Ross O'Carroll-Kelly

So we’re in Corcoran’s on the famous Boulevord de Clichy – we’re talking me, Christian, JP, Oisinn and Fionn – and I’m telling the goys why I think we’ll beat the All Blacks on Saturday and why I think it won’t even be close ? But they only want one question answered.

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I’m there, “I’d be in Paris now if things had been different,” and when I say different, I mean if my daughter hadn’t been chorged with 277 counts of criminal damage.

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I’ve never seen Sorcha so upset? And given my record as a husband, that’s a genuine achievement. She’s literally shaking with rage and whatever else is bubbling inside her, which is the reason I’m staying on the other side of the kitchen island.

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I love a crowd. Yeah, no, that’s as true of me now as it was back in my days as the best number 10 in the history of Irish schools rugby and the goy that every girl wanted to be with. I love the feeling of people staring at me with their gobs open in just, like, wonder.

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So I wake up in the hotel in Nantes to find a letter on my bedside table, which turns out to be from – yeah, no – my old  man ?

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The old man is as excited as I’ve seen him since the members of Elm Pork Golf Club voted to name the lateral water hazard on the 12th hole “the Chorles River”. It’s, like, Friday night – the night before Ireland play Romania in the opening match of the Rugby World Cup – and I’m sitting in The Connemora in Bordeaux, listening to him phone pretty much everyone he’s ever known in his entire life to tell them his so-called news.

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Sorcha is tense. Yeah, no, for her, the first day back after the school holidays is like the first day of the Six Nations for me. In other words, a matter of life and death.

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The old man looks surprisingly well for a man who’s been banged up for, like, a week and a bit. I’m sitting in the visiting room when he walks in and he’s, like, deep in conversation with another, I want to say, inmate? It’s a good, like, five minutes before he saunters over to where I’m sitting...

irishtimes.com/author/ross-ocarroll-kelly/

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I’m no stranger to seeing my old man standing in the dock accused of serious crimes – he’s Chorles O’Carrroll-Kelly, for fock’s sake – but I never thought I’d see him in court, aged seventy-whatever-he-is, chorged with the illegal possession of a fireorm.

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This is the final exclusive excerpt from Camino Royale, the new Ross O’Carroll-Kelly novel out today Thursday, August 17th.

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