"I understand why anyone would hang onto 'their' hair colour for as long as possible. To do the Liberace, with the hair of a 22-year-old and the face of a cliff face."

"You’re going to hear the word adaptation a lot more. We still have to try and ‘mitigate’ — stop things going from bad to worse. But we’re also going to have to ‘adapt’ — live with bad."

The World GAA Games shows our columnist the heart and enduring power of our island's national sports

"I have actual dreams where we find a hitherto unused basement, but then I wake up and the vice grips are still stored next to the tea."

I've covered around 100 kilometres around the city with my two kids on the back of this longtail bike

"Out in the fields with only imagination for company, I would pretend the patches of weeds were rebels and I was the vengeful dictatorship mopping up any resistance."

"As for Finnegan’s Wake, with an introduction by an eminent scholar that admits the book is “unreadable”, I lasted precisely four pages. Once again I was fooling myself."

"You know the vibe. Pretty much any southern European city has an Old Town. Narrow streets, cobbley-pavey surfaces that are there a good while and not trying to evoke anything, architecturally speaking."

It’s like it was during the Emergency. But with bananas and clothes, that fit

I had school trousers that simply had to wait for a long enough school break before being washed