“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.

It’s not today or yesterday Joe Brolly came to the attention of your eagle-eyed columnist. Or eagle ears, maybe.

The gold-medal standard for finding the alternative view of an event suffering media overload remains Jimmy Breslin at the funeral of John Fitzgerald Kennedy 50 years ago.

Last week was the centenary of the birth of Albert Camus. The great man grew up to become the second-youngest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1957 (can you guess the youngest?) for works such as The Outsider and The Myth of Sisyphus.

Frightening was the word used in description.