I achieved a great personal milestone last Tuesday evening.

I sat down on my couch, pressed the Netflix button on my remote, and watched Skyscraper Live in its entirety.

It’s the white-knuckle-ride live event showing Alex Honnold’s free solo ascent of Taipei 101, the world’s 11th tallest building at 508 metres, and I did not look away once.

Well, maybe twice. Possibly seventeen times. But I only screamed into the cushion once. It was one of the bravest displays of my adult life.

My wife will tell you that I do not do heights. There was the time we took that cliff walk over on Three Castle Head: you know the one, beautiful views, sheer drops, lady ghost on the lake.

But it wasn’t the supernatural that was freaking me out. It was my entire nervous system staging a mutiny when I got anywhere within a hundred yards of the cliff edge.

In the end, she ended up having to assist me along that ledge like I was an elderly grandfather being helped from the car to mass, one shuffling step at a time, whispering encouragement while I made sounds that can only be described as whimpering.

Then there was the Empire State Building incident. We got to the top, I looked out at the view of Manhattan, realised there were planes flying below us, and I spent the rest of our visit hanging on to the central structure like a barnacle clung to the Fastnet. The edge was a long way away.

If Clonakilty were the Empire State Building observation deck, I would have been clinging to the walls inside SuperValu, terrified I might somehow fall off the edge of town by the post office. I never said it was logical.

So when I tell you I watched Alex Honnold climb 508 metres of glass and steel with no rope, no harness, no safety equipment beyond what appeared to be a pair of rubber dollies and a small bag of chalk, you need to appreciate the bravery required. From me. On the couch.

With a small bag of low-salt popcorn.

Sometimes heroes don’t wear capes. Sometimes they don’t even get out of their pyjamas.

Muddying the waters

Look, I’m as sick of weather warnings as the next person. But when the Minister for Housing James Browne came out criticising Met Éireann for their communication before Storm Chandra battered Wexford, saying they’ll be hauled before an Oireachtas committee to explain why they’re ‘guarding information,’ I nearly choked on my Coco Pops. Met Éireann, who’ve been screaming warnings at us like worried parents watching their child climbing up a small skyscraper, are now being blamed for not screaming loud enough.

What exactly does the Minister want? A forecaster to arrive at your door personally and roar ‘IT’S GOING TO LASH, STAY INSIDE’? They’ve been sending alerts to every phone in the country, they’ve been all over RTÉ, they’ve been issuing colour-coded warnings we’ve all become experts at ignoring.

Red means bad. Orange means bad but we’ll probably still go to the pub. Purple means say goodbye to your loved ones and get your affairs in order.

Labour’s Ciarán Ahern had it right calling this an attempt to ‘distract and deflect’ from the Government’s failure to actually prepare for these events.

But when people started to point the finger at the Ballyboden Tidy Towns Group for the flooding in Rathfarnham, you knew the blame game was in full swing.

Met Éireann can warn us until they’re blue in the face, but if the infrastructure isn’t there, if the flood defences aren’t built, if the drainage systems are overwhelmed, what good is perfect communication?

It’s like getting a text warning that your roof is about to collapse when you’ve been asking the landlord to fix it for three years.

Jim Daly warned us

I caught Brendan O’Connor’s show at the weekend where they had a panel discussing how mediocrity is the survival strategy in Irish politics.

Don’t stick your head above the parapet, don’t rock the boat, wait until everyone else has said it first and then agree loudly.

They mentioned Jim Daly, the former Cork South West TD, who years ago was warning about the dangers of the internet for kids, social media addiction, the whole lot.

He even proposed plans to ban children under the age of 14 from owning smartphones and having unrestricted access to the Internet. He was treated like he was proposing we ban electricity, at the time. I probably had that thought myself.

Now, of course, everyone’s suddenly an expert on phone-free schools and teen mental health crises, and we’re all nodding along pretending we knew it all along. It might have come a little late for Mr Daly, but I hope he’s feeling just a small bit smug this week.