Smashed and smashed by a master, master class

A NATION, er, awakes.

The country hadn’t been up early this since the good old days of the Celtic Tiger when we didn’t go to bed at all, and we’d make a handy million or two before the breakfast, nothing in our bellies except a ball of crack cocaine and a quick swig of Buck’s Fizz.

As if to underline our fall from grace, Brent Pope predicted a ‘pitch and toss game’, and, his words consoled us, sure, weren’t we reared on pitch and toss, and hopscotch too, and conkers, and to school through the fields, barefooted, with a bag of spuds on our back for the teacher, and maybe even the teacher himself on our back, sure weren’t we subservient back then, beaten down, oppressed, devoid of hope, but, look, stop will you, we were happy. Delirious, I tell you.