ABOUT a year ago, in the middle of a TV sports report in Florida watched by the man in my life, up popped the inventor of the Jarvik artificial heart.

ACCORDING to Laver’s Law, I’m dowdy, and you hold the evidence in your hand.

ISN’T it strange that we have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day but neither a Sister’s Day nor a day devoted to appreciation of brothers?

I WAS so perturbed about the Pope’s broken wrist, I destroyed the bedroom and set fire to my underpants. You may think this an excessive response to His Holiness’s injury, but at least I wasn’t in the underwear when it ignited.

Whether it was his proposed bill on blasphemy or his gangland crime bill, the Minister for Justice’s actions in recent times have proved our national capacity to rush to personal judgment, rather than address the ideas involved

JUST when we thought the summer breezes would blow away some of our recession worries and cheer us all up, another lump of bad news rolls in.

Not so long ago, cancer sufferers pretended they didn’t have the disease. Neither they nor their families acknowledged the Big C. Now, it is an occasion for exploration in books, newspaper columns, blogs or – in the case of Farrah Fawcett – a TV documentary

Just as drinkers are threatened by non-drinkers because they convince themselves the teetotallers are soberly watching them getting pie-eyed, making notes for subsequent use, so the happy-clappy brigade are threatened by anyone who wants to opt out.

On the face of it, the processions and programmes on radio and television and speeches in Leinster House were the outward and visible sign of a nation offering long-overdue vindication to thousands of abuse survivors.

FIANNA Fáil got beaten senseless and the Green Party got beaten nearly to death.