Emissions/Kilian Doyle: I was up in Belfast last week, ostensibly covering the war summit between George W Bush and the other chap from Britain, who, quite frankly, should know better. It was all helicopters, cavalcades, CIA agents in the bushes, red carpets, the lot. Bertie even muscled in so he could brag in the pub. ("Oi've made it lads, Oi've touched greatness!")
It all sounds very glamorous, but the reality was very different. I was left standing in a car park for two days, huddled with the rest of the media circus, cursing our lowly status and the fact we weren't in the luxurious surrounds of Hillsborough Castle with the hacks hand-picked by London and Washington.
Now, this column is not about car parks. One supermarket car-park is much the same as any other. (Although this one was populated with a bizarre mix of bedraggled anti-war protesters, Northern politicians, goateed minders, hard-as-nails loyalist women, Abu Dhabi TV crews and a dancing priest in a violently green miniskirt.)
It's about them and us. (Not the sectarian them and us - I don't give a fiddler's what foot you kick with, as long as you don't use it to kick me.) I'm talking about the vehicular them and us.
See, motorists in the North have lorded it over us for many a year now, with their cheap petrol and fancy roads. I remember a time when you could tell you were in the North just by looking at the surface your were driving along - if it was smooth and black and straight, you were there. If it was as pockmarked as the facade of a Baghdad presidential palace, you were still in the Republic. Simple.
There was often such a demarcation in road quality at the Border that it looked like the northern side had been waxed, bikini-style, removing all the cowpats and surface muck in the process.
The spotty 17-year-old British army private from Doncaster, reeking of cheap aftershave and stale lager as he pointed a gun at you, tended to give the game away too, but that's another story. It's not so easy now, not simply because that self-same kid is now 25 and pointing his gun at Iraqi families instead, but because we've pretty much caught up in the construction stakes.
The place is also absolutely packed with boy racers. There are more stupid neon strips per square mile in west Belfast than Las Vegas. But the main difference is that they all drive like complete loons.
After a particularly miserable night standing around the lovely car-park, I jumped into a taxi, heading the 10 miles up the motorway to Belfast. No sooner had we got going, than I realised the maniac behind the wheel was travelling at least ninety. Even the PSNI officers in the line of Land Rovers we overtook in a blaze of sparks were surprised. Not that they bothered chasing.
If that wasn't bad enough, some mentalist passed us ON THE INSIDE as if we were standing still. I looked at our speedometer in utter disbelief. It was pointed, unwavering, at 95.
"Joyriders," the automaton behind the wheel said, his voice as deadpan as if he was reading entries from the phonebook. "They'll get theirs when the boys get their hands on them," he added, slightly more animated. I didn't press him for details. It was one of those "if I tell you, I'll have to kill you" moments.
Not that so-called "joyriding" is confined to the North, mind. Where I live in Dublin, local idiots use other people's cars like the rest of us use buses. Except they don't have to wait so long for them or carry the exact change. They just "Smash'n'Go".
There's so much broken glass around it's like walking up to the Pearly Gates of Heaven on a diamond-covered pathway. Except there's no avenging angels. They're all up in Belfast, "disciplining" car thieves.