ROUND about now you’ll start to notice it: a general untidiness among even the cuff-linkiest of work colleagues. Go on, ask them. They’re just ITCHING to tell you.

It leans outside against the wall of the back yard: the product of instinct, opportunism and about an hour’s proper physical labour.

SPORTSTAR product endorsement — it’s changed a lot. I’ve just watched a short internet video of Munster rugby player, Paul O’Connell, and boxer, Katie Taylor, talking about what drives them. They swap sports. Paul spars in the ring. Katie plays rugby.

UNINTENDED consequences: the focus on water charges over the last while has, rightly, been on things like handing over our PPSNs. We don’t know where that data is going to end up. Will it be left in a laptop in a taxi, after an EPIC Friday night, and then the emails you normally get from the ‘Widow of Brigadier Celestine Agabi, formerly of the Ivory Coast’, will start getting a heck of a lot more specific?

I’M just back from Copenhagen. You could tell something had changed there.

IT’S an unassuming little abbreviation: B&B. For some of you, it might be the first ampersand (&) you saw written down.

IF the Scots vote yes on Thursday, rest assured that will not be the end of the story.

IT sounds rude — to have ‘done a selfie’. It means a photograph you take of yourself, usually with a camera-phone (not to be confused with ‘selkie’, which is a photo of herself taken by a mythical, seal-like creature, once she assumes human form, goes on land and gets her first camera phone). It’s in the news because of the 100 women whose photos were stolen by hackers.

FOR me, it’s all about the back-gardens. Yes, I know the ‘ice-bucket challenge’ is about raising awareness and money for motor neurone disease, but it’s also about good-natured peer pressure and the awesome power of ‘viral’.

AFTER last week’s paean to oddness I realise that it’s not practical for everyone to be odd and proud. I forget that I have a bit more leeway.