THIS MORNING, an interviews with "Muriel" (not her real name), the Dublin bed and breakfast landlady who put up Larry Goodman for five nights during the Beef Tribunal at a cost to the State of £3,536.

But first, a word about certain purveyors of caution, hold on a minute merchants, what about what if gloomsayers, on the other hand conservatives and no little green men cold water pourers.

We go to the Olympics, bring back four medals, enjoy the hooley, but what is this (supposedly) no time for?

Complacency.

Evidence of possible life on Mars has been discovered, the implications are immense, the excitement wild, but how must science proceed?

Cautiously.

Footballer Alan Shearer now has an income of at least £30,000 a week, is one of Britain's national heroes, but what does he need to keep?

His head down.

All rather tedious, I agree. It is fairly hard to put up with these gloomy attitudes. There is little point to life (there may be none at all) if we cannot relax a little when we have reason to.

All right. I was reading about the animator Chuck Jones, creator of Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner. As a young man in art school, he apparently found himself in awe of classmates whom he thought could all draw like Da Vinci. (He may mean "Da" Vinci, the oldtimer well known on the Dingle peninsula, who helped so many of us in our early artistic careers - I am not sure). Anyway. He went home and told his uncle he couldn't take it any more - his mates all seemed to be much better artists.

The uncle asked if the teachers were good, and Chuck said that was irrelevant - "you can't make a racehorse out of a pig". The uncle agreed, but said "If you have good instructors, you can make a very fast pig." So Chuck thought: "That's what I'll be - I'll be a very, very fast pig."

I really don't understand this. I have seen recent pictures of Chuck Jones. He is not a pig, slow fast or indifferent. He does not even remotely resemble a pig. He looks as human as the next man. However, I am more interested in the uncle and his familiarity with popular sayings. If Chuck had remarked that you can't make a silk purse out of a pig's ear, it seems likely the uncle would have suggested that good instructors might be able to make perfectly dependable pigskin wallets out of pigs' ears. There may be a nugget of useful career advice in such attitudes but I am damned if I can find it.

I agree: none of this is getting us very far.

Let us see what we can learn from a story recently related to a journalist by Nicholas Roeg. The film director was in a hotel in Washington some years ago when an elderly couple came in. The woman was about 65/70, very elegantly dressed. The maitre d' showed them to their table and they ordered two cocktails and were perfectly charming. By the end of the evening they were extremely drunk, and hurling abuse - at each other. The waiter told Roeg that they sat there every day, and did the same thing every day.

The journalist noted that this was a typical Roeg anecdote, "leaving us stranded some way from the original question, but illustrating his point about the subjectivity of truth".

Now we are getting somewhere. The subjectivity of truth came up in the case of two French hoaxers recently arrested in St Malo in Brittany for mounting an exhibition composed entirely of fake Van Gogh paintings ("from private collections"). The exhibition drew about 4,000 people who paid 35 francs (about £5) each to see the 15 paintings which one policeman described as "rubbish bought in junk shops for a few hundred francs".

But most of the visitors were greatly impressed. "Stunning Van Gogh - we did not know this style" wrote one. Only one seemed unconvinced: "If this is Van Gogh, I'm the Pope."

But .. . perhaps the visitor was indeed his Eminence? There is no way we can tell. We cannot be too careful when reading superficially "ordinary" remarks deception is everywhere.

Unfortunately, now we have no space for the interview with "Muriel"(not her real name), the Dublin bed and breakfast landlady who put up Larry Goodman for five nights during the Beef Tribunal at a total cost to the State of £3,536.