My friend Catherine used to go on the continent every year. Spain, of course, like almost every Irish person who owned a passport at a time when most didn't. She'd come back to school with photos of her mother pouring wine down her throat from a crazy looking spouted carafe. As far as I can recall, we didn't have wine in Ireland at the time, let alone crazy spouted carafes. In her house, she had a poster of a bullfight with her brother's name on it.

She also had a massive picture of Bruce Lee on her living room wall and the first music centre I'd ever seen. It was the size of a coffin. This was the kind of lifestyle you could enjoy once you'd been on the continent. My family had been to Ballybunion. We had a carpet on the wall and a set of encyclopaedias. It was no contest really.

But we also had a jigsaw which, to my young imagination, captured the very essence of the continent. Its picture was of a small harbour, probably in France or Italy, with a bijoux little cafe overlooking the moored sailing boats. All the buildings around the harbour had shutters on them and the cafe's tables were outside, just like people who'd been on the continent said they were. I would spend hours pouring over that picture, trying to peer round corners and to pick out tiny details blurred by having been cut into 500 pieces. We also, somewhat unsurprisingly, had a jigsaw in the shape of a map of Ireland.

Bunratty Castle was disproportionately huge in it and it wasn't nearly as popular in our house as the harbour one. I recently found it in my parents' attic and brought it home to my own kids. It's deeply unpopular here as well, but maybe that's because my kids have been to Spain.

They haven't been on the continent, though. Strictly speaking, the continent ceased to exist around the time that Ryanair started flying there. For the historical record, the continent was basically France, though people would pretend that Spain was on the continent in the same way that people like me now tell everyone we holiday in 'Northern Spain' in order to impress them. If you were disgustingly sophisticated you could go to Italy, which was also firmly on the continent. Nobody ever went to Germany and come to think of it, nobody ever goes now either.

But the rest of the world . . . and the elastic boundaries of Europe . . . are your lobster. Now you can get to places that you've never heard of for a few quid and the prestige of the continental traveller is gone forever. Going on the continent used to involve a considerable budget and a great deal of planning; throwing a few things in a backpack on a Friday morning and heading off to Poland for 48 hours just doesn't cut the same dash. That's why The Talented Mr Ripley is set on the continent and The Da Vinci Code isn't. And it's why those of us who studied the jigsaws but missed the boat will forever be thwarted continental travellers. I've been to a handful of European countries now and I've walked around countless picturesque harbours with tables outside. But I've never been on the continent, not really.

You know that song 'I've Been To Paradise But I've Never Been To Me'? That's me, that is.

Saving my riot shoes I'm thinking of going down to South Park, gonna burn the place to the ground. The cartoon's regular depiction of Jesus as, frankly, a mentalist is surely a slap in the po-shaped faces of Christians everywhere.

I was also considering storming the offices of Punch, the magazine that depicted my ancestors as pigs, but it went out of business a few years back, thus saving my riot shoes for greater good. On the other hand, I'm not sure I really want to be named in the history books of a future generation as an individual with an emphatic sense of humour bypass. Irish women should be commemorated for greater acts, like getting off with Michael Collins. Come to think of it, I seem to recall seeing an offensive cartoon about that somewhere. Now, where did I put my Molotov?

Cable car on the Liffey?

The proposal to run a cable car service along the Liffey might be a boost for tourism (though I've never seen anyone getting on the one in Barcelona), but its real value, surely, would be in attracting James Bond films to Ireland. I can see it now . . . Daniel or the next one (Jonathan Rhys Meyer, surely) on top of the car slugging it out with some metal-mouthed Neanderthal while the winos on the boardwalk below roar them on. If it all goes well, we might even consider holding future Dublin/Tyrone fixtures up on top. The prospect of an early bath might just cool the ardour of both sides, including the Dubs, who, lest we forget, won the game.

And then some.