I have become a man who watches TV programmes about home insulation for fun.

It started innocently enough with an episode of RTÉ’s Heat My Home where Kieran McCarthy goes around the country pointing a thermal camera at people's walls and advises them on ways to make their homes more efficient. 

He manages to do so without resorting to the “have you tried putting on a warm jumper instead of turning up the heat” routine.

This is an admirable feat given the sentence formed the backbone of our energy policy for a generation.

The problem is that I have the equipment to make the obsession worse.

We have solar panels on the roof of our 1920s council house, a battery in the attic that stores away night-rate electricity, and an app on my phone that tells me who has a light on, in what room, and how many cents I will save if I leg it downstairs to intervene.

I run the dishwasher at two in the morning because that's when the power is cheapest, and I have genuinely lain awake listening for it to start, like a farmer waiting on a cow to calve.

From April to September I’m almost unbearable. Then October arrives, the clocks are about to go back, the panels basically go into hibernation and I start issuing rules around the house like some demented South American depot.

I’m exhausted from it.

My wife is surely exhausted from it.

My children eye me with a pitied expression that invokes “what’s wrong with your man?” as I prance from room to room, adjusting and sometimes eliminating the lighting in a breathless attempt to save the planet.

Talk of nukes on the moon

So you can imagine my delight reading in the New York Times this week that the world's superpowers have the exact same problem.

In late August NASA asked contractors to get ready to build a nuclear reactor that could run without maintenance near the moon's south pole.

They want it ready to launch by December 2030.

Meanwhile Russia, in cahoots with China, is aiming to have its own lunar reactor running by 2036.

Everyone wants a moon base, and everyone has worked out that solar panels won't cut it once you're running more than a few lights and a laptop.

I feel their pain.

Now, I don’t want to sound alarmist here, but I’m not sure this is the best time to be planning a mission like this.

Haven’t we enough to be worrying about?

AI is going to wipe us out, or at least take our jobs and then write a much better version of this column.

The Ireland v Israel debacle is just behind us and poor old Heimir Hallgrímsson has aged about thirty years in a week.

And Simon Harris – a young lad who looked ashen even before the latest newborn arrived - will have delivered his budget by the time you read this.

The whole country could be dead by disappointment by Tuesday evening and they’re talking about putting nukes on the moon?

Eviction to election

Spare a thought for Maricarmen Abascal, an 87-year-old woman in Madrid who had lived in the same flat for more than 70 years until her rent went from €500 a month to €2,650. 

On September 23rd she was evicted and carried out on a stretcher and Spain went ballistic.

Hundreds of people have been camped out in the Puerta del Sol for over a week, the company that evicted her has since caved and said she can go home and the government's emergency housing laws were voted down in parliament on Friday.

On Monday Pedro Sánchez called a snap general election for November 29th, more than six months early.

I couldn't help wondering what would happen if the same thing happened here.

You’d get you a full afternoon on Liveline, to be sure, and the promise of a review, which would report back sometime around 2029.

At this point the flat would be a short-term let with a lockbox on the door and the poor woman would be in a hotel room somewhere convenient to the M50.

FAI needs a talking to

Back to the football, apparently the Irish team finally has access to a sports psychologist.

The FAI finally coughed up.

And it’s about time too.

After a week of testy press conferences, UEFA bans on Israeli journalists, spitting in tunnels and the worst second half of football in living memory, it’s fair to say the lads might need to talk it through.

And the FAI could do with having a long conversation with someone too – preferably itself.