We're camping this week, about a ten minute walk down the road from my home place, and it's been a dream, back in West Cork amongst my own people, flora and fauna. 

When I say camping, I mean we're renting the privilege of a bell tent with a bed in it, which is technically glamping, but I refuse to have it described in glamorous terms given there are beds a short walk down the road if we need them.

There's a family reunion on and the house is full, so rather than have grown adults sleeping head to toe in the box room like something from Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, we volunteered to go up the mountain and live in a tent for a few nights. We've done the camping thing properly plenty of times with our own gear, but the tent didn't survive an early January outing in the back garden for my daughter's birthday, the money saved from having the party in the house probably outweighed by the destruction brought to our poor old canvas. I don't miss the taking down, mind. Rolling a soaking tent into shape in sideways rain can test any marriage.

The weather has been unusually decent, mostly dry and warm, although the Ardfield mist paid a few visits, because it wouldn't be Ardfield otherwise, and sure that's what keeps us windswept and interesting, as Billy Connolly used to put it. 

We had a few glorious night walks too. Between Chapel Cross and Mountain Forge, in the pitch dark with the whole sky roaring above us, the kids stopped dead in the road with their heads tilted back. Those stars are up there every night of the year, they don't come out specially for campers, but it's rare we take the time to look up.

We had cattle lowing in the field next door every morning and enough insects working both sides of the tent wall, the ones frantic to get out and the ones equally frantic to get in, that you'd swear the biodiversity crisis had been called off. We have nothing of the sort in Dublin, you'll be delighted to hear, and we'll be doing it again next year.

Around midnight on night two, we began to hear a different sound resonating across the valley. It was boy racers doing donuts somewhere off in the distance, that sharp rising and falling whine of eejits burning rubber that carries for miles on a still night. Harmless probably, until it isn't.

The news all week heavily featured youngsters running amok in vehicles, mostly for social media likes, but with devastating and disgraceful consequences.

There were three women and a child of seven taken away in critical or serious condition after a car that had earlier failed to stop for gardaí was driven the wrong way down the M9 at three o'clock on Sunday morning. 

The five masked teenagers inside it were all killed. And thankfully, there were no other victims involved when members of a car fled the scene after driving in the wrong direction near an exit for Fermoy on the M8 after hitting a wall.

There are practical measures being discussed, wrong way detection systems, tyre deflation devices, stinger training for guards, but none of them go near the root of why these young people are acting like this. 

And the social media platforms have serious questions to answer. If RTÉ or County Sound were broadcasting masked teenagers driving at oncoming traffic and calling it content, they'd all be hauled in front of a tribunal.

In more inspiring news, I'm not normally glued to athletics but we had some run in Birmingham last week and, as you know, I'm happy to high-jump onto any bandwagon if Ireland are doing well. Mark English won the 800 metres in 1:45.26, the first Irish man ever to take an individual gold at a European outdoors, at thirty three, sixteen years after he started trying for it. 

Kate O'Connor won the heptathlon with a national record of 6,751 points. Rhasidat Adeleke won silver in the 200 with an Irish record and Andrew Coscoran came from behind to win an amazing bronze in the 1500.

My own gold goes to Greg Allen though. His commentary on English's race was worthy of a medal itself, and somebody duly cut it into a split screen and put it up on social media. Allen's storytelling was immense, managing to condense English's full career into the space of a few minutes, the highs and lows, the almost wins, then his emotion ramping to a crescendo as English kicked into another gear. 

And it wasn't just screaming and shouting either. His poetic turn came out in the heat of the excitement with one of the greatest lines in the history of sports commentary – ‘The arc has been jagged in the graph of his progress.’ It came out of nowhere, and it probably looks strange on the page, but look it up. The cadence and pure emotion behind it encapsulated the moment so well and I hope he gets the kudos he deserves.