WHEN I’m doing stand-up, I often talk about the bizarre way people like myself hear the words “bomb scare” and don’t think ‘terror threat’, but ‘Right, that’s the morning ruined’.
People from outside “this here province” tend to blanch at the phrase, which is probably the correct response.
Fear, I’m told, is the normal reaction to being warned there may be a bomb nearby, although personally I tend to wonder whether the diversion will affect the bus route.
It only struck me that my attitude was unusual about 10 years ago during a quiet morning with my then partner, who was from London, and therefore still had a fully functioning sense of alarm.
We were interrupted by a loud knock at the door, the kind of knock that makes you sit up and say, “Who’s that banging the door like the bloody peelers?”
I opened it, of course, to find none other than the bloody peelers.
Most people here will agree they have a very specific knock: firm, official, and with just enough judgement in it to make you mentally confess to things you haven’t even done.
The policeman at the door was perfectly polite, which somehow made the whole thing more surreal.
“Madam, I have to advise you to leave the premises immediately,” he said
“There is an ongoing security alert. If you’ve no alternative place to go for the next few hours, I’d suggest Andersonstown Leisure Centre, just up the road.”
I listened to this while chewing on a slice of toast, nodded with all the urgency of someone being asked to put the bins out, and assured him I would get ready and do exactly as he asked, before closing the door gently and resuming my breakfast as normal while my partner stared at me as if I had just declined a lifeboat because I hadn’t finished my tea.
“Brónagh!” he exclaimed, with the sort of alarm usually reserved for spotting smoke under a door. “Did you hear what he just said?”
“I know,” I said, equally horrified. “He called me Madam. The cheek of him. I mean, come on, does this place look like a brothel to you?”
This, it turned out, was not the point that had unsettled him, so I tried to explain that a security alert was “just a bomb scare”, which had precisely the opposite effect from the one I intended and only caused him to start shaking like a defecating dog.
We then found ourselves in the sticky situation of me putting more and more emphasis on the word scare, as if volume and italics would give more reassurance.
“It’s just a scare,” I kept saying. “Not a real threat.”
For reasons unknown to me, this did not calm the man from London who had just been told to evacuate a building because of a possible bomb, so in the end, I gave in and agreed to bring our young son to visit Nanny for a few hours.
My parents’ generation knew these warnings often meant actual bombs, though for many of us, the lasting memory is of “scares”, some of which we later learned, were the result of a teenager turned away from a disco who decided that if they weren’t dancing, nobody was – and so called in an entire evacuation over a wounded ego and a missed chance to do the Macarena.
A lifetime of false alarms has left my internal bell a wee bit unreliable, so when my son’s school emailed on Monday afternoon about a threat alleging bombs and promising a government takeover, I smelled a rat.
The wording felt contrived, particularly the announcement of “planned terrorist attacks”, given that surely, whoever was courteous enough to warn us of these explosives wouldn’t refer to themselves as a “terrorist”.
It would almost make you suspicious that someone out there was hoping to stir up anti-Islamic tensions for some reason.
Apparently the police shared this sentiment, as the email was quickly declared a hoax, although not before causing some disruption.
Schools were right to take precautions, but whoever hoped to leave me permanently quaking picked a difficult audience.
It’s not that I’m immune to fear, just that I’ve had too much practice with this sort of thing and whoever sent it has badly underestimated the parents.
Never mind taking over the country – you’ve landed us with an unexpected school pick-up and somebody’s ma wants a word.
Start with ‘Who reared ye?’ and work from there.
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