IT was a scene straight out of some disaster movie. Last month I was taking an internal flight in India, leaving at 9pm.

TWO minutes after the BBC’s exit poll was announced last Thursday night, Iain Dale, the Conservative commentator, blogged: “Don’t panic chaps and chapesses.

COULD Northern Ireland decide the course of British politics tomorrow, after all?

HAVE the Brits finally become European, a discussion paper by the European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank asked last week?

GIVEN any thought to what you’ll be eating for dinner tonight?

AMERICANS — don’t you just love them? Actually, by and large, I do. There’s an ugly snootiness in some quarters in Ireland, and Europe more broadly, towards the US and its citizens which was never quite going to be eradicated by the election of Barack Obama. I have written as much before.

ARE you ready for Lisbon III?

THERE is nothing remotely amusing about suicide, but one story on the topic at the weekend struck me as a bit funny. According to the Sunday Independent, “29 deaths by suicide can be directly linked to the turmoil in the construction and property sector ...”

THEY might not quite constitute a “new Republic”, but Fine Gael’s proposals for constitutional reform, to be launched by Enda Kenny today, deserve to be debated seriously.

IT’S the word of the century so far. Just when the search engine launched back in 1998 became a verb — “to google” — no one quite knows, but many of us google something, anything, dozens of times a day.