Cultural Highlights

Six days into the New Year and not a cultural highlight yet to scribble down into my cultural highlights book. Ok, a book might seem a bit OTT, but I don't want to get caught out again the way I was on New Year's Eve 2009 when, at a friend's house, I was asked what my cultural highlight was.

A wave of panic rose up, as my mind took on a blankness that I only get when asked what my cultural highlights (referred to as CH from now on) are. You see being the presenter of Arts Extra I'm supposed to have a greater than average knowledge of the CH's of the passing year - due to my cultural radar being on full alert even when asleep. Except when asked I can't remember. And worse still I'm crippled by that sense of should I go for the cool option, the intellectual option, the funny option, or the option that will make all other cultural highlights contributions from assembled company pale beside mine.

Not that I'm competitive or anything.

So, while my husband goes for experiemental jazz band Polar Bear in a concert we saw earlier this year in Belfast at the Moving On Music festival, I grow increasingly envious at his cool quota and nervous at the fact that I'm next.

My head swims with the decisions. Literature, ok, Stuart Neville's The Twelve. Debut novel from Armagh born writer. Thriller. I raved about it to everyone. Good, but what about Seamus Heaney?

He's always a good, weighty bet, remembering his pride and delight at the unveiling of a statue to him on a sunny day in Bellaghy.

Wait, music, Beth Orton at Custom House Square.

Hold on. Theatre, a young man hunched over his drum kit sobbing his heart out - I'm in the Playhouse in Derry at their Theatre of Witness production. The young man is telling the real life story of his father being shot dead.

More theatre, the Belfast production about a former childkiller, now an adult living a new life under a new name. Richard Dormer in the deeply disturbing lead role, reducing me to tears for the last 10 minutes of the play so much so I can't look up when the lights come up at the end of the play. I go for the last one.

So it's New Year's Eve 2010, and the cultural highlight question is asked again. What will I say? Will it be Derry winning the vote to become UK Capital of Culture 2013? Could it be the last ever series of Lost and will they tell me what that polar bear, not the jazz band, was all about? Will Colm Toibin win the Costa Book of the Year award for Brooklyn after being, I feel wrongly, overlooked for the shortlist for the Man Booker? Or will it be Seamus Heaney's latest poetry collection, The Human Chain, due out in the summer and rumours of a visit to the West Belfast Festival in August?

Six days into 2010 at least I'm thinking about that question. Just another 358 days to go before I'm asked again.