Over the weekend, I attended my nephew's third birthday party, and learned the valuable lesson that they are not the kind of events you want to go to when you are hungover. I would probably have guessed this before, but it was forced home with particular success on the occasion. So, after conspicuously avoiding my turn on the bouncy castle, and finding solace in a regenerative bottle of beer, I was introduced to a friend of my brother's named Paul. I immediately assumed that he was one of the dads from the neighbourhood, because he was there with his wife and son, and had the same weary expression worn by all the other thirty-something fathers present. We had a brief chat before I made my way to the living room, where I promptly fell asleep in front of the Dublin v Derry game.

Later on, after Paul and his family had left, my sister-in-law casually mentioned that he had played lead guitar for Whipping Boy, a much-loved band of my youth. It transpired that the band had recently broken up, and Paul Page, rock hero, was a little embarrassed and reluctant to discuss his former profession (he now works for the civil service). Fearing a scene that would interrupt a pleasant party, my brother consciously didn't tell me about him until after he had left, because he thought I would corner him and chew his ear for hours on end. While there was an element of truth to his reasoning, I nonetheless felt chagrined to be denied the chance to applaud a man whose albums I once listened to ad nauseum, and whose performance I saw on a crappy day at Longford festival in 1996. Such injustice...