know all that stuff. All of us."

Frank? The joke used to be that he got up every morning and smiled at himself in the mirror just to get smiling done with for the day. Yet when Niall Quinn arrived in Arsenal in the early 80s, Frank had just left and his reputation for hard work was like a useful residue about the place.

Quinny had a suspicion that he might be out of his depth. He arrived in the hush of the marble halls and noted that his new employers had acquired the services of the youth international centre forwards from England, Scotland and Wales. They were confident and perfect. They had been coached and polished and buffed. Told tenderly that they would be stars, told this for four years or five years. They knew all the drills in training. Niall Quinn had come from the Dublin minor hurling team and he hadn't played soccer in five months or so.

"I felt inadequate. I really felt, well, at least I'll have the few bob for a while, and I can always go home."

But Frank still haunted Highbury.

"Frank was what they spoke about. Frank had gone to United. They'd take me aside and say: 'Listen. I promise you Frank hadn't half your ability. He had to work really hard. You'll have to put the work in'."

Niall thought they were only having him on. Making sport for themselves. But they never said anything like that to the other lads so he took them at their word. They saw something there maybe. They'd bring him to parts of the gymnasium. They'd say Frank used to keep the ball up here 100 times with each foot and Niall would say that he'd be doing that by end of the week or whatever. And next time Terry Neill or somebody would pass through he'd show them. No pats on the head. They'd find something else for him to do, something else that Frank had done.

Now years and years later he's on the threshold of doing something that Frank never did. Scoring 21 for Ireland. A little symmetry.

"I never met Frank till I got on the senior squad. I was in awe of him. If I was ever going to be good, it was through being like him. We played in Iceland in 1986 in that famous tournament. I'd never spoken a word to him. First session I went for a ball with him and scraped him because I hadn't cut my nails. He gave me a hammering. I'd never said hello to him up till then. I was thinking 'Oh no, I've upset Frank Stapleton'. The lads were winding me up saying, you know, he's really grumpy. He'll do this now, and that, but in fairness he was a big help. Not the sort of fella who put his arm around you, but he'd point out one or two little things and I'd put them to good use."

And in case it's getting too maudlin, the big man laughs.

"I remember thinking recently about Frank's 20th, when I got near the record. For Frank's record I passed to Andy and Andy clipped it and Frank shot in. Ten years later I wouldn't have passed it - as much as I was in awe of Frank. Now, I'd really, really love to do it. I maybe didn't want it badly enough at the start but thinking of the buzz of the World Cup etc, I'd love to get it."

Today, one of designated celebration, would be the perfect day. Naturally he looks back for perspective rather than forward for glory.

"I suppose I feel blessed. I look back to the group of lads I went over with. I got tall and strong. And it was a time when they wanted tall and strong centre forwards. By the time that had changed I'd learned how to hold it up."

He's thinking back again on those early days at Highbury, in the big smoke and small streets of north London. Who was there? Who went where?

There was John Woods. He went to a club in Wales and went non-league. Hasn't seen him in 15 years. And John Purdy. Went to Wolverhampton Wanderers, played a bit during all the furore when big Derek Dougan was in charge. Dropped out and played for Corby. Some lads made it. Paul Merson started then. Martin Hayes ...

Players would come every year. New ones and better ones. They brought John Bacon over from Ireland and thought he would be the new Norman Whiteside. John got homesick. Went again. And Kwame Ampadu. Remember him? Whoa! Big Niall saw him coming over from Dublin and, no kidding, Kwame could do things with a football none of the first team lads could do. He was a conjuror.

Niall bumped into Kwame recently. Sunderland played Exeter in a pre-season friendly. Kwame played for Exeter. Kwame's earned a living but when Niall looks at the talent that he had coming over compared to what Niall had.

"Well, it's immoral that I actually made it and had the career I've had. It really is. It should be the other way around."

So, for all that much, thanks, he says. For moments like the one he may be about to receive sometime this evening, much thanks. For the good times, the never-ending good times, muchos gracias.

"Naturally it's going to end. You love it so much, it becomes twice as valuable as you get older. You enjoy it twice as much. Nobody has loved it like I have. I've been blessed. No, I didn't get to play in 1994, but I played in 1990. Had me day and it was incredible. I'd love to be fit enough and give Mick everything I have left in the locker next summer. It would be a wonderful place to finish up. It would be the perfect ending but I'll be realistic about it too."

Enough time for that Niall. Blow out those candles first.