LONELY Planet just sent a marketing email – Best Places For A Break Up. Attached is a list of varied and interesting areas around the globe, accompanied by glorious photography of places where you ought to try and station yourself if you are about to either give or receive that old it’s-not-you-it’s-me speech. (Picture by Jim Broadhead, Skerries.)

THE comedian Jenny Éclair wrote recently of the five ages of swimwear. The bikini, the tankini, the one piece, the one piece with sarong, and finally, being buried up to your neck in sand. Chronologically, I am probably somewhere between the sarong and full burial.

THE summer holidays! Picnics and barbecues. Sunshine and beaches. Bombs and missiles. On the beach with my son the other day I wonder what it was like for those boys on the beach in Gaza, the bloodied ones running for their lives when the Israelis dropped the second bomb that killed them.

BOY George lists his breakfast. Almond milk, chia seeds, coconut nectar, buckwheat, brazil nuts. Not a bowl of Frosties in sight, or a bacon and egg fry up with a mug of three sugars tea and a mound of white bread.

TWITTER was on fire the night of the awful Brazil defeat to Germany, with many terrible jokes about not being able to take it and Neymar; but really it was not funny at all when you think of all those stadiums that were built instead of schools and hospitals, and then the poor host country getting annihilated at home by a 22-legged Teutonic goal machine.

TO send your children halfway around the world to learn a new language in a geographically and culturally distant place requires quite some doing – especially financially, if you have chosen an upscale language school and decided to send your kids off for six whole months.

IF men got cystitis the way women get cystitis, it is without doubt that within 24 hours a state of international emergency would be declared.

A friend of mine is known as Johnny A&E. He doesn’t drink much or very often, but once or twice a year when he gets properly hammered — he’s a birthdays and Christmas kind of drunk — he always ends up in A&E.

WITH pocket money sent from well meaning relatives comes a degree of financial independence which does not always translate quite as smoothly from its theory of giving to the reality of spending as one might hope. I call it the Lynx Effect. Give a ten-year-old boy a bus fare, access to cash, and a trip into town with his mates, and you are asking for trouble.

THREE days to go before it all kicks off. Then a month of relentless football action on the telly, down the pub, on the big screens, in the news, everywhere.