TALK IS CHEAP, UNLESS IT’S PILLOW TALK

■ IN Barbara Amiel’s (pictured) deliciously scandalous memoir Friends and Enemies – which has gone straight to the top of my Christmas wish list after it was serialised in this paper last week – she confesses to the eyewatering sums she spent on bed linen in an exclusive New York store. The sales lady saw her coming, she reckoned, and before she knew it, she’d spent a fortune on sheets and pillowcases – at around €10,000 a set, and at least two sets apiece for each of the 12 bedrooms in her various homes. With the revelation yesterday that the University of Limerick spent almost €4,000 on bed linen for its outgoing president Dr Des Fitzgerald, including €800 on pillow cases alone, in Brown Thomas’s exclusive Bottom Drawer, it seems that canny New York sales lady may have relocated.