WHEN Oliver Burkeman calculated how many weeks the average human being will live, he did what anyone would do when they have their own unique bit of trivia: he pestered people.

Like a child who knows something you don’t, Burkeman would ask his friends, one-by-one, to guess how many weeks they might get to be alive for.

Answers varied but were rarely close.

One person gave him a six-figure answer.

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“As I felt obliged to inform her, a fairly modest six-figure number of weeks – 310,000 – is the approximate duration of all human civilisation since the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia,” he wrote in his best-selling book.

The name of the book was the answer to the question.

Four Thousand Weeks.

That’s the average human’s lifespan.

It doesn’t seem like a lot, does it?

If you’re feeling guilty about what you’ve done, or not done, with your weeks then probably best to avoid delving too much into the story of Slaughtneil.

I’m not sure if Oliver Burkeman would have considered sitting down for two hours on a Saturday evening to watch hurling on RTÉ2 a good use of some of his precious time.

But he would have appreciated some of the layers beneath the Derry club’s win over Cushendall in an inspirational game.

Sometimes you have to step back from the trophy haul of the last decade to appreciate what the Emmet’s have achieved.

The........

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