His customers were a willing audience. Deep in our parochial wrangling, we were thirsty for a taste of the exotic. In our city many people were permanently incensed over history, politics, borders, insults, threats, killings, and the simple fact of one another’s existence, but we’d never seen anyone get so worked up about food before. It was an enthralling novelty.

Luigi once chased a customer round the restaurant with a knife in a dispute over the quality of his monkfish. The fella on the other end of the knife had rashly suggested that the monkfish was past its best, and Luigi was determined to bully him into attesting otherwise. That was a high point, but there was some form of incident in there most nights. People used to pack out Luigi’s, settling in amid the red-checked tablecloths just to shovel down spaghetti and watch the owner work himself up into that evening’s rage, his gelled ringlets springing in indignation away from his contorting face. Even when Luigi was in a good mood, his jollity was as unnerving as his tantrums: it was potentially on the turn.

As time went on the food – which had often been tasty, at least – began to veer consistently towards the inedible, to the point of blatant provocation. It was as though Luigi, who used to swing so dramatically between moods, was jammed on anger. Maybe he’d caught it from us.

His delicate balance of theatre and culinary unpredictability began to tip against him. Other restaurants opened and gradually drew customers away. Even his tempers lost their cachet. The taxman circled. Luigi’s famous yellow Lamborghini vanished from outside the restaurant. I can’t remember now how it all ended. There were so many stories in Belfast at the time, each one more pressing than the last.

I can see it now among people my age from home, the struggle in their different ways to make sense of everything that happened. They’ll never manage it, because sense had so little to do with it. From the very start, the Troubles created their own logic, the crazed logic of opposition, like when you’re in the thick of a blazing row and you hear yourself smashing a glass and screaming in a high-pitched tone that isn’t normally yours. In the midst of so many voices urging you to weigh in, it was a fight just to stay half decent.

Here’s the funny thing, though: after I left, I never cared so deeply about any city again. It was Belfast, with its broad streets and narrow furies, that held all the poetry for me. It enraged me and clasped me close like a family member. Even after everything that had happened it was still home, the only place in the world where I didn’t talk with an accent. I approached every other city with the politeness reserved only for friends.