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...

“The second thing that made him interesting was that he was honest. He talked about his fears. He wasn’t reticent. He acknowledged what so many athletes have, which is a real internal fear.”

It was refreshing to hike up to Shannon in Clare a couple of weeks ago to spend some time with Fr Harry Bohan, who’s written a memoir of his varied career, Swimming Upstream — Finding Positives in a Negative Ireland.

Almost Christmas. Deck the halls.

Is there no end to Anthony Nash and his nefariousness?

I was going to kick off this Monday by saying that mental health had popped up on the agenda once again last week, but it doesn’t seem to drift too far from the agenda at any stage nowadays.

At first I thought it was a joke. Not as good as the one-liners floating around elsewhere on this page, about hurling and so forth, but when I came across it first, I was impressed by the imaginative juxtaposition.