One of the reasons we have a silly season is because media decides we’re going to have it. They send the angry brigade on vacation. If Joe Duffy and Eamon Dunphy go on holiday, what are you left with? Complaints about the weather and a safety zone for Steve Staunton.

Most of the time, rude gestures like mooning are done for no good reason other than the realisation by the owner that he is in possession of a bottom and can show it to create shock and awe in passersby. Mostly shock. Not many bottoms create awe.

Sustainability as a tourist attraction requires that a building must be ancient and hold dead people (the pyramids), bendy (the Tower of Pisa) or linked with imprisonment, torture and execution (the Tower of London).

ONE of this country’s most eminent judges once acted for me in a libel case. I had published a book about famous Irish murders, and, in my account of one of them, had accidentally side-swiped an innocent bystander. Said innocent bystander happened to read the reference in the book and sued me.

‘Two or three decades of formidable theatrical achievement is more evanescent than the froth on a cappuccino: half-remembered moments in the memories of committed older theatre-goers, but no contemporary currency at all.’

On the topic of carbon offset, would someone mind telling me why it’s legal to sell leaf-blowers, which use enormous amounts of petrol, polluting the atmosphere for several square kilometres, to disarrange fallen foliage which cries out for a sweeping brush, a rake and a bag?

Even when they’re a bit fractious, the worst option on a long flight is not a toddler.

Terrorism has transformed air travel into a bloody nightmare.

The immediate payoff for not having to invest each week in stickers for a wheelie bin is small but tangible.

Stigmatising those with HIV is the current manifestation of an unchanging human reality.