Ghost town, airport alert and the prime minister

Last week I flew over to London to interview the prime minister. This was the first flight I have boarded since the pandemic hit these islands.

"How are you?" I asked the assistants in the duty free at Belfast City Airport as I strolled past.

"Well, we are still here," they replied, noting that basic resilience as an achievement.

On Thursday night, both Heathrow and Paddington Station felt eerily quiet. Central London had a ghost town quality.

As my taxi crossed Westminster bridge, I spotted a young couple stealing a kiss through their face masks. An image of these bizarre times.

The next morning I faced a short walk through the driving rain.

The hotel receptionist thrust a complimentary umbrella over the counter at me.

Social-distancing measures apply around Westminster

"I'm not sure I shall be back to return it," I told him.

"It's yours, just tell your friends and colleagues to book - we need more guests," he said.

Given the number of people working at home, the deserted pavements and smooth-running traffic shouldn't have been a surprise.

Despite that, the contrast with the months during which my colleagues and I reported from those same streets, thronged with pro and anti-Brexit protestors, was so marked it could not but leave an impression.

A Westminster-based colleague told me she'd caught Covid back in March and hadn't been fit enough to return to work until August.

"You really don't want to catch it, I think I still have long Covid symptoms, tiredness, double vision, that kind of thing"," she said.

Moments later I was bumping elbows with another coronavirus survivor - Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

There are times when journalists get an opportunity for small talk with party leaders, but the regional TV interviews which coincide with the conference season are not one of those times.

They are always a tightly-choreographed production line.

One minute to enter the room and take your seat. Four minutes for the interview. Exit stage right and be quick about it.

The moral pressure to stick to your allotted duration comes not from the government minders, but from your fellow hacks.

Woe betide you if you become - as Disraeli once put it - "inebriated by the exuberance of your own verbosity" thereby causing your counterpart from East Anglia or Tyneside to drop off the end of the queue.

Last year various parliamentary votes ate into the PM's time and I was one of the losers with four minutes becoming three then two-and-a-half.

The pressure of time meant the interview became a staccato session with me interjecting every 10 seconds, keenly aware Boris Johnson could fill the entire slot with one answer given the opportunity.

By the standards of these speed-dating affairs, this month's encounter felt more relaxed, with time for a couple of questions on Covid and another couple on Brexit.

I shall leave you the viewers to judge the results.

Afterwards, mask back on and head for home.

Grab a takeaway lunch at Paddington before realising that my original intention to eat it on the train would break the rules.

Passengers were evacuated from Heathrow Airport

Clutching an increasingly cold cheese and onion pasty, I head up an escalator at Heathrow trying to find a spot where I can legally consume my snack.

But then a man with a machine gun starts directing me urgently outside - I realise this is not a personalised service for all potential pasty eaters but an evacuation.

I start to film on my phone in case this might become a news story, when another armed police officer tells me to get back behind a barrier.

Clocking my lanyard, he adds "and I don't care whether you are BBC or not".

Fortunately the alert turns out to be a false alarm. No harm done, apart from me and several hundred others spending an hour in the cold and wet.

With passengers anxious to make their flights, there's a temporary but worrying breakdown in social distancing.

A wet stand for those moved out of Heathrow Airport

And my pasty is now approaching zero on Lord Kelvin's "absolute thermometric scale".

I arrive back to City Airport to hear the DUP MP Jim Shannon has been asked to self isolate after close contact with a Covid positive SNP MP at Westminster.

He has tested negative but is isolating after the House of Commons advised him it was okay to fly home first.

Having just shared a sealed cylindrical metal tube between London and Belfast with a bunch of strangers, I find this advice a bit bewildering, but it's not the only confusing thing in this era of contagion.

So if Friday was PM, then Monday is MU.

The end is in sight for our Inside Politics Q&A virtual tour of Northern Ireland's constituencies and this week is the turn of Mid Ulster.

Our panel will be Sinn Fein's Linda Dillon, the SDLP's Patsy McGlone, and the DUP's Keith Buchanan.

Whether it's Covid circuit breakers, Brexit talks or more local issues like sand dredging in Lough Neagh, please email your questions to us via [e-mail] or tweet them using our hashtag #bbcip

Please try and get your questions in by Monday breakfast time at the latest - last week, frustratingly, a few good talking points arrived just after we had finished our recording.