Ross O'Carroll-Kelly

So it’s, like, Friday night and I’m having the usual pints with the goys in The Bridge. Dave Kearney asks how we’re getting on with a big smirk on his face. We’re all, like, crowded around my phone.

The old man steps into the kitchen with a Montecristo the size of a rolled-up yoga mat burning between his fat fingers. Sorcha storts coughing – her passive-aggressive way of telling him that we don’t allow smoking in this house – but he just ignores her, like he did when she tried to introduce a similar rule about shoes.

How quickly the years go by. That’s what I’m thinking as I’m taking the right turn at Donnybrook Bus Depot.

I had my nightmare again last night, the one where I have a one-night stand with Taylor Swift and then I ghost the girl and she ends up writing 15 or 16 songs about me and they’re on the radio constantly. And – yeah, no – I woke up screaming.

Sorcha is upset. I totally get that? But I haven’t seen her over-react like this since I ate a tin of macadamias from the hotel mini-bor on a weekend city break in Ljubljana.

Réaltín smiles. Which might well be a first for her. Yeah, no, we’re in Baldoyle of all places, playing Thor Frimann and Lisa Murray – the reigning champions – in the semi-finals of the mixed doubles at the Leinster Padel Championships. It’s, like, one set apiece and we’re winning 5-4 in the third.

I tell Honor that I’m proud of her.I’m there, “Obviously, I don’t mean that literally?” because all she’s actually done is spend her Paddy’s Day picking litter up off the beach in Curracloe as port of her community service. “I’m proud of the way you’re, like, owning what you did?”

I’m the first to arrive. I order a pint of the obvious and I do a quick circuit of the place. There’s no one here yet, even though I said eight o’clock and it’s quarter-past already. Fr Fehily wouldn’t have put up with that. What was it he used to say? Better three hours too early than a minute too late?

I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later.“Ross?” the dude goes, pulling a face at me across the net. “Ross O’Carroll-Kelly?”