"Occasionally we’ll find a motherlode under a bridge. A stash. But it’s from the pre-Squiggly R days."

"Like a lot of parents of young children, I like to delude myself that the world will be fixed by the time I need it."

"You had a very definite idea of what time the family is arriving in Cork and We. Will. Not. Be. Stopping. Unless. It’s. An. Emergency."

"I remember very little of Dublin. My friend Daniel reminds me that because it was June 1990, pretty much everyone was dressed in Italia 90 gear from various Penneyses."

"Slowly, I’m putting more people in. Retrieving numbers from WhatsApp groups. Being annoyed at people who don’t have their name on their WhatsApp profile or their photo is their baby or a blurry one from 100 yards away as they finished a triathlon."

"What’s the matter, hun? You don’t look like you’re enjoying my mattress-recycling anecdotes."

"The programme that tied all the other programmes together. A presenter, possibly surrounded by puppets, telling us what’s coming up next and promising a chance to win a bicycle. I miss their certainty. The presenters were our guides."

I feel like there is some huge battle in the culture wars that I am unaware of. I’m not looking to increase the world’s supply of single use sachets. The ketchup bottle that a thousand people have touched is fine by me.

"AI is already analysing the data. How long before it just gives the opinions as well, live? It just needs to learn a bit of punditese."

Obviously, the bliss doesn’t last long as I worried then about where the money was going to come from but still August 2010 was a series of delicious wakings-up. Like a Lotto ad without the money