The fragments that remained today would not have yielded twelve baskets full.

In an eating house in Dublin, Ireland, today the waitress who came to clear away asked me - and I had to ask her to repeat what she said - if I wanted the remnants to take home in a box. Do people really *do* that kind of thing?

Going high when they went low was probably virtuous but it was also disastrous.

The curious thing is that usually both the tabloid press and the police in this country treat any acquittal as the appalling result of clever lawyers getting criminals off on an obscure legal technicality.

(Not by driving a coach and four through etc etc? - Ed)

The extraordinary efforts at accuracy in pronouncing names and other words in foreign languages made by some announcers on BBC radio often comes to mind if I hear announcers on French classical music radio stations blithely mangling the pronunciation of, in particular, German names and other words.

Proposed exemptions for modular homes brought to Cabinet A proposal to grant planning exemptions for modular homes of up to 45sq.m in back gardens has been brought to the Cabinet.

Even into my distant youth there was still a remnant of an old practice of householders in faded seaside towns like Tramore, Ballybunion and Bundoran renting out their houses in the summer and moving into shacks and sheds in the garden.

Nothing is ever entirely new in this world.

"How do you express the term 'self-deprecation' in the American language?"

"The concept is unknown."

"The novelists of ideas in any systematic sense in the last century were three only: Albert Camus, Iris Murdoch and Ayn Rand."

"Have they been turned into major motion pictures?"

Sometimes I suspect that they believe the rest of the world is about the size and significance of Bermuda or of The Bahamas.

65 seconds it seems it took for Bluesky to accept an uploading post. Not good. The whirr of a clockwork mechanism.

"It's striving to be a novel of ideas, but there are none."

"I prefer just a good yarn, me, rather than fruitless exertions trying to demonstrate intelligence."

"Particularly when there isn't any."

Oh, I wouldn't dream of trying to upstage a junior doctor attempting with butchery to insert a cannula into the back of the hand.

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), Vienna Donald Macleod explores Haydn’s trips from Esterhaza to Vienna.

There's a particularly good Donald Macleod COTW this week on Radio 3, 16.00 daily, about Joseph Haydn.

His operas weren't great, as yesterday made plain, but yet they are fascinating. It's compelling radio too. Excellent slider fading up and down too this week.

Funnily enough, the comparison of social cherry tree-viewing in Japan with the emptiness of an Irish bluebell woods struck me there yesterday.

There was a great deal of spontaneous humour from the team the first time I had an ultrasound scan. By the third time I went back I was able to predict the coming lines. I suppose the patient is a welcome captive audience and these days every man, at least, thinks he's really a comedian.

Even the likeness is uncanny.

And that's when I would pounce on him.

I'd like to curl up with a favourite author under an LRB blanket, even on the couch in the lounge as a start.

I could only dream of such excellence and altitude of ambition.

"I always attend a new colleague's inaugural lecture, no matter what their field, to get the measure of them and to identify their weak points."

One of them was in Home Economics (Social & Scientific) and the other wasn't.

The Post Office has once again grossly overestimated my reasonable requirements in this area.

If he only knew how far a B and a C in the Leaving Cert took me in life, but I'm not one to boast.

If I was better informed about the world I live in, that thought would have probably occurred to me (eventually). And, funnily enough, we were in a room maybe 500 metres from a prison; a room where I have in the past several times sat beside handcuffed patients.

Yes, there is such a gap between what the eye sees so easily and perfectly and what that same eye can get the camera to see and freeze.

A man in or around my own age kept referring this morning in light conversation to "my supervisor" and, once the oddness of its frequent occurrence finally struck me and I thought he wasn't a toiling low-level worker, I pursued the point. He was hint-boasting that he had a PhD.

Thank you, Stephen: a few happy accidents selected from a great mass of botched shots, but we keep trying.

Did you read PPE?

During my trade union branch secretary days here 'at conference' came to seem almost like Standard English. There was also a special T.U. use of 'comprehend' that stuck out.

'In post', though, always reminds me of Lord Gove, the first person I heard using it. 'At pace' is another horror.

I suppose the Camassia of North America produce much the same effect in mass as the bluebells of these islands, but I seem always to have missed them in bloom. Monty recommends them so often that I foresee them escaping cultivation here and marching across the plains unchecked.