The reference to golf elsewhere on the page was sparked by a book I borrowed last week, Over Time by Frank DeFord, which contains an elegantly exasperated head-shake over the pretentions of that sport.

Whether you say it’s all bunk or it’s a nightmare from which you’re trying to awake, there’s one thing you can count on when it comes to history.

We were surprised when the tweet landed, from Jackie Cahill in Semple Stadium, bemoaning the fact that he counted approximately 100 people there to support Tipperary.

You can’t just stop straightaway, that’d be very bad for you.

When it comes to ranking my shameful confessions, this one doesn’t quite make it to the top spot.

Sometimes it happens at a press conference, sometimes it occurs in a post-game scrum.

Looking back now, the man in the optician’s shop probably didn’t mean anything by what he said, but it was still an own goal of massive proportions.

The week a politician discloses his sexuality to the public, you’d imagine a quiet couple of days would be in order.

James O’Reilly and his pals on the Ballincollig junior B football team had an idea.

If he had gotten down to Camp Four that day and had heard the Koreans were in trouble, chances are he would have gone back up to try to help them. He was just that kind of person.

I might as well admit it early doors and put it up on the table.

Common sense takes week off — now that is a dealbreaker.

HAPPY new year to all readers, and fear not.

TEATIME wasn’t progressing too well that evening last week – negotiations with the two-year-old on blueberries as a viable dessert had broken down irrevocably, it seemed – when a half-heard comment at the end of the radio sports news seeped through.

WE had our topic nicely selected for this corner well ahead of time: The GAA County by County, a typically handsome production by Con Collins and his colleagues at the Collins Press.

A COMMUNAL green area in a Cork suburb doesn’t look like an obvious theatre of dreams.

FOR a while yesterday, I felt like I must be the lucky one.

JOHN Kennedy Toole has a lot to answer for.

SPARE a thought for Conal Keaney today.

THE texts and mails weren’t long in beeping themselves into consciousness on Saturday evening, an hour after teatime.

IMPLACABLE November, an exaggeration?

YESTERDAY Dromina, a little village in north Cork, had its day in the sun — or scouring rain, to be more precise — as the hurlers of Cork and Laois rolled in for a challenge to mark the opening of new GAA facilities.

REGIME change in hurling?

LAST Saturday Thomond Park hosted the latest meeting of Munster and Leinster in the Magners League, a game hyped in the usual terms: a huge battle, with unflinching confrontation. You know the drill.

IF you’d like to know what it feels like to start the most controversial minute’s music in Irish sporting history, there’s someone you can ask in the Phoenix Park.

QUESTION: when do you put away the All-Ireland trophy?

PULSELESS and saurian have been my adjectives of choice for the last few days, having come across them somewhere or other the weekend before last.

YOU CAN get cynical in this game pretty easily. You meet idols with feet of clay, the clay ending somewhere in the mid-thigh region.

THE CHAT was going reasonably well.

THE Guardian’s elegant columnist Frank Keating had a typically sharp piece in his newspaper last week, a simple concept butexecuted with precision and wit.

THE eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that Tipperary outfit Aherlow collected a second Tipperary SFC title last weekend.

“LET’S HAVE a chat,” said the sports editor, who, newly returned from holidays, usually has a new broom air about him for the first couple of days back in harness.

COUNTRY versus a continent?

EVERY year we have them.

FIRST stop the Bronx.

AT TIMES of turmoil like these, we usually go to Breandán O hEithir for consolation.

OCTOBER on the horizon.

Monday lunchtime, September 6

JUST LAST week Tony Blair visited Ireland to publicise his autobiography.

AHAB and Nemesis.

THE scene: the Burlington Hotel, Dublin, last Saturday night.

ANOTHER piece of childhood vanished for a lot of people over the weekend with the death of former world snooker champion Alex Higgins.

THE WEEKEND of the British Open, which is detailed elsewhere in these pages, is a perfect cue for talk of tradition and the past, though the (doubtless) heroics of various slacks-wearing, v-neck sporting super-athletes need not detain us here.

EVENTUALLY you surprise yourself by saying 30 years ago about your own life.

A COUPLE of weeks ago we noticed that there was a very unfortunate metaphor being trotted around by political pundits as Fine Gael was convulsed by a leadership challenge.

THE old cricket verse, At Lord’s, puts it better than we ever could: O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago.

AND SO to Waterford on a sunny weekend. We spent most of Saturday afternoon at a GAA club function in the Crystal City, which was conducted half al fresco and half al taverna, if you’ll forgive the pidgin Italian. The al fresco part was the most enjoyable, given the variety of delights on offer.

THE INK in the obituarists’ pens dried up at about the time Séan Óg O hAilpín encountered Declan Fanning underneath the covered stand in Páirc Uí Chaoimh yesterday.

YOU MAY have noticed last week that Minister for Communications, Eamon Ryan, is thinking of designating Heineken Cup games as ‘free-to-air’ events, which means that Irish viewers would be able to watch same without going through Sky and having to pay.