The Cork taxi driver hit one of those car-slowing ramps. "Oopsy daisy," said the taxi man, as my head almost went out through the roof. "Go easy," I said. "And what does oopsy daisy mean anyway?" "Dunno," said Finbar Knievel.

And I asked him if he made a habit of saying things he didn't know the meaning of. He looked at me as if I was a bit crazy, and who's to say he's not right. And yes there are some expressions that drive me mad.

We hit the next ramp so hard that had we a baby kangaroo as a passenger he would have popped straight out of his mother's pouch.

And when we arrived at Kent station the buck and bronco driver announced our touchdown with, "Rightyoh that will be 7.60." Does anyone know what rightyoh means? I don't.

He kept up the nonsense when I paid him. Instead of saying thanks he responded with "Okey dokey", which definitely doesn't mean thanks. In fact it means nothing at all.

The next stage home was by train from Cork to Tralee. This girl on the phone drove me mad with her old-fashioned talk. I wouldn't mind if she was old but she wasn't. She put 'een' at the end of quite a few words, as in, "Ah the poor crathureen." Fine if it was a real word like 'pusheen', but expressions like "She's a right little oinseacheen" went too far. And then there were about 22.6 million 'like you knows'.

What does 'like you know' mean? And then she uttered several 'whatyoumaycallits'. The two expressions were amalgamated to form a sentence of complete gibberish: "What's that I was saying again, whatyoumaycallit, likeyouknow." Oh but where are the mountains when you need them? For some reason the Paps and the Reeks failed to intercept her mobile signal and so she continued to talk in tongues for most of the journey.

There was sustained use of the words musha and wisha at the beginning of philosophic ramblings, as in "Ah sure musha you know yourself" or "Wisha she's alright at the back of it all." At the back of feckin' what? And as for musha and wisha? I haven't a clue what they mean either.

And I was transported back in time by her quaint guff to the rambling house. I could hear the spinning wheel creaking, the churn regurgitating, the cricket singing and the seanchaí boring the brains out of the ramblers with repeats.

The windows only opened so far. I couldn't jump out. And there was no sign of that handle you used to be able to pull to get the driver to stop the train.