I’m mostly stuck over here in London now, ordering my coffee supplies, putting the bins out and doing accounts, but still I keep an eye on things in Belfast. I read the news online and follow the politics and I’m back and forth to help out with the shop. People over in England ask me sometimes, eagerly, ‘What do you think of Northern Ireland now, what do you think of the peace?’ I say: ‘It is what it is’ and their faces fall a little, as if they had handed me an expensive birthday present and I had said sulkily, ‘I would have liked it better in red.’

Sure I like peace, I say, because peace is the absence of killing. You would be an eejit not to want it. The real question is who do you pay for it, how much, and for how long? You get it on hire purchase. It doesn’t float down from the sky.

McGee’s bunch didn’t do so well out of it. They got let out of prison but they didn’t scrape enough votes to make it as politicians, to get a leg up into the big house. Gradually they melted off the political scene, back into the bars and the streets, clubbing together now and again to brood fondly over the long string of horrors they called their war.

The IRA guys moved on and up, though. Those same men that cranked up the death toll in the early 1970s in their donkey jackets and jeans, coolly giving orders for bomb blasts and shootings, are grandfathers and government ministers in suits now. They pore solemnly over lunch menus, and give the double thumbs up on charity fun runs for the disabled. They meet up to commemorate dead comrades and then go home to reminisce on Facebook.

Raymond follows Liam Blake on Twitter: that kind of nutty stuff makes him laugh. Blake’s got an official account for himself, and one for his pet llama, which he also manages. He calls the animal Lliama O’Rama and photographs it in a series of funny hats, with a tiny tricolour stuck rakishly in the brim on special Irish republican days. Sometimes the creature moans on about the rain or says hooray it’s looking forward to Christmas. The whimsy can spook you when you think of all the people Blake’s calmly directed below ground. I’ve never seen a man who oscillates so wildly between genres, mixing blood and baby-talk without even a gasp of self-consciousness.

His mind has so many compartments now that it must look like the Palace of Versailles, with some dark wee rooms, built very early, that never get opened up at all. Through its long corridors, some ghosts get paraded with full honours and others are shut away in locked wings.