Suppose, as you reasonably might, that the Troubles go into sustained abeyance. What attitudes between North and South will then be uncovered? This year - some of you will have noticed - I'm going to spend more time on that side than on this side of the Border, and I hope that that sheer amount of time will shift some of my fixed ideas, which I consider to be typically Southern fixed ideas.
I said this, though in a kind of roundabout and skittish way, in an interview with Gay Byrne on his radio show the other day. About an hour later I was walking along the street when I was stopped. The person whose face was pushed in to mine, spitting at me, was beside himself with anger. The anger was hurt. And the hurt was at a level so fundamental that I hardly know what to do about it. He's from Northern Ireland and was saying there's nothing different about him.
He's an Irish person like myself, he said. It is turning Northerners into some kind of exotic tribe to talk of going there to learn about them. It is racist to lump them all together and separate them from the people of the Republic. "You're racists, racists, the whole lot of you, you and Gay Byrne and The Irish Times," he shouted at me.
I think that on one level I recognise the hurt. I remember bumping into a political leader soon after Mary Robinson won the presidential election with the help, so everyone believed, of the "woman factor". Suddenly all the political parties were into wooing women. "What do you women want?" this man said to me with complete earnestness. "Just say what you want and we'll give it to you."
And I was furious. Who was he to separate us off, generalise about us and patronise us by assuming he could relieve our condition, and brandish his power and our powerlessness by going around offering to be nice to us? Who was he, to think of women as "them" and himself as "us"? The real pain of being second-class is when they don't even notice that they're treating you as second-class: they think they're being wonderful.
I saw nothing wrong, as recently as last Wednesday, in being as flippant as I felt like being in talking about the North. The tone came naturally: I took it for granted that anyone listening realised that we knew perfectly well that these are serious matters, but that we chose to talk about them in that slip-slidey, allusive, half-histrionic, humorous, glancing way people from the South do talk when they're at ease.
Now it is borne in on me that the very, very first thing to learn about Northern Ireland is to be more careful. To think before I speak. The playfulness of public discussion here hasn't been available to our brothers and sisters up the road, and they keep their black wit for themselves. "You've no idea," a Southerner living in Belfast said to me sadly the other day, "How much I envy you all the fun you're having with Mary McAleese's Communion. You can't just have disagreements like that up here. You have to watch what you say."
Well, anyone can learn to watch what they say. But can you really re-educate yourself? And at the same time hold out for the truth of your own perceptions? If, as a scathing letter to the Editor last week put it, "the information gap Ms O'Faolain is off to investigate doesn't exist", then I'm wasting my valuable life. But I think it does exist, at least when you're going from South to North.
For example, I frankly asked last week whether anyone knew of anywhere I could live in Northern Ireland, and I got a wonderfully helpful response. I was told of a cottage in Rostrevor ("If Mary McAleese can move to Dublin, can't you move to Rostrevor?"), a house in a forest near Enniskillen, a house on a beautiful beach near Portstewart, a little house in the old part of Newry ("near Slieve Gullion which has a lake on the top"), a semi near the shore in Holywood, Co Down, which has brought the two previous women tenants nothing but luck (jobs and husbands), an old house down a lane near Lisnaskea.
But some of the letters weren't about places to live so much as about all the questions that choosing a place to live bring up. These questions are not at all the same in the North as they would be in the South. How does an outsider choose one place to express the North? Lots of places in the South are "typical", but very, very few places are mixed in religion or income or anything else in the proportion the population as a whole is.
"Why don't you move to a predominantly Protestant/unionist area?" one man wrote to me. "What about the huge swathes of land on this island (for example, the area stretching from Ballyclare to Crumlin and Antrim, to Ballymena and Ballymoney up to Coleraine) where the majority of people probably don't consider themselves to be Irish, or if they do, it is a completely different sense of Irishness than many Irish Times readers would be exposed to . . ."
Well, yes. This is a good idea. But I don't think those people would in any way let me in. I don't think, to put it mildly, that they would welcome a Southern journalist to even the fringes of their neighbourly life.
I think I'd actually have a better chance of finding some company in a place where I went to see a house myself. It was a lovely little house on the outskirts of a village on the Ards peninsula, so near the sea you could hear the waves, and yet with a pheasant walking past the back door. The only thing was, "UDA" was sprayed on the wall and the kerbstones were painted red, white and blue. Sarcastic letter-writers to the Editor please note: are the implications of geographical location not genuinely different, North and South?
A Southern man living in Belfast comforted me by writing: "The first place we rented when we came here from the South was on the border of a loyalist area. I hesitated to speak to anyone, suffered acute paranoia from time to time and mild paranoia until after the loyalist ceasefire. Lesson One: live amongst your own and make other friends from there.
"Nothing prepared me for the shock to my vague sense of Irishness when I experienced the disapproval directed at me from the other side. The only defence is a strong sense of self-identity and respect and understanding of the identity of the other, like two middle-weight boxers squaring off and sizing each other up. I had to re-examine my identity, check my principles, throw out my woolly thinking and become a person of integrity. In this sense the North is a far more challenging society . . ."
He said that one could truly learn the essentials for democracy through living in the North. That's an ideal to bear in mind, after all the anger. That is, if I ever get started. A letter from an outsider who has lived in rural Northern Ireland for some decades says: "Every person entering NI is categorised and the label stays on them. I suggest that a Nula Fallon, born in southern England, who attended a non-denominational school and university, might just get a picture . . ."
Carrying all this - and much more - advice, I set out, this very morning, to decide on a house.