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1 Let’s start with one wish that definitely will come true — happily 2024 will bring the much anticipated second season of the brilliant BBC crime drama Blue Lights, about rookie PSNI officers on the beat in Belfast.
What is it with Christmas this year? Where is the magic and sparkle and anticipation? Instead many seem braced as it hurtles towards them, like a hollow husk of a thing, emptied out of all its promise and joy and hope.
No matter what new and innovative technology arrives, it seems Northern Ireland still applies the oldest practices in the book — wipe it, lose it, dump it, wreck it. Stormont ministers and senior civil servants during the Covid crisis have since had their government-issued electronic devices wiped, thus erasing all official information amassed in discussions via WhatsApp — a scandal exposed when the UK Covid Inquiry wanted to examine the data.
In the unfortunate event of you being murdered, it is likely that your face will be more recognisable to the general public than anybody convicted of killing you. That’s not how it is in other places, but it’s how it works in Northern Ireland.
The little item this week about how the congregation of Darkley Gospel Hall had raised a collection to help the Grimley family in south Armagh shone a light on the huge capacity among our people to reach out and across even when we are at our most damaged and our most hurt.