Phwoarr. How to Report on the Troubles While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink

Well, well. It appears that fusty old Colonel Myers - he of the prissy Edwardian prose and antique patrician values - rocked out with his cock out for much of the 1970s. Looking like a cross between Jim McCann on a stint with the Dubliners and a six foot public school beef injection, Kevin "Shagger" Myers was able to play fast and loose with the ladies right across the sectarian divide. And they loved it.

Hard-man republicans annoyed by Kevin's attempts over the last two decades to get up their noses would do well to reflect that at least he's discontinued his '70s hobby of getting up their women.

For it transpires that the Colonel spent much of the decade in the nip, "nakedly" sequestered under the beds or behind the wardrobes of a lush cast of classic '70s dolly birds straight out of an episode of Minder. Night after night, Caoimghín came and went through their windows and down their drainpipes, like a cheeky Irish version of Robin "Confessions of a Window Cleaner" Askwith, at the heart-stopping sound of burly paramilitary husbands slotting unexpected keys into front doors and dum-dum rounds into Webleys.

"Reporting the Troubles", this weekend's Sunday Times breathlessly explains, "was a deadly game laced with as much casual - and sometimes dangerous - sex as any red-blooded journalist could handle, according to Kevin [McDonald Fraser] Myers in his new book, Watching the Door". And with one eye on the door and the other on the magnificent, quivering breasts of the married conquests straddling his war-weary bones, Shagger engaged in a Rake's Progress of "such galant cross-community endeavours [that] peace was surely at hand". Nobly indifferent to the hot-house sectarian atmosphere of the time, the Sexy Pimpernel's palid arse was as likely to be seen lamping into the night down the Falls as the Shankill having emerged from a bit of the old flagrante with a Taig or Prod.

In fact, it seems Shagger Myers was the one thing on which community defenders on both sides agreed. Wherever the Colonel found himself sinking a restorative post-coital libation, be it seedy nationalist pub or squalid loyalist drinking den, the patrons had one thing in mind. To nut the bastard before he reduced the entire province to a vast montessori of mop-headed mini Myerses.

“They’re going to nut you,” he whispered. “The guns have just arrived. Do as I say or you’re dead. Slip out of the side door there. Get behind my car. Do not move until I come out. Now GO!” Instantly sober, my fly still open, I turned and walked out of the side door on to the street, where I hid on the far side of Bob’s taxi, gazing through its windows at the pub door. The two young men ran out with revolvers in their hands. They scouted immediately around them, but, just feet away, still missed me.

Later, in a confessionally distinct part of town:

...I visited another city centre pub with a few friends. The IRA leader known as the Fruitcake was there with a woman known as the Black Widow because of the power she had derived from her marriage to a now-dead IRA leader.

I was enjoying myself when a stranger came over and whispered that the Black Widow and the Fruitcake were arranging to give me a hammering, and that I should get out. I didn’t ask why. This was Belfast. That was why. Flanked by my friends, I got to the door before my would-be ambushers were aware of my escape. They ran after me, with the Black Widow in their wake, screeching “Kill him!”.

Fortunately, they didn't succeed and the Colonel lived to shag another day.

While I think we can discount this particular gent as Kevin's 1970s loin fruit, does anyone know what Hugh Green looks like?