Maybe I'd had a bit of an early start. Not only was I in Belfast at 10am, even though I had been in London when I woke up, but I decided to make the most of my time waiting for a cab by checking in for tomorrow's flight home.
I saw the Flybe machines and walked over to them and fed in the code from my piece of paper. But the machine said it had no record of my reservation. Had I put in the wrong letter or number somewhere due to sleepiness? I tried again, typing carefully, but got the same result. Had the production company not booked the flight they promised? Or was I trying to check in too early. I tried once again and then, when the machine got annoyed with me and spewed out a piece of paper telling me to talk to a representative of Flybe headed to the desk to see if they could sort out what was going on.
The girl I spoke to seemed a bit confused. She didn't know why my booking was not showing up and wanted to talk to one of her colleagues for advice, but they were all busy and couldn't help. We waited for a few minutes, and then the young lady looked up at me and said, "Are you flying with BMI?"
I had been so excited to see the check in machines and so spaced out that I hadn't realised I had been attempting to check in with the wrong airline. I hadn't booked the tickets so it wasn't at the front of my mind, though I had just flown for an hour in a BMI plane so should have known.
I felt a bit of a chump and the woman obviously thought I was a dickwad but I mumbled some excuses and went to the BMI machines.
But I couldn't check in here either. The machine told me I was already booked into the flight. I had tried to book in at home, but only one boarding card had printed up. Had I fucked up everything?
Then I went to wait for my cab, rereading the email about my flights on my computer, which informed me that the BBC would be giving me my boarding pass when I got to the studios.
I had read that yesterday and completely forgotten.
I had mildly humiliated myself for nothing.
The show itself - it's called the Blame Game and you should be able to watch it on iPlayer (after it's aired) or on satellite if you don't live in Northern Ireland) - was lots of fun. I hadn't really felt in the mood and was worried I was a bit underprepared, but the rest of the panel were both funny and giving and we had a good time.
I had to talk about
Nelson McCausland who wants Creationism represented in a local museum. It was fun coming to Ireland and being rude about religion. But I was astonished to read in one survey that 25% of people in Ireland believe in Creationalism and the literal truth of the Bible and that the world is thus only 6000 years old. Presumably they think that God is testing their faith by putting the dinosaur bones and DNA and geological evidence there. He's really going some way to test our faith isn't he? I mean he has already tested our faith by providing no evidence whatsoever of his existence, except for a somewhat contradictory old book and then some other even more contradictory old books saying some other gods created the universe. So then to put some evidence that actually disproves his existence as well is really pushing the testing our faith to the limits isn't it? Almost like it's entrapment. To make it really appear to any logical mind that you don't exist and then to punish people who follow that logic seems a bit mean if nothing else. God seems like a bit of a cunt to me.
I think I held my own in the slightly parochial quiz show and it was fun finding out about the local stuff that I didn't know about. I particularly liked the fact that the panel referred to Sinn Fein as "The Shinners"! Nice they have a cheeky nickname for them. I said it was like me calling them "The Ourselvsies" which I thought deserved more of a laugh, especially coming from a non-local, but them maybe the audience didn't know that Sinn Fein means "Ourselves Alone" or maybe Sinn means "alone" (having just looked it up on wikipedia I see that it actually means "We, ourselves" and is often mistranslated as "ourselves alone" so I might have been wrong on every possible level). Were the audience really that pedantic? Not as credulous as they'd have you believe.
