Ahhh, city life. There I was, sitting in my tin can, choking on fumes, clawing the steering wheel and gear stick - the traffic wouldn't allow me to do anything else with them - and without even a radio to fumble with, because I take it out of the car when I park in my neighbourhood and, this time, in my hurry and hassle, I forgot to put it back. Moreover, don't quote me on this, but I was probably thinking: who'd have it any other way?
I don't mean about the radio, which is of course an indispensable lifeline, connecting something with some-other-thing, etc. I'm talking about the joy of being an urban people, natural-born city-dwellers. Maybe I'm just listening skew-wiff, with a resentment/antibody to this airborne virus that keeps insisting Ireland is an agricultural country; or maybe so many of the State's broadcasters are precautiously confined to Dublin quarters at the moment. Whatever the reason, it sounded to me this week (when I got the radio back) like I was listening to the sound of the city.
It started on the bank holiday Monday, when the crew of Morning Ireland (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), deprived of a lie-in, at least granted themselves something of a lazy stretch, with a longish setpiece based on a new book about "paranoid parenting". David Hanly guided his guests amiably enough through mild disagreements about whether we're mollycoddling our kids unnecessarily and in so, doing depriving them of the wisdom and independence to be gained through adventurous, unsupervised exploration and play.
The consensus seemed to be "yeah, pretty much, but whatcha gonna do?". What struck me stronger, however, was the sense - borne perhaps of Michael McDowell's nostalgia for suburban rambling and Hanly's own boyhood Shannon-swimming in Limerick - that we were talking not about farm childhood, which used to be the standard media template for an Irish youth, but about the city sort.
It was also striking, yet again, that the unproblematic "we" of such Radio 1 discussions is middle-class, without having to say so. (Only McDowell's use of the adjective "respectable" to describe today's circumscribed kids betrayed that there might just be another kind.) Every day, thousands of young children, in this city and others, enjoy the sort of childhood wanders that "we" took for granted back in our day. How come the clear data of their countless hours of non-abduction by evil strangers is never introduced as evidence in these arguments?
Mind you, it sounds like Dublin was a pretty dangerous place 20-odd years ago. That's when archaeologists, architects and activists could be expected to come to blows around Wood Quay, where Dublin Corporation's plans to build the civic "bunkers" over extraordinary Viking archaeological sites met with passionate resistance. Marian Finucane (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday) reunited three of them on Wednesday with no reason apparent other than setting the fur flying. Sure, what better reason could you want?
These were no ordinary protagonists, but real stars of the WQ smackdown: archaeologist Pat Wallace (now National Museum director), architect Sam Stephenson (still as cross as ever on this subject) and activist Bride Rosney (now not being asked, at least on this programme, about Mary Robinson's latest moves and future plans).
All three worthies were prone to the sort of intemperateness you'd be lucky to hear on one of the Sunday-morning setpieces, and which you'd hardly expect in such a respectable retrospective item. It was quite wonderful: Rosney recalled "a multitude of divisions". And, once Wallace said the activists were wrong to think the site could be substantially preserved, Stephenson tried to enlist him to the prodevelopment side of the argument. Wallace wouldn't join him, instead crediting the protest with buying him the time to excavate the site more or less properly, and he dissed Stephenson with regal style in the process: "This is how Sam has always won the day: divida et impera".
The Belacquiad (RTE Radio 1, Wednesday) was another piece of urban archaeology. Presumably programmed as a piece of support for the Beckett on Film series showing on RTE television, this documentary purported to excavate Beckett's early material and its relationship to Dublin. In the course of the programme, Barry McGovern gains some small compensation for starring in only one of the Beckett movies by being restored to his traditional role as Reader of the Works.
And then some. This was McGovern's show, with gargantuan extracts from Beckett's Joycean tracing of Belacqua's trek through the grocers and kitchens of 1920s Dublin. That was fine - well, OK - but it would have been better being presented that way, in a book slot (with a lit-crit intro, to be sure), rather than wearing a half-hearted documentary disguise.
Kirsty MacColl's Cuba (BBC Radio 2, Wednesday) might have been one of those eminently forgettable Radio 2 documentaries, in which a "name" snoozes his or her way through a lame script, and if you're lucky you're left with more or less the same level of information about the subject that you started with. (If you're unlucky, you've picked up a few inaccurate titbits with which to confuse your friends.)
This eight-part series, however, took on a different significance before it ever went on the air. Just days before part one was due for broadcast, its charming and talented presenter was killed in an appalling holiday accident - not in her beloved Cuba, but in Mexico.
Anyway, she never finished this final episode of the programme, looking at Cuba as a tourist destination. She's there, and lovely and natural too, as an interviewer, but presenting duties have been taken over by her producer, Jan Fairly.
This is one of those pluggy programmes in which, like a celebrity interviewed by Hello!, all the country's well-publicised problems are firmly in the past. So what about the casual prostitution which has become the stuff of many Europeans' "sun, sea and sex" holidays in Cuba? "The situation was certainly exaggerated and anyway was soon calmed down by the authorities," Fairly assures us.
The Cuban economy is happily dependent on tourism now, it seems. Isn't that great? It can't be long before the real-life equivalents of Don Michael Corleone move back into the hotels they so memorably fled on New Year's Eve, 1958-59. Perhaps they have already.
So, friendly, warm, witty, hospitable, unspoiled, with wall-to-wall great music and fruit that actually has a flavour. Viva Cuba . . . Libre?
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie