HOW do you get to know a nation? Taste their food? Walk their streets? Read their history? Try clicking through the nearest turnstile, follow the route on the back of your ticket to the seat. And learn.

THEY say everyone has a book in them. Paddy Coyne dragged it out kicking and screaming.

You don’t want to know the mucky process in which many engaged to get a ticket. Each one will have a tale of how they got there come Sunday.

IT’S a familiar, hackneyed old show. And one which is rerun a lot these days.

THE now-defunct News of the World used to boast, from its front page banner for many years: All human life is there.

“LEGS, arms, eyebrows, chest hair, nipples, inner thigh, everything. And I mean everything. I raised €2,500 that night but they took every bit of hair off me with the waxing,” said Ross Long as he thought back to that night in the Gaelic Bar.

THEY say you shouldn’t write anything online you wouldn’t like to see on the front page of the New York Times the next morning.

GER WOLFE jumps out of bed at 7am every morning and it isn’t long before he’s pedalling out of the driveway.

IF Fleet Street was still filled with the sound of clacking typewriter keys and the industrial whirr of print-rooms, they would have fell silent this week for a moment.

I LANDED my job in the Irish Examiner by pitching a half-baked idea — cold — to the sports editor.