There are some things you can only say to someone you really love.

With that in mind here are my five favourite insults delivered to me by my son recently.

1 ‘Daddy, if we were all put in prison then I would escape through the bars and I’d drag mummy out too but your big, fat belly would get stuck.’

2 ‘Daddy, it will be good when you die because I really like going to graveyards.’

3 ‘Daddy, can you please not sit beside me because you smell like poo.’

4 ‘Daddy, mummy does the news on TV, why do you never do anything?’

5 Screaming during a red-faced tantrum.

‘I hate you daddy! I hate you!’

Daddy looks hurt.

‘But I love you son.’

Son looks momentarily confused. Then he yells.

‘I love you and I hate you daddy!’

The first signal that it’s a day to be endured rather than enjoyed is the weather.

I open the blinds and it looks like the world has toppled off its axis and landed in a huge bowl of rancid chicken soup. There’s no definition to the sky, it’s just a ubiquitous sickly grey. The rain is incessant, steady and merciless, like a method of torture.

It’s a holiday, Easter Monday, so there’s no school to give some parental respite. Instead we’ll have to entertain our four-year-old, although we’re already weary from the daily struggle of finding educational things to do. Over the past week he has been at the zoo, the folk museum and an open farm. All attractions which have the advantage of large open spaces where he can run around inventing his own games while I’m forced to feign interest as a woman in period costume displays the ancient craft of basket weaving.

But the weather eliminates the chance of going to any outside attraction today. I’m tempted by the thought of just plumping him down on the sofa with a big bowl of popcorn while Peter Rabbit loops on the TV, but the guilt of failing to at least try to provide him with a day he’ll remember in years to come overcomes me.

Over a hurried and unsatisfactory breakfast mummy and I settle on the planetarium. As we run to the car, my socks already dampening, I’ve got a low feeling. None of us say anything but the weather is deepening the sense of gloom as I drive along the motorway. There’s a heaviness to the day which seems to infect us all, seeping into our bones and souls. Our son is crabby and angry and weeps at a series of imagined offences.

We arrive at the planetarium in good time. The car park is full but as I drive around a vehicle pulls out and vacates a spot. Perhaps things won’t be so bad?

I ask for admission for three but the stocky woman at reception meets my inquiry with a gaze somewhere between contempt and pity.

‘Have you booked for any of our shows?’

‘Uh…no. We just thought we’d turn up.’

She sighs. All the shows are fully booked. In order to get admission today we would really have needed to book several years before my son was born. I nod like a chastised schoolboy. Then, we are told, for two quid each we can instead explore the exhibition rooms and take part in the craft activities. I quickly hand over the money and stumble inside.

But there’s a problem. It’s a wet day and most of the parents in this solar system have decided to come to the planetarium today. The exhibition and games rooms are heaving with droves of screaming children and haunted parents pretending to read boards explaining lunar exploration. The craft rooms are like an episode of Blue Peter on speed, a whirl of flashing scissors, puddles of glitter and little boys and girls with their limbs glued to tables.

This is worse than I’d feared. My little boy hates crowds and despises noise so he disappears into himself, refusing to take part in any games or activities. Experience has taught us that we just have to wait for him to come round in his own time. Experience has also taught us that this usually occurs five minutes before closing time.

There seems little else to do other than to grab a cup of coffee. So we go to the smallest and most overpopulated cafe I’ve ever sipped in, presumably set up that way so patrons can experience the discomfort of an astronaut living in the space station.

My son keeps finding new ways to fall out with me, at one point bawling because he doesn’t like the way I opened his packet of crisps. I’m continually nudged and bumped by passing customers, invariably at the exact moment when I’ve got a mug of scalding black coffee just inches from my face.

It’s all going so badly that I ask my son if he wants to leave. I offer instead to take him to an adventure playground. He ignores me. I’m not sure he’s even heard me.

But then some other family members turn up to meet us, including my son’s three-year-old cousin. Presumably the logic is if we’re going to be miserable, we might as well all be miserable together. However, having more familiar faces here does reinforce my son’s confidence and we’re ready to have another crack at the craft activities.

In one packed room children are making astronauts out of plasticine. A very kind staff member welcomes us and then proceeds to show my son how to build his own spaceman. I’m presuming she has been chosen for this job because she has some artistic talent, perhaps some Tony Hart inspired gift for making things. Then she presents us with a slab of plasticine which resembles a limp phallus, rather than an astronaut. We decide to proceed on our own.

Soon we have our own clumsily assembled spaceman and an egg carton which I pass off as a spaceship.

Then we go to the dressing up and video game room, full of models of space shuttles, telescopes and space stations. It’s fun for a bit but quickly descends into a series of tantrums, with the two cousins apparently competing to be the most pink-eyed and lachrymose.

They argue over the choice of two seemingly identical space helmets and bawl over other children spoiling the game where they burst imaginary bubbles with their feet. At one point the weeping has become so persistent that I lift my son and ask him why he’s crying.

Between sobs he responds: ‘I….can’t….remember….’

We manage to put in most of the afternoon in this way, keeping an eye on our watches, thinking about what’s a decent amount of time before we go home. When we eventually announce our departure there are more inevitable tantrums. I manage to calm my son down with gentle hugs and encouragement. Then he asks.

‘So, are we going to the adventure playground now then?’

My explanation that it’s too late for that brings another flood. His tears mix with the rain as we walk back to the car. It feels like the rain, and the tears, will never end.

We tried very hard to make it an educational day. I did learn something. One day on Mercury lasts almost 59 earth days. So does one wet day as a parent.

Parenting, for me, is all about routine.

When you find something that works you stick with it. Yes, there are lots of new and exciting challenges, but a few faithful old familiar signposts keeps the rickety old vehicle ticking along.

And pretty soon a routine becomes something more, something automatic, almost sacred in its permanence.

So it is with our Friday afternoons. Ask my son what we do on Friday afternoon and he will unhesitatingly tell you ‘It’s McDonald’s and magazine day’.

I can’t actually remember a time anymore when I didn’t get him a McDonald’s and a magazine on a Friday. And I don’t want to.

I’ve come to believe that the whole stability of the world’s capitalist economic system may depend on my following this routine. Any divergence from it might lead to the value of stock markets collapsing, hyperinflation, rioting in the streets and widespread looting.

I just can’t risk it.

And so I find myself leading my son by the hand into the garishly coloured interior of our local McDonald’s restaurant.

My four-year-old knows independently how to order his Happy Meal on the touchscreen kiosk. He’s even able to use my debit card to make a contactless payment.

It occurs to me that this renders my role somewhere close to redundant. But I don’t let on.

We take a seat. There’s a huge photo on the wall facing us of a dark haired woman smiling as she’s about to stuff a burger into her mouth. It’s about as far away from reality as it’s possible to get. I’ve never, ever seen an adult smile in McDonald’s.

The Happy Meal arrives in its little red box. Chips, chicken nuggets and a plastic toy.

This week it’s Peter Rabbit, complete with his own carrot cannon.

I warn my son that if he fires the carrots in the restaurant he will likely lose them.

Not ten seconds later he fires the carrots off the end of the table. They skid along the floor and under a table where a scary looking man with tattoos is sitting alone.

He looks at me with tears heavy in his eyes (I mean my son, not the man with tattoos), so I have to go on my hands and knees under the table to find the toy while mumbling apologies.

And there’s something just a bit icky about being on your hands and knees on the floor of a McDonald’s. There’s something about the environment which just feels grubby.

Which is surprising because there always seems to be a team cleaning the floor.

You can accuse McDonald’s of many things but being under-staffed is not one of them. Like an army of ants the staff move around the restaurant. It’s not always clear what they are doing, but they’re definitely doing something.

I watch a young staff member with a mop as he determinedly cleans a small square of the floor. He looks around nervously to see if anyone is watching, and then cleans it again.

If you were to invent the environment least attractive for the consumption of food it would probably be something close to this. But my son, like just about every other young person, loves it so we keep going back.

Before I leave I take him to the bathroom to clean his hands. I notice there’s a sachet of ketchup in the water of the toilet bowl.

I flush the toilet but when the water settles the ketchup is still floating there.

We walk the short distance to Marks and Spencer to fulfil the second half of the routine. Buying a magazine.

There’s a huge market in over-priced kids’ magazines. I suppose I could pretend that buying them is justified as an educational reading aid. But the truth is the mag is always unread, my son just wants the plastic toy.

If I had to pick one aspect of being a parent I was not expecting it would be the abundance of plastic tat. Utterly useless cheaply made crap which is played with once and then thrown to the bottom of the toy box.

There’s probably a plastic island floating in the Arctic Ocean, populated by polar bears and seals which has been formed by discarded magazine toys.

Today my son chooses a Peppa Pig mag. He’s happy with his choice and ready to leave.

But I just can’t help myself. I look at the toy, a plastic Peppa and George and a little swing. It just seems a little lame.

I find a Chuggington magazine which has three little trains as the gift.

‘Are you sure it’s Peppa you want buddy? Look at Chugginton, three trains!’

My son thinks about it.

Then he decides he does want Chuggington. And Peppa Pig as well.

‘No, no buddy,’ I protest, ‘only one.’

He starts to bawl. Deep heavy sobs, snot dripping and tear stains on his cheek. I call it the MOAT (mother of all tantrums).

I try being firm, telling him that if he doesn’t behave he won’t get any magazine. All this does is make matters worse, the tantrum is now nuclear.

I congratulate myself quietly on my great parenting skills.

I settle on buying the Chuggington mag by using the logic that the sob he emits when I put it in the basket is slightly less than it is for Peppa.

He’s exhausted now and I gather him in my arms as we wait in the queue to pay. He keeps mumbling ‘mummy’ into my ear.

Sympathetic women around me smile and make encouraging remarks as the snot and tears creates a spreading dark stain on the shoulder of my jacket.

And that’s our Friday afternoon routine. As I write this my son is at my feet playing with the little trains. If the game lasts for more than 15 minutes I’ll consider it a fiver well spent.

There’s another routine closing in around us. He’ll fight against it to the end and I’ll welcome it like my oldest and best friend.

The routine of sleep.

PS Re-reading this post it occurs to me it is slightly gloomier than had perhaps been my intention.

Just after I published it I played Chuggington with my son. The Chuggington theme song quickly evolved into ‘Huggington’ which became a cuddling game.

Note to myself: Never forget the sheer joy of it.

It’s almost 7pm now. That’s our bedtime. Night night x

If you have a spare moment put the words ‘police officer bomb car northern Ireland’ into Google.

A series of headlines will appear on your screen. Here’s just a few I’ve picked randomly.

‘Northern Irish police car catches fire after booby-trap bomb partially explodes’ from The Independent.

‘Police car on fire as ‘booby trap bomb explodes’ in Northern Ireland from Metro.

‘Police car ‘explodes’ sparking fears of ‘booby trap bomb’ in Northern Ireland’ from The Sun.

‘Police officer left unhurt after bomb explodes in Northern Ireland’ from the Daily Mail.

There are many more. All describing the targeting of a female police officer on the Belfast to Bangor road this week.

But there was a problem with this story. It wasn’t true. It was not a police car. The woman is not a police officer. And, most importantly, there was never a bomb. The fire was caused by a mechanical malfunction of the car.

Going back to the Google search, several of the reports have been updated to reflect that the incident is ‘no longer believed to be terror related’. But several have not been corrected. Most of the erroneous reporting is still there.

Some of the updated versions have been changed to now suggest that the woman was a former police officer, although it is hard to see the relevance of revealing such a detail at this stage other than as an extenuating circumstance as to how they got it wrong in the first place.

As a former journalist, who still likes to keep a loose understanding of what’s going on in the world, I found myself coming back again and again yesterday to the same question – how does this happen?

So I began to track the story backwards. In the middle of yesterday morning the following two messages appeared on the official Nolan Show Twitter feed.

‘Breaking: Ian Paisley MP has told the Nolan Show there has been a terrorist attack on a police officer this morning. He says a explosive device was placed under a female police officers car’.

And…

‘MP Ian Paisley – “terrorism will never prevail” after a female police officer has been targeted by what he describes as an “under car booby trap device”.’

Sure enough, skip across to Ian Paisley’s Twitter feed and, at around the same time, the MP posted this message.

‘I understand that a Terrorist attack on police officer in Ballyrobert Co Antrim has taken place. Suspected Under car booby trap device. My concern is for the officer and family of officer. Terrorism will never prevail.’

Within a few minutes he was corrected by the loyalist blogger Jamie Bryson that the incident described had actually taken place in Co Down, not County Antrim.

The other main driver of the story was Sky News which posted several updates, including reporting a comment from Northern Ireland’s first minister Arlene Foster, who was in Brussels.

According to Sky News, Mrs Foster said: “We’ve just received news from Northern Ireland which is very disturbing. We do condemn utterly those who would seek to bring violence back to Northern Ireland. We send our thoughts and our prayers to the police officer and her family.”

I should point out that I was not contemporaneously following the news yesterday morning so I don’t know which was the first organisation to report on the incident.

What is clear though, is that by late morning the supposed terror attack was being reported by most of the main news organisations, both locally and nationally. A number of Northern Ireland-based journalists tweeted that security sources had confirmed the details to them. Reporters were dispatched to the scene and began to prepare on camera reports.

But just an hour later the story had begun to unravel. Ian Paisley released a new tweet.

It read,

‘UPDATE reports suggest this was a major malfunction of the vehicle and not terrorist related. If so that’s a huge relief and I hope those involved are uninjured.’

The story quickly dropped off the news agenda. As I said earlier, some organisations corrected their earlier reporting, some just quietly dropped it.

And a few journalists took to social media to explain to the public what had happened. I was quite struck by the messages of those who said that multiple security sources had got it wrong.

It’s worth going back over what happened. A car went on fire. Bomb experts were sent to the scene, presumably because police had some suspicion that there may have been a sinister causation. At some point after arriving they discovered that the fire was mechanical rather than terror-related.

A well-placed security source would have been able to tell a journalist exactly that. Nothing more. Anyone who went further and gave inaccurate details was either not close enough to the incident to report back accurately or else they were jumping to conclusions. In any case they are not a reliable source.

Many years ago I worked as a security journalist. It was a job defined by the shadowy use of so-called security sources. In truth I wasn’t very good at it. In my experience, reliable security sources were about as common as hen’s teeth. And just as talkative.

But it seems to me that when faced with a story like this the obvious journalistic question to any source should have been ‘how do you know?’

A reasonable security source for this story might have been a police officer at the scene, or a superior officer who was receiving regular updates on what was going on. Anything beyond that and the water starts to get a little muddy. If the cause of the incident has not yet been determined for sure, then how can a source, not at the scene, know for sure that it is a bomb? Politicians are often more likely than a police officer to talk to a journalist, but their account should usually be treated with caution because they are several steps removed. They should be used for reaction, not as the sole source for reporting of a criminal act.

So, going by the news coverage yesterday, it seems that a lot of security sources got the story wrong.

Or, is the more likely truth that most of these reports, many of which were compiled by journalists who are not based in Northern Ireland, were simply copied from each other? In essence one website gets the story wrong and the rest rush to follow.

Reading the reports I noticed much use of the phrase ‘it is understood’ and the prolific use of inverted commas, which is a betrayal of the fact that the journalists have no way of standing over the ‘facts’ they were presenting to the public.

Journalism, now driven by digital news and social media, has increased the pressure as never before to be first with the story. The competition is immense. It seems that rivals would rather run the risk of copying and being wrong than being left behind on a story. The website report can always be updated later anyway.

And thus the integrity of the process of journalists presenting facts to the public is compromised. The faith in the art is slightly diminished.

Because, as I know from my years working as a security reporter and a news editor, there is one phrase that no journalist ever dares to utter. Words I’ve never heard said in a newsroom.

I don’t know.

The fear of being seen to be outside of the loop is paralysing.

Of course, it’s easy for me to sit here on the outside and criticise. A bitter ex-journalist waffling on about how much better things were in my day.

Not a bit of it.

Journalists have always been prone to make mistakes, and they always will. I made plenty myself. Several stories I wrote over the years that I wish I could get back.

And meaningful journalism can still be found easily today. Much of the truth about the collapse of a proposed deal to restore power-sharing at Stormont is only known by the public because of the efforts of Eamonn Mallie and Brian Rowan.

But in this age of rolling news with the accompanying rush to be first with the sensationalist headline, it is the desire for accuracy which seems to be the first victim. It is acceptable and human to make a mistake. But when the rest of the media rushes breathlessly to repeat that mistake then you have a bigger problem.

I have called this post Fake News. It is the expression of our time, and one that I hate because of the threat it represents to the craft to which I gave many years of my life. It wants to suggest that the trust has broken down, that none of us should believe what we read.

There are many, usually those with the most to hide, who want to throw the profession off the edge of a cliff.

And it doesn’t help when journalists line up like lemmings to assist them.

Jonny came from a time when people believed things were meant to last.

Televisions and vacuum cleaners were brought to the repair man when they broke down. You didn’t just throw them away and get a newer model.

You didn’t need a degree in computers to put your head under the bonnet of a car and clothes and shoes were passed down to other members of the family.

He had brought his old-fashioned attitudes with him as the world grew more disposable around him.

But as he sat at his desk, watching a pale watery sun sink into the horizon on a night which chilled you to the core, he couldn’t help thinking…

‘It’s about time I bought a new garden shed.’

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have written before about my propensity for finding unusual ways to injure myself.

Perhaps it’s because my body is generally a few steps behind my brain.

Today I did it again. And then some.

The scene was that we were hosting some family members who had battled through the snow to visit us.

My little nephew and my son were enjoying a McDonald’s Happy Meal as a Friday treat.

They were so excited about playing in the snow that they ate no more than a few bites before they ran off to have fun.

I played outside with them, trailing a sledge up and down an icy hill without coming to mischief.

Then I came inside and spotted an uneaten Happy Meal on the kitchen table.

So I did what I always do when I find food lying about, apparently unwanted.

I ate it.

Urgently and desperately, like a pilgrim who’s been on a 40 day fast.

Rather than eating the chips one by one, I grabbed a handful and stuffed them in the general direction of my mouth.

But the fries had gathered in an irregular form. So while most did indeed enter my oral cavity as planned, there was a small level of divergence.

Leading to the unfortunate situation of me thrusting one of the fries right up my nose.

With no little force.

As I spluttered and quickly removed the offending chip, I found myself pondering the possibility that the sharp-edged ketchup-stained strip of fried potato had perhaps pierced my brain leading to an irreversible injury.

I steadied myself. It was clearly uncomfortable. I had a sharp nasal pain. The nostril may have been bleeding. Or it may have just been red sauce.

I waited to see if I would fall over.

I did not.

I found my mind straying to the case of the woman who had received a multi-million dollar compensation award from McDonald’s when she scalded herself on hot coffee.

Could I have a similar case?

I would have to prove that reasonable precautions had not been taken by the supplier against any supposed risk.

It seemed quite an ask.

But things were about to get worse.

My nephew now returned, rosy-cheeked, ravenous and keen to have the rest of his Happy Meal.

Having to explain to a hungry three-year-old that I had eaten his dinner was not my finest moment.

And even telling him that I may have given myself brain damage while doing it failed to bring any cheer.

If I was Aesop now I’d be saying there’s a very clear moral message here. The greedy, selfish uncle who eats his nephew’s dinner gets what he deserves when he impales his brain on a glass-like shard of potato.

That’s fair enough. I’d like to think I wouldn’t do it again.

But the truth is I undoubtedly will.

And before anyone asks, yes, I did eat the offending chip afterwards.