BRITAIN, it seems, is drowning in a vale of tears. One after another, in the run-up to their general election, British politicians are lining up to emote in public. Never before have so many cried so easily, so openly and so often.

WITH perhaps 50,000 Muslims now living in Ireland, it’s imperative we find a modus vivendi. No one pretends it’s going to be easy but there is no alternative to trying.

IT’S 125 years old this year and if some reports are to be believed, the Orange Card is still the one the British Tories feel should be played. It was Sir Randolph Churchill, Winston’s father, who coined the phrase in the aftermath of the 1885 election and it continues to have a chilly resonance for nationalists.

WHO will ever forget January 20, 2009? In America and around the world, it was truly a great day. It shouldn’t have mattered but for someone of colour to assume leadership of what we used to call the “free world” counted for quite a lot.

THE news from Haiti is always terrible. No Haitian news doesn’t mean good Haitian news, merely that the long, slow Haitian catastrophe is continuing as usual.

ARE those Northerners sick, you might well ask? Their vital political institutions might be on the brink of collapse and what are they doing? Laughing their heads off, that’s what.

HE WAS only little – about two, I would say – and a bit scruffy, his feet barely touching the floor as he was dragged along the Tesco aisle by his mother who was carrying a shopping basket and also pushing a buggy containing a younger brother or sister. She let him go for a minute, distracted by the choice of soft drinks, and he sat down and started to pull plastic bottles of mineral water off the lowest shelf.

I LIKE to think I’m not old enough to play golf but my youngest brother has been fascinated and obsessed with it from an early age, so that excuse won’t wash.

TOMORROW and on Friday we will brave the busiest travelling days of the year to be with our families, or they come to us depending on whose turn it is to host. It’s as if the whole country stands up in a mass game of musical chairs, everyone scrambling to land somewhere, somehow at a table with a turkey and a plum pudding.

AS the Taoiseach prepares to leave for Copenhagen, we are told there are only a few hours left in which to save the planet. For all that is at stake though — entire nations vanishing and millions losing their homes to rising seas — I suspect the read-out from the conference-of-all-conferences will be rather less intently followed than, say, last week’s budget or even the X Factor result, come to think of it.