SOMEONE once said that news is all about shouting out that “Lord Jones is dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive in the first place.

I HATE to quote the Scottish play, but that line from Macbeth has never been so apposite.

JUST as paintings “go into a wall” over time, as their owners become so used to them that they hardly notice them any more, so a once-dominant feature of the Irish coastline has become almost invisible.

IT would have been fine to be seen with Fr Brian D’Arcy a couple of weeks ago, but right now, you’d want to steer clear of him, since the day when he was seen on the back of a lorry — in and of itself so repellently resonant of rural demagoguery — along with the Quinn family.

HE sold his car.

PHISHING, googling and apps.

SHE is bowed in a drowse when you arrive, so you nod and smile at the others before carrying over a chair to sit beside her.

SO THERE we were, cooing over a photograph of the little boy a friend has just adopted from Russia and imagining what it might be like to welcome him, when one of the people in the office announced that, when he was growing up, he always wondered if he’d been adopted.

ONE of the gigs worth your attention next weekend is the Trim Swift Festival.

AN American woman named Anne-Marie Slaughter, first female director of policy planning at the State Department in the Obama administration, has gone and said it.