Gail Walker

Take a look at these pictures. Look at them carefully. And if you are any sort of a person, draw some hope from it. There’s Jay Beattie, a young teenager who is living life with flair, dignity and renown, campaigning energetically for charity. He is well-known for his love of Celtic football club, often going to Celtic Park to cheer on his heroes and raise awareness of the charity Downs & Proud.

One of the few delights of getting older is that one gets to enjoy the spectacle of everything the Cool Kids rubbished back in the day becoming, over time, the very epitome of quality and taste while their own favourites descend into oblivion or, worse, ridicule.

It’s the job of relatives to let you down at a wedding. Uncle Sidney drinking the free bar dry. Brother-in-law Steve, with wispy comb-over and gravity-defying belly, trying to chat up bridesmaids a third his age.

A Cleveland, Ohio, Christmas radio station has banned the old chestnut Baby, It’s Cold Outside because it is not in tune with these #MeToo times. Yes, that Baby, It’s Cold Outside, the Frank Loesser classic covered by all and sundry, from Dolly and Rod, Lady Gaga and Joseph Gordon Levitt, Bette Midler and James Caan, to Tom Jones and Cerys Matthews and (blimey) Willie Nelson and Norah Jones.

It was one of the most moving, riveting and affirmative things I have seen on television for a long, long time. And there he was: Brian Kennedy belting out his biggest hit Life, Love And Happiness on BBC NI’s Nolan Live a few hours after having chemotherapy as part of his ongoing treatment for cancer.

DUP deputy leader Paula Bradley is quitting frontline politics to become a full-time carer for her elderly mother and father.

For an organisation striving to improve its public image, dismantle stereotypes and present a friendlier face, the Orange Order has an unerring knack for attracting PR disaster.

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.

Billy Dixon has spent decades helping everyone from health workers to politicians, sports stars and broadcasters build resilience, confidence and self-belief.

Is it any wonder Tesco bosses across the water gave their new anti-theft robots a Northern Irish accent? As years of dodgy TV dramas and films have established, if you need viewers’ blood chilled, send for an actor who can do the Belfast bark. It’s a kind of shorthand that unpleasant things are about to happen very soon.