I WENT to see megastar Chris de Burgh's eighth Dublin concert, not only for that reason but on the assumption that, by then, things would have simmered down.
Chris de who? If Patricia the Stripper or The Lady in Red doesn't answer your question or, for that matter, if they bring a red Catholic mist before your eyes, please skip on and try the crossword.
Things had not quietened down. Indeed he told us we were "the best audience so far". Maybe he tells all the gazers that; but I can tell you three or four or five thousand (more like a million) believed him.
Two million arms were stretched up towards the roof and half as many voices roared with joy from where they had been standing (not sitting) for some two and a half hours. It was as if — I imagined — a small section of the Valley of Jehosophat saw God leaning down out of the clouds giving the all-clear for paradise.
This small, gentle, charming young man, leaping about the stage and switching from head banging rock to heart-catching lyricism as easily as Shakespeare did from Macbeth to As You Like it, played that audience as if it were an instrument as responsive as his guitar.
THE POOR always feel guilty. The rich take it that everything belongs to them. On one of my two favourite airlines (!) flying to London at eye-bulging expense, I declined the superb meal (saving the company who knows what riches) but accepted a snipe of champagne. Tiny but well-formed.
My neighbour had both meal and champagne and some of the rough stuff as well, in the miniature bottles. Near the end of the journey, his palate, happy but confused, persuaded him to request another touch of champagne. Why not?
"And how about you, Mr Andrews?"
"Thank you ... er yes . . . thank you".
Why 1 should have "er'd" at those prices, I don't know, but I did. I felt I was stealing. I had no intention of drinking it. It was going into my bag for a potentially parched partner back at the ranch. My well-stuffed neighbour quaffed his, of course, en flight. I left mine on the tray and tried to slide open my briefcase to receive it.
"Shall I clear that, sir?" said the male steward, stretching towards me. Then, in a louder voice, "Oh, it's FULL . . . sorry". Heads turned. Twenty miles later, with Windsor Castle below on the dusky left, I almost had the dwarf bottle in the bag when the darling stewardess this time said: "Oh, let me take that from you" and then blushed when she too realised it was full. At least she didn't shout. I had a mad, resisted compulsion to hand it up on the way out and confess.
FLEET Street photographer Monty Fresco was the unsuspecting Guest of Honour on last week's This is Your Life. His boss-man Sir David English, Editor in Chief of Daily Mail Newspapers, tipped us off that Monty was retiring after 50 years of hard-neck, hot-bulb
success.
On the morning of the show, he sold Monty the story that we were springing the surprise on their hot gossip hit man Nigel Dempster and that he, David, wanted a close-up shot of me, Eamonn, delivering the Big Red Book surprise.
We made it very difficult for Monty. He was just about allowed into the studio and warned not to move into shot, where I was talking — on air to Dempster and his boss. (I have to pause here to tell you that Monty used to be an old ringside colleague when we both recorded boxing moments in the 50's, he with his camera, I with my tongue!)
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him creep in and crouch at the bottom of the stairs. I leapt at him — a man who had refused, for the sake of pictures, to retreat from lethal live landmines on the Golan Heights. "This is live" I yelled. "What are you doing here?"
To my astonishment — and consternation — he backed off. For once in his life, he had been hurt.
"It's me. It's me" he kept on saying to his old friend. So, when I told him he could take the picture, relief flooded his face until he gradually realised he couldn't take a shot of . . . himself . . . since he was the one getting the Big Red Book.