Aaron Cruden was still standing over his first attempt at what would ultimately be the match-winning conversion, but Gordon D’Arcy was already peeling the strapping from his wrists. Draw or lose, at that stage it mattered little.

Belinda McKeon tells Sue Leonard how she realised she was getting free master-classes on how to be a novelist by interviewing writers for her work.

YUCK! That’s Not a Monster! by Angela McAllister and Alison Edgson (Little Tiger; €13.90) is the story of a misfit. Mr and Mrs Monster are thrilled when their gloriously ugly offspring, Frightful and Horrid, are hatched out.