The nice Polish woman selling the tickets asked us if we’d come far.

‘Just down from Belfast.’

She smiled to reassure us that we’d come to the right place, rather than falling for the seductive charms of any of the vastly inferior rival tour bus operators. I relaxed a little.

‘How long are you here for?’

‘We’re going home later today.’

This answer seemed to encourage her to tell us about the merits of the 48 hour bus ticket. I listened patiently as she listed all the things it would allow us to do in Dublin tonight. When we wouldn’t be in Dublin.

For a moment I wondered if I should change our departure plans, just so her labour wouldn’t be wasted.

Instead I opted for the 24 hour ticket. In truth all I really wanted was a two hour ticket but that didn’t seem to be on offer today.

Then she asked if we preferred to go on the red line or the blue line.

Huh?

My wife stepped in at this point to take charge. She often does this just at the point when my general social idiocy is about to be exposed. She’s good that way.

Then I paid. I’m originally from Ballymena and as I handed over the money the old Jimmy Young joke was in my mind. ‘I only want a ride on the bus, not to buy the whole thing.’

I didn’t say it though. I’m not sure the charms of Jimmy Young ever made it as far as Poland.

‘The 24 hour ticket will be valid until this time tomorrow,’ the woman told me helpfully.

‘And your time starts now,’ I think she said. At this point I’m imagining the Countdown clock in my head.

We headed to the top deck of the tour bus. After our walking odyssey the day before, carrying a four-year-old around the tourist attractions of the city, I was looking forward to something a little more sedate. At least we would be sitting down.

But seeing that the only available seats were at the back of the bus, my son now decided that he wanted to sit at the front. This immediately thrust him into bad form and was a wound that festered and spouted yucky hissing puss throughout the trip.

I don’t usually give advice but if you are looking for a simple way to see all of Dublin’s rich and varied selection of roadworks then the bus tour is surely the best way to do it.

Also it’s worth going onto the top deck because you are able to see so much more of the top deck of all the other tour busies.

My main problem with any form of tourist attraction is my inability to retain a lot of the information as it is relayed to me. I decide I’m going to try really hard to concentrate this time. I’m not going to let my mind wander.

The bus pulls out and a recorded voice begins the commentary.

‘If you look to your left you will see a magnificent building with a green dome….dah di dah, la, la, la, tweety birds.’

Having a recorded rather than a live guide leads to difficulties with co-ordination. Often the architectural wonder or historical artefact is nowhere to be seen when we are being told about it.

We are informed at one point that there is a statue of Oscar Wilde on our left but when I turn all that is there is a Lidl.

Between the bouts of commentary Bob Marley tracks are played to us. I didn’t even realise Bob Marley was from Dublin. At least I’ve learnt one thing today.

All the time my son is sitting on mummy’s lap seething that we can’t sit at the front of the bus. Of course he has decided this is my fault and scowls at me each time I smile.

Then he tells me he hates the bus and wants to go back to the wax museum. This is the same wax museum that I carried him from kicking and screaming yesterday. Yesterday when he spent hours asking me when we were going on the bus.

A number of passengers get off at the Guinness factory, no doubt attracted be the offer of a free pint of stout.

I spot a free seat at the front and make a dash for it, knocking German tourists flying like skittles.

Mummy carries our boy forward and he sits in my lap, a brilliant panoramic view of the Georgian area of Dublin now visible to us.

I bask in the glory of being a good daddy, not allowing any circumstance or German tourist to stand in the way of what my son wants.

But I need my accomplishment to be validated. To have my son acknowledge what I’ve done.

‘Hey buddy, this is much better now, isn’t it? We can see everything up at the front.’

No answer.

I look down and realise he’s asleep in my lap, his face heavy resting against my stomach.

And so it remains for the rest of the tour.

I don’t know of any city quite like Dublin. Any that is so full of stories, so immersed in its own sense of history.

Soon I begin to worry there just aren’t enough streets to accommodate the names of all the writers, revolutionaries and political giants whose accomplishments need to be commemorated.

My son awakens just as we’re disembarking. We dander around for a bit, stopping for a coffee and a chat. But we’re all pretty much spent and soon it’s time to head for home.

As we’re walking back my son spots a couple of living statues. They are dressed as two old men sitting together on stools, painted black, like dirty iron.

My son becomes more animated than he has all day, insisting on dropping coins into their hat to make them bow, until my last reserves of Euros are drained.

He spends so long staring that in the end one of the men holds his hand out. I expect my shy, sensitive son to back away at this point. Instead he steps forward and gives the painted hand a firm and confident high five.

And so it is over. My son walks away beaming. I lift him and he puts his head on my shoulder as we head back to my car. I can tell he is thrilled with his Dublin experience.

We’re having a family break down in Dublin for a couple of days.

I decided to be bold and undertake the journey in my car.

So we headed off down the A1, across the border, a quick pit stop at the Applegreen and then onwards to one of my favourite cities.

My son doesn’t like long journeys so we decided to play a harmless game of I Spy.

As a method of making the time pass  faster it proved to be spectacularly ineffective.

‘OK son, it’s your go.’

‘I spy with my little eye something beginning with R.’

‘R good. Let’s see, is it road?’

‘No.’

‘Rain?’

‘No.’

‘Uh….Renault?’

‘No.’

‘Um….I don’t know….radio?’

‘No.’

‘I give up, what is it?’

‘Dolphin.’

The time seemed to pass slowly.

Eventually we reached the city. Here my plans started to unravel when the amount of money I had budgeted for the trip was soon spent negotiating the various toll booths.

With a little help from Google Maps we found our guest house which is right beside the Aviva Stadium.

The stadium itself is quite impressive in an upside-down ashtray sort of a way.

A combination of trains and trams brought us into the throbbing cosmopolitan heart of the city.

It was at this point my son decided he’d lost the use of his legs and mummy and I spent most of the rest of the day carrying him around.

We decided a trip to the National Wax Museum might give him a separate focus.

It’s pretty underwhelming as an attraction but my son enjoyed burrowing through the tunnels in the children’s section.

I was just glad to have a few minutes with him off my back (take that literally or metaphorically, whatever works for you), so I sat at the side of a display featuring Superman, Batman and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Just resting.

I’m often accused of being lethargic and I suppose I had found a position which was comfortable.

All I know is that when I turned around there was a mother and her two sons watching me. 

When I stirred the poor woman jumped in the air proclaiming ‘Jaysus, Mary and Joseph, it moves!’

My boy is a sensitive soul so we decided to avoid the horror section. 

Unfortunately the display devoted to the politics of Northern Ireland had much the same effect and sent him running and screaming from the building.

Dutifully we trudged around a few more attractions, mummy and I taking turns with the weight until we wearily gave up and headed to a Greek restaurant for dinner.

One helping of ice-cream reinvigorated our little man and as we arrived back at the guest house exhausted, he found his eighth wind of the day and started to run around excitedly.

As I write this I’m sprawled on the bed, mummy’s on the sofa and our son is doing laps of the room, singing the theme song from Horrid Henry and trying to wrestle me onto the floor.

I like to know that he’s aware that these are special family days; times to be remembered when things are a little bit rougher.

I ask him if he’s had a good time. He shrugs. I ask him what the best part of the day was.

Immediately his face brightens.

‘When we stopped at the service station.’

Tomorrow we’ll do the bus tour.

But for now, it’s bedtime. Mine, not his.

Having a son means lots of early mornings.

Lots of early mornings means time. Time before many people are awake.

Time when my brain is at its most active, it’s most alive.

Time when I feel I’m just a tiny bit closer to having it all sorted out before the pressures of the day club me back into my normal state of idiocy.

I’m lying here on the sofa with my son at 6am. He’s eating Honey Puffs and watching Ollie The Little White Van.

I’m quite content. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

But my mind is racing, the mosquito thoughts are buzzing, wondering, creating, worrying.

And then I have an idea.

I’ll write a post.

But with a difference.

One with no plan, no structure, no narrative. No neat point to tie it all together. No fable, no moral lesson. No conclusion which makes you go ‘Hmmmmm’. No grand idea.

I’ll just start with a sentence and see where my mind takes me.

The sentence is ‘Having a son means lots of early mornings’.

So here we are.

Uh…..

Um……

Well it’s a grey start today, a little cool. Maybe it will brighten up later? (Blimey, you’ve built this thing up, you’re going to have to do better than that).

Ok. My son’s on my lap so I’m trying to write this on my phone.

It’s not that easy cause he wants a lot of attention and I’m not great with the tiny little keyboard on my phone.

I feel like a giant trying to carry out keyhole surgery on a gnat as my great fat clumsy fingers constantly hit the wrong keys, leading to a series of misspellings and blunders.

My poor old phone does its best to tidy up after me and predict my next move but, hey, it’s early.

A couple of paragraphs back I tried to type the word ‘maybe’ but ended up with ‘maypole’. Not a word I use in conversation very often.

I’ve often seen people using the wrong word in a text or email and then blaming it on auto-correct.

A service which is meant to prevent mistakes often leads to the introduction of them (and yes I’m sure there’s a way to turn the service off on the phone).

But it’s more than correcting. It’s predicting. My little phone often tries to end my sentences for me, suggesting the next word before I’ve even decided what it should be.

This thought first started rattling through my mind a few days ago when I was typing the phrase ‘nature abhors a vacuum’.

I had managed to get as far as ‘nature abhors a……’ when my phone inserted the word ‘woman’.

This completely brought me to a stop, both stunned and a little concerned. Nature abhors a woman?

Did I have a sexist phone? I mean I know it’s not the latest model but come on.

As I typed the same phrase just now the phone had completely reversed its position. 

This time it inserted the word ‘man’ as if it had picked up on my feelings of horror last time and went way too far in the opposite direction.

It doesn’t end there. A couple of months back I was Googling the phrase ‘General election results’.

I had got no more than three letters into the first word when my phone threw back the suggestion ‘genital warts’.

During Wimbledon I was texting my brother during a match.

My phone decided it didn’t like the name of the Czech player Berdych and changed it to ‘Nerdy chicks’.

I had sent the text before I noticed, thus leading to some confusion from my brother when I told him ‘Federer on top of Nerdy chicks’.

So now I think I’ll play a trick on my phone.  I’ll deliberately spell words incorrectly just to mess up its little brain.

I rmebemer bneig tlod yaers ago taht it deson’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aepapr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is the frsit and lsat lttetres.

The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit dficufilty.

Better still. I can throw a few numbers.

Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17.

My poor phone. It was trying its best with a few words before it abandoned all hope (there’s smoke coming out of it now).

The words were all jumbled up but we can still understand them even when the phone can’t. Does this mean our inherent code-cracking ability is more sophisticated?

Also does it mean that we all get too hung up on correct spellings? 

As a former journalist I have that infuriating habit of correcting spelling mistakes when people text me.

But if we didn’t know how to spell the word in the first place we wouldn’t be able to crack that code.

If there was a single wrong letter in there it would just appear as gibberish. The order of the words is also important.

I’m driving to Dublin today. 

Usually I would be a bit daunted by this, but now I’ve got a satnav so it will take me straight to where I need to go.

But is this a good thing? Does my brain lose something by not having the challenge of finding the location itself?

Does the lack of exercise lead to a lack of elasticity? A lazy comfort in letting technology do the job for me?

I really don’t know.

It’s not so early anymore. I can see life in some of the houses in my street now. People shaking off the rust to face another day.

So what’s the point of it all? Well, as I said earlier, there isn’t one.

I almost started this post with an entirely different line. It was almost ‘Sugar Puffs are now called Honey Puffs’.

That would have been entirely different. I suppose that’s the beauty of it all.

Good morning.

I took my son to watch the Belfast Pride parade today.

Mummy was covering the event as part of her job as a journalist, so it seemed to make sense for us all to meet up in the city.

I’ve previously taken my boy to see a St Patrick’s Day parade and a July 12 march.

He seems to have a genuine interest in any event with a sense of pageantry.

While he doesn’t understand the issues, I want him to absorb the ethos that there are causes or events that people feel so strongly about that they are prepared to go onto the streets.

The sun shone and we had a great time. He loves rainbows and the overall spectacle, a caravan of love, held him fixed.

As the floats snaked their way through the city the largest cheers were reserved for a group of uniformed police officers, some from the PSNI, who were taking part.

Their satisfied smiles as the volume of the crowd grew were heartening.

The overall atmosphere was welcoming and I could see no street drinking. A couple of times I was accidentally jostled by members of the crowd but they always met me with a smiling apology afterwards.

At no moment did I feel that it was not a safe or appropriate event to bring my son to.

The energy of the parade was driven by young people. Reminding me that the next generation and the one after that have already overtaken us. Good thing too.

The only downside I could point to was the street seller behind me repeatedly yelling ‘Get yer flegs er garlands!!!’ in a Belfast accent as thick as cough syrup.

I moved my location a couple of times but he always seemed to be able to find me, positioning his wares at my feet and screaming ‘Get yer flegs er garlands!!!’ until it felt that my brain was rattling in my skull.

When I go to any public event with my son I plan an escape route. A way to get back to the car when the inevitable and usually imminent moment that my son gets bored and tired occurs.

But it didn’t happen. He insisted on me lifting him high so he could get a better view. In the end it was my poor old back which gave way before his attention did.

My son likes to ask questions. To try to understand why.

As we’re about to go home he points to a placard being carried by a young woman, brightly attired.

‘What does that sign say daddy?’

‘It says ‘Love is a human right’.’

‘What does that mean daddy?’

I think for a second, just to make sure I say the right thing.

‘It means that any person should be allowed to love any person they want.’

Hey, you can’t send a superhero out to save the world with a wrinkled cape 

No, I can’t believe they let me back in the building either.

But then again, maybe I’ve found my broadcasting niche.

Last week they wanted me to talk about how I’m so hard-hearted that I leave my son in a crèche even when he gets upset.

This week it’s why I’m so irresponsible as to share photos of my child on social media.

Inevitably they will have another parent going up against me on air to argue why she would never take the risk of putting a picture of her child online.

I’ve a feeling I’m being pigeonholed. I imagine there’s a big book somewhere in Broadcasting House with my number stored under G for ‘Godawful parent’.

I imagine next week they’ll be having a debate about the merits of sending children back down the coal mines. Some producer will be scratching his head and then excitedly proclaim, ‘I know, phone McCambridge, he’ll argue for it. He loves to be on the wrong side of the great questions of our time.’

Anyway I’m back in the green room waiting to go on Radio Ulster again. It’s practically my second home now (but still no jelly).

It’s Evening Extra I’m doing this time. I’ll be interviewed by Seamus McKee, a broadcaster and journalist I’ve admired since my youth. We’ll be talking about ‘sharenting’, a word that makes me shudder each time I have to say it.

I’m told author and columnist Lucy Mangan will be giving the other side of the argument. I’m beginning to worry it won’t be a fair fight. She’s got 54,000 Twitter followers. I’ve got 13. She’s won awards for her writing. I got second place in the egg and spoon race when I was in P6.

My mind wanders to an alternate universe.

I’m sitting in the studio of the Jerry Springer Show. Lucy Mangan is sat beside me. Jerry introduces the topic, that phlegmatic half-smirk permanent on his lips.

‘Well Jonny, tell us why you’re comfortable putting your child’s image on social media?’

‘Well, Jerry, thanks for the chance to….’

Before I can go any further Lucy Mangan interrupts me by shoving her hand in front of my face.

‘Talk to the hand cause the face ain’t listening!’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Talk to the hand!’

‘Uh right, well as I was saying…’

Lucy Mangan is now wagging a finger in front of my nose.

‘Oh no you didn’t!’

‘Eh? I’m just saying….’

‘Oh no you didn’t!’

‘But……’

Lucy Mangan now begins to beat me over the head with her chair. As security rush the stage the crowd chant excitedly ‘Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!’

My mind returns to focus. I’m led into the studio.

Seamus is there. So is…..John Campbell!

John Campbell, BBC NI Business Editor. John Campbell who I last week described in a blog as having a scowl like a little boy who has been told he can’t wear his Spider-Man wellies to school.

I sit uncomfortably beside him. For the first time ever I’m hoping that someone hasn’t read one of my blogs.

The population of Northern Ireland is 1.8m. That blog was one of my most popular, it was read about six times. I subtract the three times that I clicked on it. I’m trying to work out what are the odds that John Campbell might have read what I wrote about John Campbell. But the truth is you’d need to be John Campbell to figure out the maths.

He’s talking to Seamus about Brexit. I try to follow the argument and nod knowingly a couple of times. But soon I’m lost and I start to wonder what the implications would be if I gave John Campbell a wedgie while he’s live on air. I decide against it.

He gives me a quick look as he leaves the studio but it tells me nothing.

Then I’m broadcasting to the nation again. Lucy Mangan is lovely and not at all confrontational. Indeed it seems that we’re mostly making the same arguments, but just coming to different conclusions. This has the strange effect of being both reassuring and making me feel intellectually illiterate.

Seamus is polished and professional as ever, not even missing a beat when I accidentally eat part of my microphone after the first question. As ever it all passes in a blur.

My wife and son have made the trip to Belfast with me because we’re going for pizza afterwards.

When I return to the car my son overwhelms me with hugs and kisses. He just about understands what is happening, that daddy was on the radio. Mummy tells me he almost burst with excitement when I mentioned his name on air.

There’s a strange look in his eyes, something I haven’t seen before. For a moment it’s almost like he respects me. But then he pulls up my shirt and grabs a handful of stomach fat, shouting ‘Daddy’s got a squidgy belly!’

Of course he doesn’t entirely understand the concept of the radio just yet. He can hear me but doesn’t know why I can’t seem to hear him.

Apparently the whole time I was on air he was yelling at the radio ‘Daddy, tell them I like doughnuts!’