I’VE been releasing short videos on social media that I call “BedTalks”, which sounds, I’ll admit, far more profound than it has any right to.

In them, I talk about everything from the colloquialisms we use in the north, and how some of them connect back to the Irish language, to the cultural and generational differences that shape our society.

From that description, you could be forgiven for imagining something deeply intellectual, perhaps me reclining like a Belfastard Socrates, delivering wisdom from under a duvet.

In reality, it’s just me sitting on my bed, asking the internet whether I’m an oddball for still putting “Auntie” or “Uncle” before the names of my parents’ siblings.

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What surprised me was not that people had an opinion, but how fondly those opinions were held.

There was something lovely about the replies, wee snapshots of kitchens and aunties who always had biscuits in a tin and uncles who appeared somewhere between the kettle boiling and the football........

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