SO FAR, the score is one Waterford Glass tumbler, two plates and a cereal bowl.

No matter how many months he had been sober, no matter how, objectively, he knew that drinking was the road to hell, the visceral craving for alcohol overcame his resolution and he repeatedly relapsed.

YOU remember the pictures. Of course you do. Guys in good business suits, standing on the sidewalks of American cities, selling apples. It was the definitive visual representation of the onset of the Great Depression.

ALISTAIR CAMPBELL, in person, is taller, funnier and infinitely more charming than he is in print.

YOU have to ask why on earth General McCrystal agreed to have a journalist embedded with him for eight weeks.

‘MY GRANNY doesn’t like you,” the student at the book-signing blurted out.

YOU have to hand it to the spin doctors who work for BP.

THEY thought she was the bee’s knees, did her parents, and they did their best to make her the cat’s pyjamas, too.

WHEN the organisers contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in doing workshops at this year’s Listowel Writers’ Week, I thought about telling them I would consider it, but I was afraid they’d go off me and get someone else, so I said yes with such speed, it came close to tearing their arm off at the shoulder for the chance.

The black box recorder, already recovered from the wreckage of the Boeing 737-800 that crashed at India’s Bajpe airport, will reveal the split-second decision-making which caused it to overshoot the runway and burst into flames.