Looking back at the headlines this week you wonder if this is just the lull before the storm. The loyalist feudal no-go areas and their rain-sodden flags are strangley silent – touch wood – without the presence of a certain fat thug now holed up in durance vile consulting his lawyers.
Who pays the bills of the men in wigs?
Surely not us?
Over in London town the holy men of peace, the heads of the hierarchies have been pictured at No 10 with a smiling Prime Minister Tony Blair.
It is noted that there have been no such photos with the other much-talking politicians who have been over yet again to discuss the uncertain future.
Nothing to smile about?
Now about that forecast of stormy weather ahead.
The uncertainty about the Stormont May election is over.
Tony Blair says it's on, come what may, whether the imported direct rulers are still here mopping up the mess or not.
Consult the crystal ball and what do we see?
First, there is that ominous international distress signal 'May-Day! May-Day!' for that old war-worn hulk, the 1920-built cruiser, HMS Ulster, holed by a DUP torpedo and grounded off the mouth of the Boyne on its surprise journey to Dublin Bay.
The pro-agreement crew has been rescued but there is fighting for control on board the stricken vessel by the boarding parties of Sinn Féin and DUP would-be salvage crews.
With no response from the regular American and British salvage experts, all absent in a Gulf war, the outlook is gloomy.
At this point the picture fades in a grey cloud tantalisingly.
Is it just a bad dream 'the world in a state of chassis' visualised by another Joxer?.
We must await the outcome of the not so merry month of May when the crucial Stormont election takes place and the electorate decides the fate of the politicians – good, bad and indifferent.
Meantime, all the bets are off because of allegations that Officialdom has 'gerrymandered' huge numbers of voters off the voters list by its tough new restrictions.
In our dear old Neverneverland, where the graveyards were ransacked at election times for bogus voters, this is a new twist.
After the census jiggery-pokery the cry goes round the battlements 'can they do nothing right?'
What price a republican first minister after the polls?
Turn now from fantasy to reality as we read the latest episode from the Jarndyce and Jarndyce Bloody Sunday inquiry, that lawyers bonanza now sitting in London.
Five years on and 280 sitting days, costing millions in briefs, we wonder, will it ever end in our lifetime?
Already it has gone down as the greatest inquiry in history and the most expensive.
Who Wants to be a Millionaire? can now be seen on TV and Methodist Central Hall, fortunes are being made there but in the end the families of the innocent victims will get precious little except words, millions of them, in a tome which should rival the Domesday Book.
Once again a revealing picture of the peculiar relations between Britain's military chiefs and their so-called masters – the politicians elected to govern – is revealed in the evidence of ex-prime minister Ted Heath.
Heath and former defence secretary Lord Carrington deny all knowledge of the Sunday afternoon massacre of Derry's civil rights marchers and imply that their bungling brasshats in Derry made a hames of the situation.
That afternoon, while all hell broke out in Derry, Prime Minister Heath was busily engaged, he recalled, arranging the catering for one of his yachting expeditions.
He only learned of the tragic happenings in Derry at dinner later that evening.
No doubt it spoilt his appetite for the evening and, emulating Home Secretary Maulding, downed a few stiff whiskeys.
There is no record that he ordered Carrington to sack General Ford or promote him out of harm's way, like another involved mystery MI5 character, as military attache to Peking. In the First World War we are told that Field Marshall Haig and the other stupid military chiefs labelled their masters in London as "frocks" and treated them with contempt.
Is this still the situation?
Who bosses who?
