Brussels is still provincial, a bit scruffy, and we don't care.
Ndiaga Seck, associate information officer with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in the North Kivu provincial capital of Goma, said LRA attacks have decreased since December's massacre in Makombo, but people were still living with host families, unwilling to return home.
But 20 years ago, you couldn't move for thrillers in provincial theatres: always set in country houses or smart London flats, always starring an actor off the TV in neckerchief and fawn slacks (Gerald Harper or Jack Hedley or Bill Simpson), always featuring a drinks trolley, an attractive fiance, a best friend and a stalwart detective who appears after the interval to investigate the crime.
Gen Rubén Darío Alzate, who heads the Titan task force in the Pacific department of Chocó, was taken on Sunday afternoon by members of the Farc, along with another military official and a civilian, in a small village close to the provincial capital of Quibdó.
He was introduced to TV writing at Granada by Peter Eckersley and made an immediate impact with plays such as The Reporters (1972), an autobiographical view of the joyful seediness of provincial journalism, and The Mosedale Horseshoe, as well as a political serial, The Nearly Man (1974).
And all the time explaining to bemused fans of so-called bigger clubs why I cared so much about this little provincial side who perennially hung around the third and fourth divisions.
Interestingly, the word that provincial voters have most frequently been using to describe the elections so far is "trivial".
Due to a decade of tri-annual BBC2 exposure, dogged Dantean circuits of provincial comedy venues, conscious manipulation of vulnerable broadsheet opinion formers and undeserved good luck, I am now popular enough to have caught the eye of touts or, as we now dignify them, Secondary Ticketing Agents™.
The provincial HIV infection rate, at 39%, is the highest in South Africa.
The defence minister, Juan Carlos Pinzón, directed the search from the remote provincial capital of Quibdó near where General Rubén Darío Alzate was abducted along with two others on Sunday.
Fitt served as deputy to the chief executive, Brian Faulkner, the Ulster Unionist leader who had been the last Stormont prime minister before the provincial parliament was suspended by the administration in London in 1972.
