I was going to write about Big Brother this week. I was going to write about the dread and excitement that bubble to the surface as us addicts gear up for the seventh (seventh!) summer of watching housemates irritate, amuse, repulse, abuse and occasionally fall in love with each other, writes Róisín Ingle.
The dread comes from the knowledge that if we sit down to watch the opening episode - the one that goes out on Thursday night, showing those lucky, lucky people enter the house - we will be hooked for the next 13 weeks. (13! Weeks!) That's the way it is round our house. And, yes, I know the television has an off button. I just can't seem to find it when Big Brother comes around.
The excitement in the pit of my stomach is caused by the endless array of unknowable Big Brother elements. Will any of the contestants be Irish? Will Davina McCall ever stop shouting? Will a "celebrity" be put into the mix of "normal" people, in a reverse Chantelle? Will I manage not to watch the live stream and stick to the nightly recorded programmes? Will I what?
I was also going to write about my little brother's Big Brother-related brush with the tabloids. He is happily married now, but I don't think he'll mind me revealing that, as a teenager, he had a brief romantic encounter with the housemate known as Mary the Irish Witch, who was booted off the show in the early stages last year, mainly for being too spooky and having scary eyes. Once, when they were snogging some time back in the late 1980s, Mary asked my brother to bite her neck. The bro paid off his Visa bill thanks to this salacious bite-and-tell story, which he sold to an Irish red-top paper. Fangs for the memory, said the headline. Mary, who was asked about it when she came out of the house, didn't seem to mind.
I was going to write about having a bit of a hefty Visa bill myself at the moment. About how getting an interest-only mortgage for three years seemed like a good idea at the time but it's a sad day when the three years are up and you are suddenly paying the mortgage and the interest. I was going to write about my hope that one of my past conquests might turn up on Big Brother. I'd say that story would be worth a few grand, at least, and the funds would make up for my disappointing lack of an SSIA.
So I was going to write about all this, but then, just as I was getting started, an attractive young woman came to interview me for a radio programme. When she arrived at the office I showed her to what used to be the smoking room, and we did the interview.
Then, on our way down in the lift, she hit me with it. "Were you ever, you know, with a boy in Derry?" she said, all innocent. She stressed the with, as in: "Were you ever, you know, with a boy in Derry?" I could feel the heat rising at the back of my neck and instinctively reached for my notebook to cover my face. Past conquests appearing on Big Brother was one thing; the ghost of one of them cornering me in the lift at work was quite another.
Thoughts flashed through my mind in the horrible seconds that followed. (I think very fast and in italics when I am panicking.)
Argh! Who did I ever get off with in Derry? Jesus. It must have been that boy - quite cute, really, now that I think about it - who I met when I was covering the people of Derry's response to the Belfast Agreement. It was Holy Thursday.
Argh! Now I remember. I met him in one of those pubs on that very steep street named after a boat. Canoe Street? Dinghy Street? Ah, Ship Street. And because I was bored with asking people who didn't seem to care about the Agreement, and because he was gorgeous, I started chatting to him, and then, because he was a poor student and I had loads of sterling, I started buying him pints.
He liked cider. So did I. Lovely dark hair. Long eyelashes. Argh! I had been given a posh suite in a local hotel. Felt it would be a shame to waste it. He went and got his guitar from his house. Oh my God! I met his parents! Back in the hotel. He sang a lot of Oasis songs. Other stuff happened that I must have blocked out.
Then it was morning. Oh. Then I rang my husband to say I'd be back later that day. Your husband, he said, appalled. (What? We were on the verge of splitting up!) Then he left. Argh!
I didn't say any of this to the nice radio woman, of course. "Have you been with a boy from Derry?" she said.
"Might have," I replied, thinking I could still get away with it.
"It's just he's my boyfriend," she said "He told me to say hi."
Oh. Right. Hi, Brian.