WHEN you've lived all your life in Norn Iron, you accept that people can often take a different view on the same set of events, depending on their background.
Thus official reports that reveal collusion between the RUC and loyalist paramilitaries in the murder of innocent Catholics become, to the other side, 'a few bad apples' who spoil the image of a courageous organisation.
And those who have nothing but a good experience of the security forces are entitled to take that view. Though a wise person should look at the experience of others too.
But it takes some warped thinking to look at the Police Ombudsman's report on the Sean Graham's massacre and other loyalist murders, and decide, as the News Letter did on its front page, to "revisit the murders of some of the men believed to be responsible".
So we learn, from quotes from Lost Lives, that one of the presumed killers, Joe Bratty, was tough and aggressive, but also "vulnerable and impressionable", and was not "a born killer". They rarely are.
How strange to focus on the men who pulled the trigger, not the victims themselves - five people, from a pensioner to a 15-year-old boy in a bookies' shop, a mother of two in her own living room, a taxi driver and a takeaway delivery man, among them.
I was at the scene shortly after the Ormeau shootings. I still remember a teenage boy standing ashen-faced outside the bookies shop.
"He's waiting for his twin to be brought out," a man told me. "But all the wounded have already been taken away."
It was 18-year-old Martin Magee, whose twin Peter was among the dead. He died from liver disease aged 43. Friends said he never recovered from his brother's death.
Nor did Kathleen Kennedy, the mother of another victim, 15-year-old James Kennedy. She died just two years later, broken-hearted.
Her husband said: "The bullets that killed James didn't just travel in distance, they travelled in time. Some of the bullets never stopped travelling."
There will be no future for this country until people actually reflect on the experience and pain of others.
And that also applies to the sort of people who regularly desecrate the memorial to the young Scottish soldiers at Ligoniel, or destroy the wall remembering all the dead between 1916 and 1923 at Glasnevin cemetery.
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IT would be hard for satirists to top what passes for politics at Westminster.
After dumping half of his staff to take the blame off himself for the Downing Street parties, BoJo appointed a new spin doctor, Guto Harri, from his time as London mayor.
And if you thought there was really a prospect of this PM taking the job seriously, then consider what Harri, a fluent Welsh speaker, said in an interview with a Welsh language website after he got the job.
Damning with the faintest of praise, he said Johnson "wasn't a complete clown" and then revealed how the PM burst into the Gloria Gaynor song I Will Survive when Harri asked about his future.
Yes. The country is clearly in safe hands. The PM can stay on to smear Keir Starmer over the Jimmy Savile case, leading to a bunch of anti-vax numpties surrounding the Labour leader, shouting abuse and forcing him to take refuge in a police car.
And yet the DUP, sulking now that their Stormont mini-drama has not caused a ripple of interest in the 'mainland', are demanding that Johnson rushes over here to solve the crisis.
Ian Og tells a half-empty Commons chamber that the PM should break his silence, belatedly recognising that there may be something to the fears that the Conservative government is actually an English nationalist party.
And in other news, the Pope is a Catholic.
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I HAVE long wondered why Victoria Beckham's face was always tripping her.
Married to a rich, handsome ex-footballer, with a successful career and healthy children, yet she is never seen looking anything but miserable. Now we know why.
In a podcast, her husband has revealed she has been eating the same meal for 25 years - grilled fish and steamed vegetables.
Rather tragically he added that the only time she had eaten the same thing as him was the "amazing" time when she was pregnant with daughter Harper and had taken something off his plate.
"It was one of my favourite evenings. I can't remember what it was, but I know she's never eaten it since."
Get that woman a gravy chip.
