IT'S Culture Night Belfast this evening, with 200 events across 100 venues around the city's cathedral quarter.
It coincides with a night out with a friend, so I forwarded her the programme so she could see which event she fancies checking out, picturing us wandering around watching a few jugglers and some fire-eaters before dinner.
"I generally like political/feminist/visual arts stuff," she emailed back cheerily.
Gulp.
That's the thing about Culture Night, there's always stuff on the programme you haven't even noticed and possibly wouldn't even consider attending if you had, but is worth checking out and likely to be both entertaining and enriching.
I hope...
I haven't been to Culture Night since three years ago, when Amnesty International NI were generous enough to invite me to participate in their event 'Journalism on the Frontline'.
It was paying tribute to some of the world’s journalists who have risked their lives to ensure that corruption and human rights violations are exposed.
Journalism is both the most competitive and most collegiate of professions.
Every day newspapers and their teams rush to get the best exclusive, the most interesting new line, the most striking picture, the most effective layout.
We are all commercial operations and literally survive or fail by these tiny successes and narrow margins that attract a finite number of readers to our product. But more than this, each member of the team has a professional pride that makes us want to do our bit to make our paper the best, to ensure that every person who hands over their (in our case) 80p every day can be sure thy are getting value for money.
But, those same readers may be surprised by the camaraderie in the press pack, from hurriedly cross-checking quotes after press conferences, to sharing the complex calculations during long hours at proportional representation election counts and giving each other a lift back from jobs.
However fierce a competitor, no newspaper celebrates when another publication closes and no journalist feels smug when colleagues are made redundant.
When it comes to threats to an individual's freedom or life all those proud to call themselves a journalist rally to their side.
And so an Irish News reporter, who hadn't engaged in public speaking since leaving school more than a decade before, went to the Belfast Telegraph's offices to recount, along with a colleague from the News Letter, the realities facing journalists in countries where the press still struggles for its freedom.
Amnesty asked me to highlight the case of prominent Ethiopian journalist Eskinder Nega,
Just two months earlier, Nega had been sentenced to 18 years in prison under the country’s Anti-Terrorism Proclamation of 2009.
His arrest had followed the publication of an online column critical of the use of that very law to silence dissent and calling for the Ethiopian government to respect freedom of expression and end torture in the country’s prisons.
He and 23 other journalists and opposition politicians were found guilty on terrorism charges.
A few days after the 2012 Amnesty talk, his house and wife’s car were confiscated, along with property belonging to the other prisoners and their families.
After we had finished speaking, the audience asked questions. One woman wanted to know about the dangers of our own jobs, whether journalists are safe working in Northern Ireland.
They were shocked to learn that at the time two journalists, including one from this newspaper, had recently received 'credible' death threats.
This is, after all Belfast, not Addis Ababa, and this was 2012, 14 years after the Good Friday Agreement was supposed to turn us into a 'normal' society - complete with freedom of the press, surely?
And here we are. The same week, three years later and once again a journalist has had a chilling threat made against their life. A highly-respected, hard-working colleague has become a target merely for doing their job. Our job.
And once again journalists stand together. Not just within the Irish News, but newsrooms across Ireland. We are all here to do our job and if we are a civilised society we must be able to do that without fear of intimidation.
If we are not a civilised society so be it. But we will still be here. Standing by our colleagues and doing our job.
b.archer@irishnews.com
@BimpeIN
