When I was a child you could wander back and forth across the border as casually as a cow registered in both jurisdictions.
Today you need to change your money, notify your insurance company, switch over your SIM card and bring your passport. OK, you only need to bring your passport if you're black – but as far as the southerners are concerned we're all refugees from the third world anyway.
This week Sinn Féin marked 100 years of failure with a building-sized 'Make Partition History' banner in Parnell Square. To the well-heeled Dubliners strolling beneath, it must seem as naff and infantile as a Che Guevara poster in a sullen teenager's bedroom. In every way that counts, partition and the union are deeper and stronger than they have ever been.
Northern Ireland faces a great many problems but the sudden end of its existence isn't one of them. So how then can we explain the feverish urgency of 'Love Ulster', which calls for "hundreds of thousands of Protestants and unionists to oppose a united Ireland?"
Quite simple really. 'Love Ulster' is a terror campaign. Not the old kind of terror campaign, mind you but a new political kind aimed at terrifying people into thinking that all those cows are about to stampede north and chew up our passports.
Actually, now I think about it, this isn't a new kind of terror campaign either but it is unique in having been spurned from day one by every single unionist politician and party.
When even the DUP refuses to jump on a bandwagon you can be sure the wheels are falling off already. Remember how Mr Paisley carefully distanced himself from Drumcree when he realised it was a lost cause? No? Well, exactly. The Orange Order, which is up to its neck in the Love Ulster campaign, has also forgotten rather quickly that the sight of Mr Paisley running away from you is an even surer portent of disaster than the sight of Mr Paisley running towards you.
Also involved in this doomed enterprise are one-sided victims group Fair and double-sided A4 newspaper group Shankill Community Media Ltd, which doesn't let a £30,000 Invest-NI grant stop it deriding "cowardly British policy" on the front of its campaign launch special edition. Between them these loyal sons of Ulster plan to round up our sacred border cows faster than Cuchulainn on a quad. Unfortunately they have chosen to begin their campaign with a symbolic re-enactment of the birth of the UVF (or "the old UVF", as all promotional literature is at pains to make clear). This is not a particularly glorious chapter in the history of the union.
In 1914, as real patriots of all persuasions headed off to fight the Kaiser, the old UVF's white-feather brigade was smuggling in weapons from Germany. Oops. "UVF – The People's Army" is how flags and murals across east Belfast now commemorate this act of treason. Perhaps "UVF – Die Volksarmee" would be more appropriate, as long as it wasn't mistaken for Ulster-Scots. Incidentally the reason that the First World War was such a disaster for the Protestant people was that it drained our gene pool of the sort of man who would give today's loyalists a good kicking.
Still not to worry because the Larne ceremony symbolised only the smuggling in of "words" – which will be a great relief to the 37 per cent of 16-year-olds in the Shankill who leave school unable to read.
Not to worry about that either, because according to the words of the headline on the campaign newsletter: "We are all victims now".
Well there's a slogan to motivate the masses.
Perhaps they should put it on a building-sized banner?
