LAST Saturday I conducted an auction in the Mullingar Park Hotel at a fundraiser for an MRI scanner in Mullingar Hospital. This was run by the Murphy family, who are well known in Westmeath farming circles, and it was to mark what would have been the 40th birthday of their son Johnny, who died in 2011.

The charity auction saw a number of great items, finishing off with a donkey, which made €3,000. The guest speaker was RTE rugby pundit Brent Pope, about who many remarked how much taller and thinner he was in real life than on the television or in his photograph in the programme. Regrettably they did not say the same about the auctioneer.

At the beginning of this month I read one story that I initially assumed to be an April Fool. The High Court had awarded damages of €20,000 to a woman who banged her knee against the leg of a table while sitting down to dinner in the hotel’s restaurant.

This took place in March 2011 and the victim claimed that the leg, which was concealed by a table cloth, constituted “a trap”. This was negligence on the part of the hotel owners, because nobody warned her that a leg might be hidden behind the table cloth. I can only imagine that her family did not have a close association with National Hunt racing.

WOODWORM

If a guest at Ballinlough was to connect with a table leg, I rather fear that centuries of woodworm would mean that the table’s leg would be more likely to suffer irreparable injury than the human one.

Nevertheless I was tempted to pull my chair in at full speed that evening, in the hope that I too could connect with a table leg at sufficient velocity. Indeed, the table itself would have been an interesting lot in the auction, as a sort of modern day genie’s lamp.

Happily the evening raised a great deal of money for a most worthy cause.