TALKING of smiles, it’s not something you associate with lying flat on your tummy on a hospital bed.

But perhaps not every patient gets provided with the same recovery room reading.

Pain-killing injections are funny things.

Not intrinsically if you understand my meaning, more in terms of delivery.

Short on pain, long on relief. At least that’s what I told myself first time round.

And since I’ve just been back for a repeat performance, I must have been convincing.

More likely it’s down to the skill and judgement of the doctor at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary who not only delivered the appropriate dose to help me put my back into enjoying life but proved himself an expert on distraction techniques too.

He did it by sliding a copy of the Irish Times under my nose. It worked.

And not just because I’m a journalist with that addiction to news that can bore the print off everyone else.

“You’ve seen the news twice already today” say exasperated friends, when I hanker to take a peak at the latest bulletin.

“But something might have happened,” I say rather lamely. It’s a downright habit. News is compulsive. But so are good writers.

I bought books as a teenager that convinced my friends that I was on another planet. Theirs was fuelled by pounding music, mine by what I found wildly funny words.

So imagine when my iced water and blood pressure checks were accompanied by a piece published first in the 1940s by one of the greats of Irish writing, Brian O’ Nolan, known to avid readers of comic novels like me as Flann O’Brien and to readers of the Irish Times as Myles na Gopaleen.

The newspaper is re-running some of his Cruiskeen Lawn columns to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth.

And it was a typically dark and irresistible piece that I found myself drawn into – nose down.

“I happened to glance at my hands the other day and noticed they were yellow,” he begins.

“Conclusion: I am growing old (though I claim I am not yet too old to dream).”

What follows is a glorious tale, held by a single thread which is as funny as it is profound.

Funny because of the nightmarishly real scenario that he creates, profound because when you reach the end of the thread that he has woven so gloriously, you see by what simple premise it is held. And it makes you gape at the daring and the dexterity with which he writes.

It was the same vivid humour of his books, The Third Policeman, a mad satirical thriller where all the policeman are fat and of The Poor Mouth, a merciless look at Irish Life.

And once home, it sent me off to the bookshelves to pull out The Best Of Myles, a Sixties’ collection of his articles printed by Picador which kept me smiling all last week.

So thank you on all counts to the HRI’s pain management clinic team. That dose of Myles na Gopaleen was perfect.