FIRST a confession.

1 THE Mary Byrne award for best female performance this year, happily, has been marked by our girls representing on the world stage.

“I WAS known as Piddlers for a long time in certain circles, you know.”

IT WAS said by Napoleon — Bonaparte, not Dynamite — that one should never watch a sausage or a law being made if “you want to keep your stomach about you”.

I was at the Arcade Fire gig in Dublin the night before the budget was unleashed.... songs and snowballs filled the air.

HUGH McILVANNEY, the great Scottish sportswriter, sketched a scene for his readers of a Saturday afternoon in an Old Trafford press box which coughed out cigarette smoke.

JOHN GILES scrambled down his staircase in his Yorkshire home one morning to bafflingly find a pair of match caps had dropped in the letterbox from Dublin.

IT feels, this week and in this country, like someone should gently place a Sinatra record under a record player stylus as we bob downstream together towards oblivion.

TIM HORGAN told us to crack open the Catcher in the Rye.