“You know why.”

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“No . . . wait!”

But he’s back on the bike and gone.

Five things I googled this week?

‘Median age.’

‘Jeroboam.’

‘Thirtieth Anniversary.’

‘Ted Walsh.’

‘Kathleen Watkins.’

Call me old-fashioned but I could never understand why Gay Byrne always referred to his wife, Kathleen Watkins, by her full name. It was never ‘Kathleen says’ or ‘my wife says’ or ‘my darling says’ or (the dreaded) ‘my spouse says’, it was ‘Kathleen Watkins says’. She was always Kathleen Watkins, only Kathleen Watkins, as if she was like . . . you know . . . ummm . . . a different person.

She has always seemed a lovely person. On Thursday, she was on The Ray D’Arcy Show talking about life in the lockdown and the importance of having a structure in your day. She’s 85 and lives alone but wasn’t complaining.

“I’m doing quite well here and alone, of course, but my daughter Susie is filling my fridge regularly, and my niece Susan is flying around looking after the three widowed Watkins sisters.

“We’re all very spoiled and we’re counting our blessings really. I have been tidying up Gay’s office, and after a lifetime of broadcasting there’s a fair bit to tidy up.”

It was the mention of Gay’s office that perked my ears. OMG! What I wouldn’t give to spend an afternoon in that Aladdin’s Cave! And we listened, waiting – hoping – for Ray to intervene: “What’s in there Kathleen Watkins? Give us a guided tour. Tell us about the treasures you found.”

But it never came.

I’ve been thinking about the jeroboam of champagne. It’s 30 years since I was interviewed by Gay Byrne on The Late Late Show – it kind of feels like a Big Deal. And it’s 30 years since Rough Ride was published, and that feels like a big deal. And it’s 30 years since Vincent Browne gave me a start at the Sunday Tribune, and that’s definitely a big deal.

Those first 18 months were like winning the lottery. The Five Nations . . . the World Cup . . . The Tour de France . . . The Galway Races . . . there was nothing I wouldn’t write about, nothing I couldn’t do. Then I stopped pulling rabbits from the hat and was dumped with an ugly truth . . .

Oh!

Okay.

How is that spelled again?

J-o-u-r-n-a-l-i-s-m?

I couldn’t even google it!

And then it got hard. Real hard. The angst. The gnashing. The self-mutilation. I remember thinking: ‘Jesus! If I could squeeze five years out of this I’d be the luckiest guy in the world’. And here I am, 30 years later, still counting my blessings and pulling at my eyebrows!

Good ideas help, especially in the time of Covid, and it’s a help to have really bright friends. Gary O’Toole sent me a message recently: “Can you at some stage during this crisis rank your top 10 interviews – the whys and the wherefores. And can you then confess to the people you disliked before you interviewed, and liked after. And liked before you interviewed but didn’t feel the same about after.”

Jaysus!

Where do you start with that? How do you define ‘top’? The biggest names? The best written? I’ve met so many interesting people. Gary for starters – it’s like Sophie’s Choice! Rory or Pádraig? Floyd Landis or Roy Keane? John McEnroe or Eddie Jordan? Jimmy Connors or Joe Namath? Seve Ballesteros or Pete Sampras? Nick Faldo or Ivan Lendl? Flavio Briatore or Eamon Dunphy? Matt Hampson or Tony Cascarino? Jim Bolger or Damon Hill?

Mike Gibson or Eugene McGee? Gareth Edwards or Jackie Stewart? Greg LeMond or Boris Becker? Mick McCarthy or Jim McGuinness? Martin O’Neill or John Robbie? Kevin Heffernan or Paul O’Connell? Laurent Benezech or Jimmy Greaves? John Giles or Ian Botham? Geoff Hurst or Brian Moore? Paul McGrath or Joe Brolly? Sinéad Jennings or Sonia O’Sullivan?

Andy Ripley or Andy Townsend? Paul McGinley or Tony Jacklin? Brian Kerr or Ronnie O’Sullivan? Shane Lowry or Shane Warne? Graeme McDowell or Tony Adams? Novak Djokovic or Michael Carruth? Roger Federer or Dermot Gilleece? Ruby Walsh or Martin Johnson? Paul Galvin or Sam Lynch?

It’s like being asked to rank your kids.

I’ve always loved Ted Walsh. He was 70 on Tuesday – happy birthday Ted!

There was no WiFi at Italia ’90. And no mobile phones. Writing was the easy bit then – the ulcers came on Saturday afternoons when you tried to send your copy to the office. I travelled that summer with a huge white laptop and a dot-matrix printer that weighed half a ton. I would write the feature, hook the laptop into the printer, and fax the pages from the nearest hotel.

Then the laptops and the printers got smaller. Then mobile phones arrived and the laptops came with modems that connected to landlines. Then the mobiles got smaller and connected with the laptops. And now there’s text messaging and WhatsApp and any number of ways to connect with your boss.

I don’t like phones. I’ve never liked phones. Those great names I’ve interviewed? They were all face-to-face. Gary at his parents’ home in Bray; Floyd Landis at a cabin in the San Jacinto mountains; Roy Keane in room 311 of the Hyatt Regency in Saipan; Boris Becker at the Mandarin Oriental in Munich; Seve Ballesteros at the Hardwick Hall hotel in Durham; Pádraig Harrington . . . everywhere.

But this poxy Covid thing has compromised us all.

I did my first interview on Zoom last week – four hours of reaching for my subject through a tiny laptop screen. It’s better than the phone and you’re arguably face-to-face, but it’s not the same. It’s not one-on-one. There’s stuff you miss. Stuff that matters. Rory driving to the shop for toilet roll. The tattered carpet in Floyd’s living room. Those priceless moments when character is revealed.

I forgot Serge Blanco. And Andre Agassi. And Haile Gebrselassie. Serge was great. He was the most popular rugby player in the world when I travelled to Biarritz in February 1990, six weeks after joining the Sunday Tribune. How was the interview arranged? I have no idea. But here he was, le beau garcon, sitting on a sunny terrace with a coffee, some bread and a plate of saussison.

It wasn’t breakfast, he explained, just a mid-morning snack. He’d had cornflakes for breakfast, and was reading an Agatha Christie novel. “Tres British, non?” he smiled.

If we had been talking on the phone, I’d have asked about his (poor) form in the Five Nations and his hopes for the upcoming game against Ireland – and in truth, there was plenty of that shite in the piece – but what made it was the sense of Serge as a bon viveur.

His eyes wandered as a pretty girl crossed the terrace. He demolished the saussison, ordered another coffee and dipped into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. “Do you smoke?” he asked, lighting up.

“No,” I replied.

“Ahh, you’re a sportsman, are you?” he smiled, filling his lungs.

That doesn’t happen on Zoom.

There are only two women on the list? Yeah, there’s undoubtedly a column in that but I’ll take my leave with a brief salute to the bravest woman I’ve known. She’s 78 today. Happy birthday ma.