I HAVE spent the last week horizontal, which is not a sentence I get to write often, and which I would not recommend you aim for.

To give you a good mental image, I am finishing this very piece from the leaba, tapping away like a puffy, middle-aged Carrie Bradshaw. We do it all for you, dear readers.

Some class of a stomach flu arrived last week, set up camp, and refused all reasonable offers to leave. I appealed that this was not a good week to hit me. I have a small company I try to run. I have two young children. And one of them had a communion on the way, with family descending from the countryside to celebrate with us.

Alas, my appeals fell on deaf ears and I ended up like the Grandpa from the opening scenes of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in bed while life buzzed around me. Meanwhile, the other men in the family heroically assembled the trampoline I had ordered from Decathlon in advance of the special day. Food was had in the house, fun took place, everyone helped out and I observed with the cold remove of a French Existentialist writer, occasionally trying some toast.

There is a particular clarity that descends around day four of a proper dose, when the fever lifts just enough for the mind to start working again but the body is still refusing to co-operate.

And it was in that strange, dressing-gowned state that I came up with my invention. I am calling it the TempoSick, and I believe it will make me a wealthy man, or at the very least get me an outing on Dragons’ Den.

The premise is simple. We spend a fortune now on wellness, on cold plunges and gratitude journals and apps that ping you to remind you to breathe, all of it basically a roundabout attempt to feel alive.

The TempoSick cuts out the middleman. You strap it on, press the button, and for 30 seconds it delivers the full orchestral suite of being seriously unwell: the blocked nose, the ache in the kidneys, the endless self-pity, the conviction that nobody has ever suffered quite like this. Then it switches off. And you are well again.

The idea is to stop you taking your health and your body for granted when you are feeling well. And to motivate you to embrace every minute of your life while you can. Still some legal, scientific and operational issues to look at, and I should probably aim to get out of bed first before I launch it…

But you heard it here first.

Bertie blip denounced

Fianna Fáil turned a hundred this year and to mark it they gathered in Dublin last weekend for an Árd Fheis that was meant to be one long warm bath of nostalgia.

Unfortunately, Bertie did the equivalent of an uncle at a wedding making a major faux pas at the dinner table, and put a small sour note on the whole event by saying what he said on a doorstep in Dublin in the run up to a bye-election.

Listen, we all know his remarks were completely out of order but he’s probably not saying anything that he’s not hearing on the ground - the guy has some form when it comes to capturing some of the public mood and parroting it back at the people.

The Taoiseach said plainly that it was ‘not appropriate’ to be ‘specific about any given ethnicity’, that the remarks did not represent Fianna Fáil, and he made a point at the Árd Fheis of the candidates from different backgrounds standing for the party.

In the end the centenary went ahead much as these things do, the speeches made, the cake cut, and the family agreeing quietly among themselves that somebody really should have a word with the uncle before the next big day.

French go crock-au-vin

While I was laid up, the rest of the world carried on without me, and the most startling bit of news to reach the couch was that the French have gone off the wine.

I had to read it twice. France, last year, for the first time anybody can remember, drank more beer than wine.

The government there is now so worried about the lake of unsold wine sloshing around the country that they are paying farmers to rip the vines clean out of the ground, four grand a hectare to make the stuff disappear.

Lads, that’s an incredible waste in this cost of living era. Is there anything to be said for an undersea vino connector to help out friends?

I’m thinking Kinsale could be a logical landing point. We could call it The Wine Line.

Fast track to Fastnet

All going well, and the lurgy having run its course, I will be upright and presentable by the time this paper lands, because I have somewhere to be.

The Fastnet Film Festival runs in Schull from Wednesday, five days of films screened in pubs and village halls and cafés and just about anywhere in the town that will hold a projector, and my wife has her short film Reunion screening. An Irish premiere, no less. And in fairness, after the week I have had, I will hardly need the TempoSick to remind me to be glad of my health.

A premiere in Schull, with my wife, is about as good a reason as any to get back on my feet.