How being on the horns of a dilemma caused a posh person’s fall from Grace

SO there I was, last Friday, ready to put on a Viking helmet and leap into one of the amphibious craft that were used to land GIs on the Normandy beaches during the Second World War.

I’d paid up front for me, Grace, and her mother to be entertained by raucous driver guides on a Viking Splash tour of Dublin. Grace Brennan is a slender wand of a girl possessed of an air of reserved wisdom unexpected in a nine-year-old American. Or a nine-year-old from anywhere, for that matter.

In the event, circumstances prevented me joining the two of them, so mother and daughter went off without me. The mother sent me an email afterwards saying it had been a riot and that at a certain point she had said to Grace (nine -year-old wand of wisdom) that she was very sorry I’d missed it, because I’d have loved it.