Given that everyone is sharing their Brian O’Driscoll stories, I thought I’d give the benefit of my long history of encounters with the great man.

Identities are still protected under the statute of limitations, but the story bears retelling.

I won’t bore you too long with this one, but unfortunately it raises its ugly head once more and must be reintroduced to Madame Guillotine, if I can squeeze another drop of juice from that metaphor.

Lately in the pages of this newspaper, you may have seen a lengthy interview with Jim Nolan, the Waterford playwright.

What could best be described as a wave of molten outrage flowed down out of the northside of Cork last week with the news that the North Monastery primary school is to close.

Interesting to catch up with Owen Sheers during the week — Sheers is the poet who was artist in residence with the Welsh Rugby Union for a year, and wrote a book about his experiences sharing protein shakes with the Welsh back row, and kicking the ball back to Leigh Halfpenny after training.

If you read the Eamonn Fitzmaurice interview in these pages last week, you enjoyed a terrific insight into what it means to stand on a sideline with a day-glo BAINISTEOIR bib on your back.

This reporter spent the last three weekends in Mallow, watching the drama of the McGrath Cup unfold and then... refold, as Cork won the competition last Sunday.

The technical term in the newspaper industry for the Roddy Doyle-writing-Roy-Keane’s-new-biography alliance is a “gusher”: as in one of those derrick-blasting oil fields which we used to see when Dallas ruled the airwaves, an apparently untappable source of columns, features and quirky pieces.

I imagine you turn to these pages out of weariness and disgust with much of what appears earlier in the newspaper. As in the confirmation of the banana-ness of this particular republic with such spectacular own goals such as missing files in the Department of Finance, the kind of hapless cock-up quite at odds with the notion promoted by that same Department of its own expertise...