This whole war-on-terrorism thing has made me feel so much better about flying this holiday season, how 'bout you? I mean, okay, so it's obviously provided good motivation for suicide-bombing for tens of thousands of grieving Afghans and millions of their sympathisers around the world, and it's led to enormous racism and curtailments of liberty directed against all sorts of unrelated folks, but it seems to have created such a vigorous sense of camaraderie among airline passengers - as heard all over the airwaves early this week.
And all the while giving Osama bin Laden such a jolly good fright too! As the week wheeled on, the war-talk had to give way to Peace on Earth, deck the halls and turn on the telly. Still, there were perfectly good non-musical reasons to listen to the radio - even on Christmas itself, when in the evening Stephen Rea could be heard reading Derek Mahon's Hudson Letter (RT╔ Radio 1, Tuesday), one of the best of this season's umpteen musings from New York.
And then other programmes fell awkwardly into the it-will-have-to-do category: no other time of year lends itself so freely, for obvious reasons, to pre-recorded programmes, allowing a digital disc to take the place of an oral human being in a radio studio. Not in Our Set, Dear (RT╔ Radio 1, Friday) belonged to this category, and though it was neither Christmassy nor year-in-reviewish, Teri Garvey's documentary seized the moment impressively.
This was a profile of the late Brian Inglis, who in the course of this half-hour went for me from being a vaguely recalled name to his apparently more rightful, vital role in an imagining of independent Ireland (or Irish Times Ireland anyway) and its relationship to Britain in the 20th century. For God's sake, he was even born in 1916, and went on to be, in Garvey's introductory words "a journalist and columnist, a historian, a broadcaster, a lecturer in applied economics and an enquirer into fringe medicine and paranormal activities".
As well as interviewing various people, Garvey hit the radio archives to find Inglis telling his own story, starting with his childhood as a posh Malahide Protestant, very much ascendant. "We regarded the Catholics as being an inferior species. There were two fatal things, socially speaking: one was to be a Catholic, the other was to be in trade." (The latter was worse.) The title of the documentary came from his granny's likely reply to the prospect of socially unsuitable visitors.
Socially suitable, just about, was working in this newspaper (and only, in Ireland, this newspaper). Inglis started in The Irish Times to hold him over before taking up his Royal Air Force commission. As the journalist he became, he was well placed to watch "my world . . . disappear". He appears to have done every job in this place apart from radio reviewer, though he did plenty of radio.
In Britain, where decent journalistic salaries eventually lured him, he became a notable TV broadcaster too. Eventually, Inglis was tapped for a job as RT╔'s programme controller, appropriate for a man whose grandad owned Montrose House, but he had the sense to stay away. Inglis may have abandoned the prejudices of his native "set", but what appears to have been his effortless confidence surely owed plenty to his experience of enormous privilege. Having chosen, luxuriously, as an adult, to be "Irish", he could choose the extent of that identity; or as Michael Parkinson put it: "He became more Irish the more attractive he wanted to be." I suppose one shouldn't begrudge him this facility; many of us have cloaks of identity we put on and take off, though not necessarily with the conscious ease of an Inglis.
Take, for example, his near-contemporaries, the title characters of Three Men Standing at the Met (RT╔ Radio 1, Sunday), described by Michael Coady: "my future-father George, his brothers Jimmy and Peter, three ragged-arsed young immigrants, their futures yet unscored, in an America careering towards the crash of '29 . . ." The three young Irishmen have managed, in 1927, to cough up $3 each to stand in a passage leading to the orchestra seats at the Metropolitan Opera, and stand listening to Verdi's La Forza del Destino, "under the boxes of the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Harrimans, the Juliards and JP Morgan, in a high temple of wealth and art and privilege".
As the narrator, 70 years later, Coady is propelled back to that imagined moment by a combination of Verdi on the radio - live via satellite from the Met to rural Ireland - and his father's annonated programme from that operatic night. "That was then, this is now. Or maybe vice versa."
We already know George Coady won't last in America, that Depression-era TB will send him home to Ireland and a dance-hall meeting with the narrator's mother, to the sound of a Duke Ellington tune rather than a Verdi opera.
His big-brother Jimmy will stay, though, to work as a sign-painter out on Long Island and collect grand-opera records. "He'll become outwardly assimilated but never content, watching as year by year the New York rich appropriate the foreshore, hardening into a bitter old age . . . as unforgiving of his Long Island village as of the town he came from. Over the years, letters from the homeland bring him word of clay on coffins . . ." Uncle Peter does a little better: he gets back to Ireland and is a local musician of note, singing Brother, Can You Spare a Dime and playing various instruments until he keels over dead on the bandstand on St Stephen's Night, aged 53. As Coady puts it later: "In the tangle of choice and chance, every effect in turn becomes a cause." This heartbreaking, philosophical programme was full of poetry and music, pulsed with swirling, vivid memory and wondering, and a fluid sense of time and place; it was truly visual as only the best radio can be. It should come as no surprise it was produced, as an Open Mind special, by John Quinn.
At the end of such a disheartening year, and with every promise of 2002 delivering more of the same, it's still worthwhile to take a deep breath and give thanks, and not just for John Quinn. In the case of this column, there's no doubt to whom most thanks are owed: so many readers, especially in recent months, have taken the trouble to provide feedback, positive and negative - mostly through the magic of e-mail, but also by post, by phone and last week in the supermarket. However, one reader's input was most touching of all: three months ago, as the Republic took over the chair of the UN Security Council and the US started to pulverise Afghans, a senior official in the Department of Foreign Affairs found the time to complain to my boss that this column had referred to his boss as Brian "Clow-en" Cowen.
In the extraordinary circumstances, it was a wonderful if incongruous compliment to be read so carefully, and taken so seriously, even when making the stupidist of jokes.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie