It all looked so achingly familiar. I had missed Belfast, with its broad avenues and crammed shops full of earnest girls out shopping arm-in-arm with their mammies. I watched them in stores in Royal Avenue as they mulled over clothes intensely for minutes at a time and then rejected them with a small, haughty turn of the head, letting the scorned cloth fall back into the hanging rack.

I had missed the wee fellas on the corner near the City Hall, hawking the Belfast Telegraph by yelling ‘Telly’ in a long, strangulated howl, as though the word had been first stretched and then plaited. I had missed the bespectacled assistants in the handsome bookshops, who took enquiries very seriously and all looked as if they attended Leonard Cohen appreciation conventions in their spare time.

I couldn’t enjoy the city with the same confidence I used to, though. I felt like an ex-husband tiptoeing back into the house where his former wife now lives with her thuggish, heavily armed lover. One clumsy move, one broken vase or clatter of falling cutlery, and my unwelcome presence would be advertised to all. I didn’t want to bump into anyone I used to know, and have to struggle through ridiculous explanations. The sooner this business was concluded, the sooner I would seal it off tightly, like a dirty parcel headed straight for the bin. If no one else knew anything about it at all, it would be that much easier for me to dump.

I was working on a disguise, so I started off in Belfast’s best joke shop, the one I used to plague Big Jacky to take me to as a child in search of plastic flies and smoke bombs. The line-up of rubber masks featured the usual suspects, Dracula and Dolly Parton, with a sprinkling of more recent favourites, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, along with Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley as an appeal to home-grown waggery.

I chose the Clinton, because it was the only one with a tight enough elastic strap to sit right. With its red blobby nose and symbolic topping of ridged grey hair, it didn’t look altogether unlike Mr Wharton. The face was creased in permanent joviality, revealing a generous spread of rubberised American teeth. I felt good when I had it on, wobbling my head from side to side like a giant puppet. It made a start.

Then I selected a wee black metal gun entitled ‘The Spud Gun’, designed to shoot out raw potato pellets at high speed. When I picked it up it had a surprising and pleasing weight in my hand. There was also one moustache – a luxuriant dark brown thatch – that matched my hair colour, and with some trimming it could be convincing enough. I was hunting for the moustache glue when the assistant padded up, sporting a light veneer of friendly concern on top of a well-entrenched expression of solid boredom.

‘Fancy dress party?’ he asked.