Well, that was the summer that was. Or should I say: wasn't! I missed the worst of August thankfully through being on holiday in eat-your-heart-out, sun-kissed France, followed by the Olympics in Beijing.

Back in Belfast situ, I look out at the persistently leaden skies of Ulster and it makes me wonder if the dull shade of grey in the sky colours our outlook on life.

This mood is set when I wake up and listen to the morning headlines. What a litany of doom and gloom. Does nothing happy ever happen overnight in this province?

A man was knocked down by a car ... Another car was burned by youths in Craigavon ... Three people were arrested in Belfast after a disturbance ... A man will appear in court today charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old-girl ... And now the weather ... another low pressure front is approaching Fermanagh and it will bring long spells of rain for most of the |day ?

Listening to this tale of woe reminds me of the old joke about two Ulstermen stranded on an iceberg in the Atlantic. They spot a big liner coming out of the fog towards them. "Sammy, we're all right now," says one to the other. "Here comes the Titanic."

Seriously, I do think we're in danger of losing the plot in Northern Ireland when it comes to what constitutes the morning news headlines — and the late night ones as well. This is definitely not ‘the Northern Ireland news’. It's only a part of the picture, and the bleakest at that.

I'm not suggesting that bad news should be censored but surely there are also more positive aspects of this society which constitute news as well. The problem is that radio and television news bulletins are round the clock, on the hour and at all hours of the day and night. So what do we get? An undue reliance on police, fire brigade and ambulance sources to fill bulletins. Dismal and demoralising reports of street crime, arson attacks and road accidents.

The 28,000 journalists at the Olympics were well aware of a very different approach in China. The State-controlled news was like a happy hour. In China, nothing is challenged and negative reporting frowned upon, if not censored.

No one would begin to defend this distortion but I still ask if we have not gone too far in the other direction.

Can the news gatherers here not see beyond the grey skies above us and catch the odd ray of sunshine in their stories?

In the bad old days of the Troubles, hardly anyone went to bed or awoke next morning without switching on the headlines. What the police and other emergency services reported to news rooms was really all we wanted to know. Where was the trouble? Which town was hit by a bomb? Who was shot at? Who was the latest casualty? Mercifully, those terrible times are a memory now. But the style of broadcast news does not appear to have moved on. I suspect it can't because, behind the microphones and TV cameras locally, lies a shoe-string operation which still depends on the emergency services to provide the substance of early morning and late night bulletins.

I accept and acknowledge that this is not the case when it comes to the main news programmes of the day, such as UTV Live and BBC Newsline.They, like this newspaper, have changed and now embrace a much broader concept of what news is.

The round-the-clock newsroom is all very well for the big battalions such as Sky and the BBC nationally, with their extensive resources. At local level, it does not provide a comprehensive view of daily life in our society. There is much more — more that is positive — about Northern Ireland than those morning and late night headlines reflect.

To coin a phrase from a recent TV ad: ‘Quote me happy’. Just because we've had a miserable summer, doesn't mean we have to listen to miserable news.

l Whatever happened to the Stormont Executive? I know this is a very rare species of 12, politically-unstable, emotionally-disturbed homo sapiens, but a sighting of them together must rank in the same league as an appearance of the Loch Ness monster or a Mongolian Yeti. Any day now, I expect David Attenborough to devote an entire BBC Two documentary to a search for them in the undergrowth of east Belfast.

There have been occasional sightings of individual members of the species over the summer but no sign of them mating or feeding together inside the white Portland stone lair which these strange creatures have been known to inhabit in the past.

Whether they decide to mate again this autumn, no one can be sure of knowing at this juncture. My own feeling is that they have too much to lose by not doing so. They have the promise of a cosy, comfy winter habitat and I expect them to emerge very soon, showing off their political plumage but still squaking quite a lot at one another.

Before they can settle down, they will need to make one special flight across the water to the lair of the Greater Spotted Labour Lapwing nesting in Downing Street. They will emerge some hours later, uttering warm courting calls to one another. Then they will happily fly back to our shores, their winter feathers billowing out with pride and behave as if all was sweetness and light for another few months.