“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.

Tuesday night: I’m locked in a bathroom, behind a door with a faulty lock. Forty-five minutes into the ordeal I’m eating toothpaste and have promoted a rubber ducky to head of communications.

BELIEVE it or not, I was once the feckless type of young man who’d only wear a suit when I reached the cup final in Championship Manager 97-98 on the Amiga 1200.

IS there a silver lining in the economic storms at our doorstep? Now that we’re poorer, will we produce better teams?