If as Shakespeare says: "All the world is a stage", it's getting pretty close to the time here in the land of No, No, No when the frustrated audience will rise up in fury and start throwing rotten eggs and over-ripe fruit, at the players who have wasted years to land us in the present impenetrable mess.
While the rest of the world, including our friends down south, are getting on with modern life doing their own thing, up here in the political wasteland its back to all the old stuff reported in the papers and television – the archaic bigots and their 13 and 15 year-old brats, who should be in bed, out throwing paint and pipe bombs at unprotected Catholic churches, schools and the homes of isolated elderly folk. The hot-bed of this campaign is Paisley's constituency of North Antrim inducing DUP spokesmen to tut-tutting and deploring it as, "immoral, should stop", etc, etc.
But the question is what's behind this obviously concerted move to enliven loyalist Ulster with their version of ethnic cleansing?
What are they up to? Is this a futile attempt to stage a copy-cat Bombay Street in the hope that the ceasefire IRA will emulate the UVF and torpedo the tardy peace process?
Over the holidays I have been reading All of These People, Fergal Keane's account of his life as an award-winning war correspondent which took him from his job in Belfast as RTE correspondent covering the Troubles to his later extraordinary journey for the BBC-through war torn Africa.
Nephew of famed Irish dramatist John B Keane, Fergal saw the north at its worst in the three years he reported the conflict before he felt the place closing in on him: "It was too small, too close, I told myself. And I was bored."
He found Ian Paisley a "frightening figure".
"He preached intolerance but surrounded himself with a patina of respectability.
"His words inflamed hatred but kept a clear distance between himself and those who did the actual killing.
"When Ulster needed calm he created fury.
"When it needed words of peace he spat hatred. When those exhausted by conflict tried to make peace he stood outside the process, bellowing betrayal."
Keane, from his republican background, confessed that the IRA's 30 years' violence had made the old shibboleths they had grown up with in the south embarrassing.
"At dinner parties in Dublin I learned to say nothing about the north.
"I was quiet when someone who had never been north of the border launched into a tirade – how could you help people who wouldn't help themselves?
"All they did was complain. It was a sick society. They were all bigots."
After a while he stopped going to Dublin every weekend. He could no longer join in with the jokes and condescensions about northerners without feeling he was betraying those whose funerals he had reported. Well that's his honest appraisal of the situation north and south and it must be admitted that it's a pretty depressing one. Where do we go from here?
Nobody has a clue. The Unionist soothsayers are suffering from writer's block.
Not even the arrival of the Canadian General yet again, has caused a ripple of excitement or anticipation about the long forgotten D-word. Yes D for dump or D for decommission. Take your pick.
Meantime, the hand of death has sadly taken from our midst the big hitters Gerry Fitt and Mo Mowlam, unorthodox politicians who shocked the staid
Yes Minister nabobs of the civil service and dared to make us laugh while they worked miracles. The big secret is out. Big Ian was at death's door, they say, was told until doctors developed an elixir which brought him back to life as the boss. That's the story as told to the puzzled ordinary five-eighths of the DUP.
The end result was that his dutiful sidekicks Dodds and Robinson, battling for the top of the greasy pole, were thrust rudely aside and the Ayatollah emerged demanding "sack cloth and ashes" from the IRA.
For them and the pitiable Jeffrey Donaldson, who ratted on Trimble to offer himself to the DUP as a turncoat, the future is unsure, the 'heir not-apparently' Ian Paisley jnr, is now the boneless wonder who will inherit his da's crown (joke over).
At 79 time is running out for the big man.
He is said in his Bible studies to be an admirer of the great apostle Paul.
Even at this late hour if he saw a blinding light on the road to Damascus or Ballymena and recanted for all the misery he has masterminded over the years, there just might be a happier ending for this community and all the deluded tribesmen of Ulster blindingly marching to oblivion.
