Don’t confuse the best and the brightest with greedy self-promoters

He’s an accountant. He’s a Corkman. He’s opinionated. He’s an old friend. So when he heard me, on RTÉ’s Drivetime, suggesting that Brian Lenihan should levy enormous taxes on the very rich, it bothered him.

He texted me to gently point out that, since I can just about add and subtract and am seriously challenged by multiplication and division, he understood why I would talk complete drivel, but that I should stop it. The professor on the panel had already crushed me on the same topic by saying it hadn’t worked for Harold Wilson.

The French have a great phrase for what had happened to me between the professor and the accountant. They call it “l’esprit de l’escalier.” Meaning that it’s only five minutes after you’ve had a fight with someone that you come up with the killer riposte to how they squelched you. I was halfway up the RTE radio centre stairs when the response to the professor came to me: “But that was in another country, and besides, the politician is dead.”