LOOK at this, nearly half the year gone. The butterfly floats in upon the sunbeam, and the fair tanned face of June, the nomad gypsy, laughs above her widespread wares, the while she tells the farmers' fortunes in the fields, and quaffs the water from the spider peopled wells.

Thanks Frankie Ledwidge, I couldn't have put it better myself.

A letter writer tells us that "the greatest wish of the cure d'Ars was for the simple faith of a Breton peasant woman.

This is a total mystery to me. If there is indeed a cure d'Ars, what (pray) is the ailment?

Oh all right, not very funny. The writer means the cure d'Ars, Saint Jean Baptiste Marie Vianney. My own feeling is that the cures greatest wish was that the devil, whom he accused of repeatedly plaguing him, would lay off, and cease setting fire to his bed. Also perhaps that he might get a little time off from the 12 to 15 hours spent daily in the confessional (the right side of the box), the price of his fame at the time.

Anyway, I am only going by hearsay, but it seems the cure though a huge administrative success (no housekeeper either, I might add), was not a formally educated man. It is likely his faith was little more complicated that that of the unspecified Breton peasant woman. And in my experience it is only those whose faith, or expression of faith, is wildly sophisticated who long for simplicity of belief. Those of us neither here nor there, torn between crazed paradisical imaginings and atavistic fear of eternal damnation (depending on the time of night) are the ones with the real problem. We are the oppressed middle classes in more ways than one.

Anyway. I see a lot of stuff on the letters page these days about white elephants. So many of these have been identified by various readers that there must be enough for a zoo they could be installed with the sacred cows identified by another writer as including the Irish language, the Roman Catholic Church and the farmers (some overlapping here).

There is enough in the above paragraph to form the basis for a Class Four "humorous article" and I offer the notion free of copyright.

But look. This write down stuff is a waste of time and I don't know why it didn't dawn on me until now. Stand up comedy is where it's at and I am going into it the first chance I get. It has more immediacy, more street cred, more PC status, more youth, more bravado, more payback, more sex appeal.

I am going to cog some stuff from the wonderful world of stand up comedy just to show you what you missed, unless you actually attended the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival in Kilkenny or read the report in yesterday's paper.

There was an American female comic on stage and she said. "You know that phrase about men seldom making passes at girls who wear glasses well, most men I know would f** a tree".

Talent? Humour? Well lookit. Pardon me while I wipe the tears from my eyes.

Sean Hughes apparently talked about how the more you drink the more ugly people become really attractive and how you're so dehydrated the next morning you swig from a bottle of contact lens cleaner because you're too wrecked to make the walk to the kitchen.

What a hilarious chord that strikes for us long time macho drinkers who know how impressive hangover stories are and how they reflect so well on us and how when you laugh at such stories you show you are one of the lads too because we share a common deep life experience alien to all non drinking nerds and bores and dreary out of touch people who think sobriety is kind of OK sometimes.

"Acclaimed" American comic Kathleen Madigan talked about aliens and the people they meet when they first land. "It always seems to be that the first experience of the human race those poor aliens have is some dumb f** man in overalls who has no teeth and who answers to the name of Billy Joe".

I mean (as they say at these gigs), "some dumb f** man in overalls". Like, working class. Like, stupid. And of course Kathleen has no need of asterisks (hard to pronounce anyway) and is a big no nonsense girl able to say the F word loud and clear and get a loud laugh from an audience too cool, or perhaps nervous, to respond otherwise.

I need hardly tell you the whole thing is an art form and that any Irish who practise it are by definition brilliant, astute, needle sharp, button cute.