IT’S often I look in bewilderment at an article in the sports pages with an expression similar to those which Usain Bolt’s competitors convey as the Jamaican sprinter glides past like he’s on rails.

EVER have that nightmare where you’re rowing the Indian Ocean in a 23ft-long boat, surrounded by sharks, the sun is melting the skin on your back, you’re eating out of tins, going to the toilet in a bucket... and you’re naked? No, me neither. But meet the Irishman who plans on living that dream for 150 nights.

I was aware of the programme, like everyone who travels abroad. It’s a magazine show really and like anyone I’d think ‘how did your man get that job’?

MORE INNOCENT times. On the day Fianna Fáil launched its 2002 election campaign, PJ Mara walked into the party’s press conference in the Shelbourne Hotel and announced: “It’s showtime.”

TOMMY WALSH’S debut in the AFL next week is a story that will be framed by the sports pages, distilled by short-sleeved press men and is, undeniably, about Aussie Rules.

IN 1992 my father fired myself, my brother and two cousins into a car as a long, wet Sunday yawned in front of us.

THE grandly-named Herbert Warren Wind touched down in Dublin for the first time in 1967.

WHEN I was 15-years-old or so I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to go on a school trip to Barcelona.