DOUG Beattie has unblocked your humble diarist. Ymay glean some sense of how passion and excitement wane as one grows older from the fact that it’s the most exciting thing to have happened to Squinter since he got his bus pass.

Squinter has no idea how long ago Doug blocked him, but if he was to hazard a guess he’d say it was four or five years ago. 

Two things need to be said about this epochal event:

1. Squinter has no idea why Doug has decided after all this time to let him back into his life.

2. Squinter has even less of an idea why Doug blocked him in the first place.

Squinter’s trying hard to think of what it was that led Doug to cast him into the social media wilderness, but nothing springs immediately to mind. The biggest thing to have happened to Doug in his political career was the uncovering in 2022 of a shedload of neanderthal social media posts from the 2010s targeting women, Muslims, Blacks and, ah, Edwin Poots’ wife. The then UUP leader said he was “deeply ashamed and embarrassed” by the tweets and it is entirely possible that Squinter made reference to that massive story at some point. And given the nature of this column it is equally entirely possible that if there was a reference it was a less than supportive one.

The ancient Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger said “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end” and in that spirit Squinter intends to grasp the second chance that Doug has given him. Hate-the-world Melvin Udall, played by Jack Nicholson in the hit 1997 romcom As Good As It Gets, is centuries and worlds away from Seneca, but by the end of the movie, after he has learned to love and hope, he tells his love interest “You make me wanna be a better man.”

That’s Squinter’s pledge to Doug. A man can change. A man can be better. A man can be blocked. A man can be unblocked.

Permission to cry, sir. 

• The only UK paper to have the funerals of 160 Iranian schoolgirls on its front page this morning is the Metro freesheet.

Quite simply, had they been Israeli schoolgirls the coverage would have been immense. You can lie to yourself and say it's not true – but we all know it is.

Oh, what a lovely war: Squinter on Twitter

• THE NEWS: The world stands on the brink as US and Israel strikes on Iran continue and Tehran reprisal attacks widen. Meanwhile, China and Russia look on and consider their options.

LOYAL ULSTER: This reminds me of what the IRA did in Glengormley in 1973.

• 1. Assassination of Archduke Frank Ferdinand.

2. German invasion of Poland.

3. Elderly rapist covering up his role in a global child sex ring.

• 160 now killed by Israel at an elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. The pile of bloodstained schoolgirl backpacks reminds me very much of the personal exhibits at the Auschwitz Museum.

History’s strange, isn’t it?

• Hands up those who think the Nakba and the creation of Israel has been a plus for the Middle East and the world.

• Listen very carefully…

It is your moral and democratic duty to support the US, the most violent country in the history of the planet, as it expands its interventionist CV.

Iranians may be in Iran, they may not be Arabs, but they remain brown.