Herself went for a sleepover with her saintly aunt. It was a bit traumatic for both of them. The Princess burnt her lip by applying a scalding sausage roll to it and crushed her fingers in a heavy fire door. She still has a scab on her lip but, at least she can write again. My poor sister is exhausted from it all, her niece, however, is undaunted and keen for a rematch with the door.

Perhaps in part due to her various injuries and the fact that she had stayed up until 1 the previous night on her sleepover, the Princess was an unmerciful pain when we went to the Leinster House open day. I was mildly keen to be guided round our legislature by one of the ushers who won the lottery (a syndicate won the lottery, though I understand from one of the ushers in question, it worked at 18,200 each and his share has already gone on internal plastering work at home) but the royal mood was such that we felt that it would be unwise.

I was a bit disappointed overall, I thought that there would be more in the way of family fun and less in the way of re-enactments of the debates on the Treaty. Also, I was a little surprised to see lots of vans selling random wares on Leinster Lawn (or the car park as it now is). I suppose I hadn’t really psychologically prepared myself to beat off requests for popcorn and ice cream and I am not sure about whether the marriage of politics and commerce sends out quite the right signal. We were met on arrival by a man on stilts who assured the children that there was free candy floss. Though I assured them he was joking, it was not until we had carried out an extensive search and double checked with the apologetic stilt walker that we were able to abandon the candy floss hunt. We got the children’s faces painted and called it a day.

To my intense chagrin, the event was reported in detail on the radio as I drove to do the shopping later that day (one hour in the car, the hunt for a decent supermarket nearby that is not Tesco continues unabated and entirely unsuccessfully) and everyone other than us seems to have had a spiffing time. I like other people to share my misery.