LIKE many of you, I’ve been wearing a little gadget on my wrist that tells me, every morning, exactly how badly I slept the night before. This is a strange thing to throw good money at when you think about it, paying a Californian company to confirm what you already know a few seconds after opening your eyes. But over time, I have found it very useful as an extremely complicated way to basically remind me: sleep is really, really important. I’ve been at it more than usual these last few weeks, on account of a dose that flattened me and it’s been fascinating to watch the stats match the recovery, a few seriously long shifts in the leaba coincided quite nicely with some step changes in feeling better again. A good eight hours, or in my case usually around seven, is better than a month of supplements and meditation, it seems.

Which brings me, somehow, to Donald Trump, who reckons he gets by perfectly well on four hours a night, maybe five if he’s been up late watching Fox News. He goes off to bed at one and is up at five again to read the papers and perform his own version of meditation, firing off demented messages on Truth Social. His great hero Margaret Thatcher used to say much the same, four hours and not a minute more, as though needing a full night’s sleep was a moral failing on a par with joining a union. The pair of them wore the not-sleeping like a medal, the way certain people will tell you they haven’t taken a holiday in eleven years and expect a round of applause for it. And I’ve been thinking, in my newly rested and clear-headed state, that maybe we’ve all been looking at these two the wrong way around. We keep asking what made them the way they are. For me it’s clear: a chronic, decades- long want of sleep turns you into a right wing loonbag. A sleep expert is what we need to send into the White House it seems.

Put manners on Donegal

DOWN in Castletownbere at the weekend they managed to gather just shy of two thousand people who were all, every last one of them, a Sullivan or an O’Sullivan, which is enough to break a world record apparently. They came from Boston and from Mexico and from every parish on the Beara, a few of them flying halfway around the world and producing their passports at the door as proof they were entitled to be there. Which is something everyone should need coming into Cork, if Fachtna had his way. The previous record was held by a crowd of Gallaghers above in Donegal, who’ll be raging, and the organisers were decent enough to more or less invite them to come back and have another go.  As for how many Sullivans it takes to change a lightbulb, I couldn’t tell you, but on Saturday there were 1,848 of them in the one town and I’d say not a single one would have admitted to not knowing how. And as luck would have it the footballers are bound for Donegal themselves in a fortnight, away to Ballybofey for the Round 2A, which could be a Kingfisher song. So between the Sullivans knocking the Gallaghers off their perch and the lads going up to do much the same, the county is having a great month of putting manners on Donegal. There’s a place in an All-Ireland quarter-final riding on that one, and we could hardly have asked for a tougher draw. And yet, there’s that old feeling - hope.

Shels shock over footie

LAST weekend I brought the young fella up to Tolka Park to see Shelbourne, the first League of Ireland match either of us has ever been at, and I’ll be honest, I went in not knowing what to expect. But we were both entranced the minute we walked in, by the music, the drums and the fanfare, and there was something lovely about it being a short spin from the house, wheeling the bikes down to your own local ground. The football wasn’t bad either. A different crowd entirely to what I’m used to in Croker, smaller and a good deal louder, right up on top of the pitch. He caught me for a Shels jersey before we’d even sat down, which is the surest sign I know of a child who’s made his mind up about something. We’ll be going back for the Shamrock Rovers game in a few weeks, and I find myself, at my age, turning into an ardent supporter of a Dublin soccer club, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write down. Life comes at you fast, basically.

RIP Tomi

ON a more sombre note, Tomi Reichental died at the weekend, aged ninety. He survived Bergen-Belsen as a small boy, lost thirty-five members of his own family in the Holocaust, and then came to live a long and quiet life here in Ireland from 1959 on. For the best part of two decades he spent his days going into Irish schools to sit in front of teenagers and tell them, plainly and without flinching, exactly what untrammeled hatred can look like. There are very few of that generation left now, the ones who can stand up and say I was there, I saw it with my own eyes, and when the last of them goes there’ll be a silence where their voices used to be. The least the rest of us can do is listen while we still can, and then carry the stories on ourselves, to our own children and to whoever will hear them after that. Tomi Reichental did the hard part for eighty years. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.