When she found herself surrounded by journalists and microphones, she took the pressure off her friend by identifying herself as the patient, and then delivered a haiku of concentrated misery.

ASSUME you’re a publisher, and that this column is a proposal: a pitch made to you in the hope that you’ll publish a novel set in a small, fantastically verdant planet. Awash in diversity, this planet. One species of animal is by far the most intelligent. So intelligent that it finds ways to extract the carbon locked into the crust of the planet since primeval times and stick it into the sky overhead.

It’s dismaying to realise just how much of one’s life, at the point of moving, should have been in a skip years before.

Some of those around the table might have agreed, but nervously, because the fear of committing your organisation to Something Legal is huge.

Having crossed the finish line, the runners go into shock, shivering in a way that rocks a small car on its wheels and begin personal comparison: did they do better than they did last year, or last month in this city or on another continent?

The dead guy in the raincoat punched me in the kidneys. They called my flight before the relationship ended, which meant the chair continued to wallop the air as if the dead guy was sporadically animated by a cattle prod.

Florence Nightingale’s undeviating determination to put her own stamp on nursing, nonetheless, succeeded, not just because of her capacity to use vitriol, charm and manipulation in equal measure, but because she understood the importance of communication.

WE’RE the most observed, studied and measured society ever. Ireland can’t get through a week without a new study or survey, measuring something about us.

THIS Monday morning, trying to explain Ireland to a visiting Martian would be quite a challenge. Any alien from another planet would ask you to start with sport, since he wouldn’t have been able to get away from it this weekend.

All sorts of verbal blunders swim through our sentences like bubbles in champagne.