AT AROUND six feet four, John O'Dowd should be hard to miss. Yet, since having the brass neck to challenge Michelle O'Neill for the deputy leadership of Sinn Féin, the Upper Bann MLA has largely disappeared from sight – at least in media terms.
There has always been a curiously opaque style to the process of promotion in SF ranks. O'Dowd, a capable and articulate education minister might reasonably have expected to be a contender to take over from Martin McGuinness since he had stood in as deputy first minister when McGuinness fought unsuccessfully for the Irish presidency.
But once O'Neill started appearing at the Derryman's elbow at every photocall, it was clear she had the official imprimatur and she also ticked the box as young and female. As did Mary Lou, who emerged to replace Gerry Adams who was considered too old, too beardy and well… far too 'nordie' for the southern electorate.
But voters can be a thran lot and the fragrant Dublin TD led her party to a good thrashing which saw them losing two MEPs in the last poll.
O'Neill has also seen the Sinn Féin vote in the north take a dip. It can't all be laid at her door, of course, but her media appearances are usually statements delivered with all the passion of a "I speak your weight" machine.
It would have been interesting to have heard an alternative voice. When O'Dowd announced his bid he said he was looking forward to the debate. It didn't happen. The ard comhairle decided there would be no hustings and the whole matter would be conducted "in Lodge" as they say in other circles. Old habits die hard.
:: I MAY have missed something, but wasn't politics once described cruelly as "showbiz for ugly people"? So since when were people asking for our votes also expected to look good?
George Clooney will have lost little sleep over competition from Westminster's finest right now, so it's pretty disgusting that the only candidates getting abuse like that directed at Carla Lockhart on social media are female. And, shockingly, some of it is coming from other women too.
Catch a grip, keyboard warriors: the only 'ugly' we should be concerned with is the evil of universal credit, which has terminally ill people and many with severe disabilities being invited to interviews to explain why they aren't fit for work.
:: A TRIP to meet former Belfast Telegraph colleagues at the city hall brought back memories this week. It's a lot more welcoming a venue than it was 25 years ago when I used to frequent the marble corridors as local government correspondent, or "our City Hall man" as news editor Norman Jenkinson preferred to call me.
I had a wander round the various exhibitions but I was surprised not to find a picture of former Lord Mayor the late Tommy Patton among the council 'characters', alongside the likes of Paddy Devlin and Gerry Fitt.
The former shipyard man was an affable, long serving alderman who was renowned for his legendary malapropisms. He famously suggested at one meeting, that the City Hall didn't need an expensive facelift as a "good coat of Durex" would do.
Máirtín Ó Muilleoir quotes him as saying the police "were no detergent" against the IRA. But my personal favourite was when he gave directions to a reporter who'd visited his east Belfast home to hear his latest concerns about safety at the Belfast City Airport.
"Don't go up that street, love," he told her. "It's a nom de plume."
:: I HAVE to confess I'm one of those people who loves the run up to Christmas, though I can hold off putting up the tree until December. As a one-time shop assistant, I have some sympathy for the shop owner in York who has banned a whole range of the usual Christmas standards including Mariah Carey and Slade because she said it would drive her staff mad listening to it for weeks on end during the festive season.
When I worked in a shoe shop in Ann Street, Belfast, in the 1970s, David Bowie, in a major lapse in taste, recorded a Christmas song. No, not the toe-curling Little Drummer Boy with Bing Crosby. This was much worse. I give you The Laughing Gnome.
After two months solid of "Ha ha ha, hee hee hee, I'm a laughing gnome and you can't catch me", I would have cheerfully sent him to the same fate as Major Tom.
