The English media loved him because he made a lot of his Protestant working-class credentials. He spoke in a bass voice using too-complicated words stuck in slightly the wrong places, but they were prepared to give him points for trying. They thought they had discovered an authentic curiosity, The Talking Belfast Prod – a new thing, since most of us were reliably taciturn in the face of interrogation.

Nixon had regretful blue eyes and a heavy, blurred jawline, but then sometimes he’d get a bit blustery and muscular, just enough to hint that he was the sort of guy who hung out with hardened gunmen. You could tell that the interviewers enjoyed that even more. They went briefly malleable, like an East End glamour-bird offered a drink by one of the Krays.

He didn’t sound that authentic to me, though: he had picked up his style of talking from the IRA spokesmen, who used it to remarkable effect, and the two sides were at it all the time, oozing their way across the airwaves, competing for who could sound the most emollient.

Liam Blake was one of the IRA men who organised that notable day of carnage in the early 1970s when more than twenty different bombs exploded right across Belfast, a sunny afternoon suddenly darkened by grey smoke, flying shards of metal and spurting crimson rain. Shoppers ran screaming from one explosion into the path of the next. A family friend of Murdie’s was killed that day, and one evening at our house he started talking about it, normally enough at first, until he said: ‘Och he was so funny, that wee lad. He could do these impressions of anybody, he could do—’ but the last word seemed to stick in his throat and he stopped very abruptly. He got up and walked quickly over to the window and stood there stiffly for a while, turning his head away from us and staring out at the street. After a bit Big Jacky got up and poured them both a drink and they began talking about the football. I had wanted to know more – in which part of the city, how exactly it happened – but I didn’t ask him about it again.

Blake, however, now spoke almost exclusively in a voice polished with piety, a thoughtful social worker issuing case reports. It did my head in just to hear it. Between them the assorted paramilitaries talked so gently that everyone was thoroughly deafened, and hardly anyone could hear the swish of baseball bats up alleyways at all.

Forget all that, I thought. I turned the radio off and got up. I would take a shower, clean my teeth, go to work, see Eve, my heart sang. Tomorrow I would write to Phyllis.