POOR Pat Kenny. On his recent ramble around Moyross, he audibly gritted his teeth as some child who probably wasn't even born when Gay Byrne retired harangued him about whether he had "one for everybody in the audience".

And on Thursday, as he went walkabout in Moore Street, some oul wan wound up their conversation by solemnly intoning: "I hope you're successful", as if Pat were only starting out in this crazy business called show.

In fairness, Kitty the fishmonger wasn't just any oul wan. For one thing, she offers six fillets of plaice for a fiver. Good value, mused Pat. "It is good value, " agreed Kitty, "but the foreigners don't think it's any value. They must get their fish for nothing where they come from."

So what did she think of the "changes", asked Pat, somewhat redundantly. "Terrible. Shocking. Absolutely shocking, " said Kitty. "I'm not going to suit the foreigners, I'm going to suit the everyday Dublin people.

Admittedly, the foreigners boost up the sales but they don't give you great money.

And they look for funny kinds of fish that we've never even heard of." Like what?

"They look for shark. They wouldn't know a salmon if it jumped up and bit them. They look at you as if you have two heads."

And then, "Thanks Pat, I hope you're successful."

Maybe it's a fish thing. If Kitty doesn't see gold in them there gills, down the street, butcher Paddy Buckley has spotted the moolah to be made from the melting pot.

"Around 2001, I noticed the number of foreigners passing by so we decided to go for that market and we went out and asked them a few questions, " he told Pat. Paddy's window-board now outlines his wares in 13 different languages, and he can sell you a pig's head for 5. The foreigners like meat on the bone, and they love pork, he revealed, but it's the Irish who still buy most of the tripe.

Not sure how Ireland's Mary O'Brien felt about tripe but her alter ego Dusty Springfield certainly knew her onions when it came to belting out a tune. On Dusty In Memphis, a documentary about her greatest album in the week she was posthumously inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame, we learned that this seminal work would have been more accurately titled 'Dusty in New York', as she was so freaked out about working in the same Tennessee studio used by her soul idols that she couldn't sing a note until production was moved to NY.

Even then, she insisted on so much backing track in her headphones that she couldn't hear her own vocals, and it took a full year for her to stop hating the record.

Decades later, the album's most famous cut, 'Son of a Preacher Man', won Dusty her first ever platinum disc after Quentin Tarantino put it on the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction. Which came as a complete surprise to the woman herself, as she revealed in a previously unheard interview.

"This package showed up at the door and I thought it was something I'd ordered from a catalogue cos I'm always ordering stuff from catalogues, gadgets that I can't use and that just end up lined up on my stairs, " she recalled in that scratchy voice.

"It was this rather thin thing, didn't have a label on it, and I thought: 'What on earth did I order? A kaleidoscope or something?' And I took it out and it was this enormous poster for Pulp Fiction with this flashy disc in the middle of it . . . I was touched."

She was touched, alright . . . mostly by magic.

Speaking of celestial beings, where were you at 4.45am today? On Quantum Leap, Dr David Asher from the Armagh Observatory was telling Mary Mulvihill how the Leonid meteor shower was due to to rain down 100 shooting stars an hour around this time.

"You do want to be somewhere dark though, " he counselled, "away from artificial light."

Like in bed, perhaps?