Bill Harvey: King of the Fairies

As I get yet older, I sometimes question whether some of my more bizarre memories are true. Such was the case last weekend when news coverage of the Good Friday Agreement anniversary reminded me of my first trip to Northern Ireland.

When I started one of the then-new Boots Tutor Practitioner jobs back in the early nineties, I was required to travel to various parts of the UK to deliver training lectures to colleagues in practice. The first of these was to the practice in central Belfast, a city still experiencing the Troubles. I was late meeting my new boss, a certain Dr Nizar Hirji, after being detained at the airport. My pre-PowerPoint carousel of slides had proved to be just too suspicious. I finally arrived for my rendezvous at the Europa Hotel, my main memory of which was that the windows in my room bore stickers advising me to keep at least 1 metre away from them in case of a bomb blast.