SOMETIMES, the fortnight’s holiday abroad can be squeezed out by the combined effect of the two weeks that bookend it.

THE RAIN, it rains on the just and the unjust. And has been doing so forever. Complaining about the weather in Ireland is like Mrs Lincoln complaining about the play.

MY NAME is Noelle and I’m a very bad runner. How bad? I knock down children. I ran over a toddler last night, and I don’t even have a vehicle.

MY INTEREST in sport — which doesn’t extend beyond egg and spoon events — has never once, in the 25 years of being married, encompassed standing as I do now, in a cordoned-off area next to the finishing line of a half-iron man race, in which my husband is taking part.

BRIXTON HILL, London. And there’s a man with an enormous bunch of dreadlocks fidgeting on the side of the road ahead.

ON PENTECOST Island in the South Pacific, boys engage in the coming-of-age ceremony, Naghol. They climb a 70ft rickety tower, tie vines to their ankles and dive to the ground, falling at speeds of around 45mph. A dive is considered successful when the boy gets close enough to touch his head or shoulders to the ground. When the boy miscalculates the vine length and shatters Humpty-Dumpty style, it’s considered unsuccessful. While the boy makes his first dive, his mother watches. She holds an item representing his childhood and when he jumps, she throws the item away.

MY DAUGHTERS are slumped in the back of the car with Zara bags underfoot.

MY MOTHER is coming to stay.

I’M STANDING in a London art gallery, staring at this sentence: “At the moment of becoming our thinking “I”, we reconstruct the jarring and incompatible into crazy narratives of surrealism.”

A TEACHER has invited me to school to talk to a class of 11- and 12-year-olds about journalism.