Ross O'Carroll - Kelly:How's a goy supposed to score in St Tropez when the beach is crawling with steroid junkies? Maybe using a shark as bait wasn't such a good idea
Miracles - it's like, when do they ever happen? I mean, JP would have been tracking that more than the rest of us, having spent two years in Maynooth, but of course religion has been, like, the great unmentionable since that time he went chicken oriental.
It has to be said, these open training sessions are a good idea. I know a thing or two about a thing or two, and I can tell you this - coming off a beating like last weekend, having two or three hundred French schoolgirls staring at you with their mouths open can do wonders for the old self-esteem.
"Four tries," I hear myself go, "against Orgentina - you'd have to say we're heading home on Monday."
"Miracles happen," someone goes.
It's Lorraine, the Limerick bird that Oisinn pulled last weekend in St Tropez. The usual fare for him - horrendous, in other words. Looks like she's been hit in the face with a bag of bent euros.
"What about the miracle of Gloucester?" she goes and I'm like, "That'd depend on your point of view. I actually prayed that Munster wouldn't get that fourth try - and they did. So it was, like, no miracle for me. It was, like, the opposite and shit?"
Oisinn's looking at me as if to say, dude, quit while you're ahead. She already hates my guts for singing "the three proud provinces of Ireland" in Kitty O'Shea's last night.
"I still say you should get somebody to look at that arm," she goes. Typical nurse. "You're terribly pale, Ross." I am feeling a bit weak actually, though I'm not going to admit that.
I'm like, "Hey, I've had way worse than this." The orm - I probably should explain why it's bandaged up, because it's bound to become a big story, especially with another Six Nations around the corner.
We were on, like, a major downer after the France game, roysh, so me and the goys decided to hit St Tropez, where Fionn's old pair have, like, an aportment. It has to be said, roysh, it's some spot down there - we're talking sun, sea and Celia Holman everywhere you look.
The only drawback, you'd have to say, is the competition - we're talking serious steroid junkies here, with bodies so brown they look like they've been swimming next to the sewage effluent. It'd take a lot to make me feel inadequate but two hours on the beach and not a single female's given me a second George Hook.
I latched on to this total cracker - the spit of Hayden Panettiere - and I was stood over her while she was sunbathing, telling her that, as an outhalf myself, I know a little bit of what Ronan O'Gara's going through, which is why I sent him a text after the match, reminding him that form is temporary, but class is permanent, and he'll always be a hero to me and millions of others.
Turns out she's Spanish - she wouldn't know Rog if she fell over him in the bookies - but she did tell me to move because I was blocking her sun and then some dude who looked like he'd been held down and stuffed with watermelons came over and gave me a look that said, basically, beat it.
I took my red cord like a man, faced the walk of shame back to the goys and we ended up hitting this, like, seafood restaurant, right on the beachfront, to talk about the fact that, after seven or eight years out of rugby, we weren't the young gods we used to be.
Then - after four or five looseners, of course - Oisinn had an idea.
The restaurant had all these dead fish, roysh, laid out on crushed ice in this, like, display case at the front - and right in the middle was this, like, baby sharpnose shark. "What we need to do," he went, suddenly stuffing it up his shirt, "is create some kind of diversion. Come on . . ."
We followed him back down the beach and the next thing we're all at the water's edge and Oisinn's going, "Ross, give me your orm," and before I had a chance to go, "Er - as in why?" he grabbed it and clamped the shark's mouth around it.
He was like, "Quit struggling. It's dead - it can't hurt you. Look, birds love a hero - you of all people should know that." The goy knows what buttons to press with me.
"I'm just going to apply a little bit of pressure," he went, "just to leave a mark. Then you crack on you're wrestling with it. Honestly, Ross, in half an hour, you're going to be fighting the birds off with a speargun."
"Okay," I went, still a bit Scooby Dubious about this as he laid my orm down in, like, a foot of water. I was like, "But just barely break the skin . . ." This, like, evil smile crossed his face. He jumped, like, three feet in the air and suddenly eighteen stone of pure lard down on top of the shark's head.
It was, like, me who screamed first. Then I was joined by a couple of hundred others, most of them women and children, having total conniptions at the sight of me, thrashing about in the water, blood everywhere and a shark literally locked onto my orm.
It was hilarious now looking back on it now.
My neck is suddenly itchy and I'm scratching like a man on the Luas red line.
"Thanks for the text," I hear a voice go. I turn around and it's Rog himself. Then he's suddenly squinting his eyes at me, going, "Are you feeling okay, boy?" I'm like, "Me? Cool as a bucket of free beer." But I'm not. I'm feeling seriously Moby here.
"Jesus, look at his neck," I hear Lorraine go. "Ross, you've got septicaemia," and that's the last thing I hear before I feel the ground reach up and hit me full in the face.
I wake up in a hospital somewhere in Paris, with the goys around the bed, struggling not to laugh in my face.
"They might be able to save the arm," JP goes. "If you believe in miracles, that is."