Cancer may not be the super killer it used to be, but you still don’t ever want to get a letter from the hospital with the words ‘not signed to avoid delay’ and ‘abnormal results’ on the same page.

Cathy Walsh is a choreographer and performer from Cork. She is the movement director for the current run of Dancing at Lughnasa at the Everyman in Cork.

MICHAEL McDowell is Irish politics answer to the heroine of Arabian Nights, the young woman who stays her own execution by telling the wife-slaying king an even more incredible yarn every night for 1,001 nights.