MY father learned all about mistakes at a wedding. Not his own wedding. He and my mother were guests, and to keep her end up, my mother borrowed a fur stole, described by its owner as “coney”.

‘I think,’ she says.

SNOW shovels, big print doorknob hangers and supermarket sandwiches may be the best investments Hillary Clinton will ever make.

ANYONE who has read Alistair Campbell’s eponymous account of the Blair years knows Tony Blair is already in the running for sainthood, if only for his unremitting kindness to and patience with Campbell and the other infighting inadequates who surrounded him during his leadership of New Labour.

A total of 90% of Irish law now comes from Europe, according to an expert on a radio programme. 90%. Only 10% of what we elect TDs to do is actually being done in this country. Just as companies outsource their manufacturing to China, we as a nation have outsourced our legislating to Brussels and Strasbourg.

IF Brian Cowen’s livelihood depended on TAM ratings or JNLR figures, he’d be good and goosed this week.

I’m sick of being coerced into kindness.

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.