We’re within earshot of GAA HQ hereabouts and, inside the last few minutes, U2’s Croke Park caterwauling has just got underway. No doubt the po-faced lectures about development aid and so forth – on which, incidentally, if you subscribe to this lady’s line of thinking (and I do), you’ll take the view that The Gob is wrong – will start before too long as well.

We’ve now got three nights of this aural annoyance ahead of us but, for reasons I can’t for the life of me fathom, it’s not three nights in a row. Maybe the lads have already pencilled in a night in on Sunday to watch Dessie on The Sunday Game.

Before you start to get alarmed, I’m not going to engage in a middle-aged, middle-class rant about U2 playing down the road. Sure didn’t I see them there myself one time (Sweet Mother of Jesus, that was back in 1985, all of 24 years ago, when Bono looked even more ridiculous than he does now but, then again, so did the rest of us) and, in truth, they’re not the worst cultural entity to emerge from these shores. I don’t even mind the fact that they’ve been given the run of Croke Park – it’s a seriously expensive place to run and they need this kind of dough to keep the wolf from the door – and I’m not all that fussed that they’ve been handed the keys to the place during the summer either.

What bugs me is the fact that the extravaganza is going ahead so close to when the real action is about to start in the All-Ireland series: couldn’t they have scheduled the damn thing for a week earlier? I know that they were caught between the Leinster football final and next weekend’s All-Ireland quarter-finals and I know that that 20-storey contraption that’s presently squatted in what’s normally described as the middle third of the pitch needed to be assembled but it also has to be disassembled, and in double-quick time too.

Which brings me to their night off on Sunday night. I know the lads are getting on a bit but you’d still think that they’d be able to do their stuff three nights on the spin without having to take a breather on Sunday. Had they done so, they could have taken their shit apart and have fucked off out of the place before Monday was over, in which case there would have been four clear days to get the pitch relaid for the following weekend. As things stand, though, the night at home in front of the telly for the Fab Four will leave the Croke Park lads with only three days to get everything sorted ahead of the first throw-in at 2 pm on the following Saturday. And, needless to say, if there’s hitch on that front, it’ll won’t exactly be The Sweetest Thing. No, it’ll be Bad, very bad indeed.