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“There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” - Leonard Cohen.

Hello to all the Advertiser readers. As I am writing this, in the very early hours of Wednesday morning, it looks like Trump is in the White House. Students are back in school, and Ireland is king of the rugby world. Now, how is all that for a starter paragraph to my usually placid weekly column?

As I write this column on Wednesday after midnight, I am filled with sadness. My lovely sister-in-law Ann Lenihan died on Tuesday, October 25. It was completely unexpected; she just quietly passed away. Yes, she had been ailing and a little more than a year ago had a major heart operation, but she seemed to have come through it and to be making some headway.

Well I am filled with sadness and I am sure many reading this will feel the same.

There is a certain temptation these days to treat the US presidential election as some form of over-the-top reality TV show. Bring out the popcorn, bring out a buzzword bingo card, and sit back. There is certainly something of the fantastic in the air: "He couldn't! Could he?"

The season of think-ins has begun, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It has started with Fine Gael in Newbridge in County Kildare. Enda was great to state quite definitely that he was staying the pace no matter what the papers said or whatever the plots his bold back-benchers were hatching.

He brightens up our early morning misery with his hit Gift Grub performances on Today FM, and now Mario Rosenstock is all set for a new Irish tour with an Athlone date scheduled for November.

What an awful few days there has been again in this world in which we live.

Even the most sceptical observer cannot accuse those who describe last week’s Brexit referendum result as 'seismic' or 'a political earthquake' of engaging in hyperbole. From an Irish perspective, it is potentially the most significant thing to happen in peace-time British politics since the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936.

"We must sow terror in the hearts of the Irish people," a senior Irish politician told Irish Independent journalist James Downey in 2001, explaining how the Republic's Government would reverse the people's No vote to the EU's Nice Treaty that year, and turn it into a Yes vote for the same treaty the year after.