ONE minute you’re cock of the walk, next you’re a feather duster.

And sometimes you're always a cock.

The swings and roundabouts of our three score and ten have been a source of inspiration for philosophers and thinkers since Ug killed his first woolly mammoth and then ripped his best fur leotard on a tusk.

Somewhere in Donaghadee, Master Jamie Bryson must be considering the vicissitudes of the loyal life as he bitterly observes his erstwhile pals bringing the concept of Doing a Lundy to undreamt-of new levels. Paul Givan doing the Waves of Tory in the playground of a bunscoil and Emma Little-Pengelly playing camogie where I grew up broke him – there’s no other way of putting it. The frequency of his increasingly demented missives can never be a reliable indicator of where My Cousin Binny is on the outrage spectrum, as Rippin’ It is his factory setting. But the end of his friendship with Stephen Nolan, Circus Master of the Former Biggest Show in the Non-Existent Country, was proof positive that Jamie’s on Defcon 1 and liable at any minute to deploy his Baltic Fleet.

When once Steeky sent Christmas cards of himself dressed as a fairy to North Down, the deposed King of Morning Radio is now entertaining guests keen to point out Jamie’s central part in the Irish Sea border debacle. And Eddie the Legal doesn't like it a bit.

“Another 20 mins for a DUP Protocol implementing Minister on Stephen Nolan to do propaganda,” wailed the former taxi dispatcher and doorman wrangler on Twitter, “and not a solitary word of challenge” – i.e. "I wasn't invited on."

Blinking through the tears he continued: “Sad days indeed when the DUP have such a free hand not just on Nolan, but in most of the media.”

The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, The Spice Girls, Dean Martin and Gerry Lewis, The Jam, Pink Floyd. Fallings-out behind the velvet rope are two-a-penny, but this parting of the ways is the most devastating to hit Our Wee Country since Edwin Poots threw Arlene Foster under the Glider in order to try out the big job for day or two. Doubtless there’ll be a BBC4 documentary in years to come on beautiful 12-year friendship savagely ended in a perfect Protestant storm involving a packet of sausages and a Louboutin Lundy.

Bangers and Sash. They can have that one for free.

Scappaticci? Sorry, I don't know anything, but I know plenty who do

IT'S not often I get, like, really angry about the media in this charming little corner of Paradise – a wry chuckle is usually the fan that cools this fevered brow. But if anyone wants a bent laptop with a shattered screen there’s one round the side of my house awaiting recycling.

The Kenova feeding frenzy that we’ve seen in the past few days is so replete with bollocks that I can summon up nothing but TUV-level fury. I have no idea what Freddie Scappaticci did or didn’t do. I think, scanning the preponderance of material (yes, I have deliberately avoided using the word evidence simply because there is none), it’s likely that he was praying on both sides of the aisle. Apart from that, I'm sayin' nathin'.

FACT-LIGHT: There has been much written and said about Kenova and Scappaticci – more's the pity
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FACT-LIGHT: There has been much written and said about Kenova and Scappaticci – more's the pity

Why? Because of the three words that journalists find it hardest to say: I don’t know. But everybody else knows. And they know everything. Or at least, that’s what their breathless coverage tells you. (FACT CHECK: They don’t; they don’t even know a tiny fraction of what happened – and, like you, they will likely never know.)

The pitch on which journalists are playing the Scappaticci game today is not the San Siro on a balmy Milan evening. It is a blasted wasteground piled high with dead and broken people and the rubble of grieving families’ nightmares and hopes. And the playing field has been designed and laid out by the British state which is looking on and smiling coldly from the corporate seats. I could extend this already stretched analogy by saying that the various arms of state intelligence played journalists off the pitch over 25 years of conflict, but the fact is that the media here generally didn’t bother turning up for the match.

A Fourth Estate Few – the best of them – tried but proved no match for a British state so resource-rich and adept at the 'Black Arts' that the Downing Street letterhead should be a pentagram. The bulk of them sat downing doubles in the bar of the Europa chatting with a guy called Nigel wearing a green jumper with patches on the elbows or smoking in the newsroom, waiting to move about the words on the latest NIO press release before putting their byline on it. And the useless, toxic sludge produced by that baleful relationship is now the journalistic record, to be consulted by historians and students for centuries to come.   

Just days ago, the head of the BBC in the 1960s said BBCNI was back then run by “the bloody Protestants” and was responsible for covering up the truth about the rancid bigotry of the Stormont regime. My parents and many others considered the BBC reasonable and credible, whereas they saw the Belfast Telegraph and the News Letter for the honest Loyal Ulster stenographers they were. But the local BBC let my parents down simply because they were Catholics by not telling the truth about what was happening to Catholics. Was BBCNI, whose shameful lies of omission were one of the reasons for our descent into conflict, fit for purpose when the guns and bombs came out? Had it flipped from being an apologist for a one-party unionist state in August 1969 to a fearless seeker of truth by September? Believe that and I’ve a bridge across the Irish Sea to sell you.

Journalists aren’t reporting the truth about Stakeknife or the IRA or the British state today. They’re picking the pockets and pulling the boots off the dead like medieval peasants after a battle and presenting their booty to you as news. And that’s a grim tableau that pleases only one protagonist in this lethal Kenova comedy.

My name is Robin Livingstone and I’m proud today to say that I know nothing.

Having your cake and beating it

“I’M a cake and a pudding.”

Not me, lest you reckon the heady buzz of Michelle and Emma playing camogie 50 metres from one of my favourite childhood rioting spots has gone to my noggin.

“Try me with custard.”

No, that’s not some weird boudoir fetish I’ve learned of from a C4 documentary or the trial of a Tory minister.

The bald statement and the coquettish suggestion cited above are in fact to be found on the wrapper of  a McVitie's Jamaica Ginger Cake, one of which I picked up on a whim as I strolled the aisles of my local local Spar wondering whether to go back and get that Danish I'd passed up a couple of minutes earlier.

HOLY GOLDEN COW! A McVities Ginger Cake brought the memories flooding back
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HOLY GOLDEN COW! A McVities Ginger Cake brought the memories flooding back

It was a whim driven by nostalgia, as whims so often are, because my oul’ da loved nothing better with a mug of tea than a slice of McVitie’s Ginger Cake – and now I’m quite partial to it too. Not to the extent my father was; truth is, I can’t remember the last time I’d had a slice.

The key difference between father and son when it comes to this particular delicacy is that Archie used to smother his cake with Golden Cow butter. (In a nod to International Women’s Day, I should point out the truth: that my father never buttered anything in his life – my mother did it for him, just as she did everything else.)

Me? I like it dry, or should I say sans addition, because it’s not dry to begin with, is it? It’s described on the wrapper as a ‘Sticky Pudding Cake’ and whereas if you squeezed a slice of Madeira cake between your fingers it would crumble to bits, you do the same with a ginger cake and it’ll simply flatten out.

As I so often do, I asked the Twitter throng which side they were on in the Battle of the Teatime Treat and buttered ginger cake won hands-down. 

So my oul’ lad’s got one over on me again – and he’s not even here. Hope he’s enjoying his win somewhere as much as he enjoyed his buttered McVitie’s.