An independent production company in Belfast is making a series of television programmes, called As Others See Us, for showing in Northern Ireland. It is about the way outsiders see the place - people who have left it, people who have moved in, southerners, tourists, and movie-makers.
And journalists, who have chosen this or that way to report the place to the world. I was one of the people the television programme talked to. The task concentrated the mind. What IS different about the North? What is different, that's to say, that is worth talking about?
Because you could always fob a serious inquiry off with a list of small differences, such as, for instance, the way Belfast people add the suffix "so it is" to "it is" statements, thus - together with the lavish use of the adjective "wee" - lending a charming air of the infantile to their speech. Or talk about the marvellous bakeries, the standard of home hospitality, the care for neat and spotless and respectable apparel.
I could have talked about the presence of the Bible. I could have talked about the sense of imploded genius - or a trapped, black intelligence - you pick up in some company in some pubs. But none of those is the real, important thing. The real, important thing about Northern Ireland is the underlying, omnipresent sectarianism.
That's what I'll take away as my main impression, now that I am finishing my little stay in the North. When I came there was snow on the hills. Now the montbretia is coming out - the flame-coloured wildflower that children so sadly call the `back-to-school" flower.
I think I've lived in Belfast long enough to get a taste of the place. But I know now that I'd need a lot more time to really get into it. I feel more and more that I want to get back South to home. On the other hand, by any standards Northern Ireland is a very interesting place, and it has been a privilege to learn how to move around in it.
I was very lucky in my half-year. Soon after I came there was a period when Catholics were being randomly killed in the city. Everyone was waiting for retaliation from the Catholic side, and then, for the familiar cycle of violence to resume. But that didn't happen.
Instead, the paramilitaries have stayed quiet, and there has been a flowering of creative political and constitutional ideas, all of them eventually backed by the majority here, if not yet by an overwhelming majority. For all the trouble there has been and will be, the Northern scene has utterly changed in this very year.
Perhaps the Northern Ireland entity has not, after all, failed.
Though I imagine that it will take a very long time for any ordinary kind of mutuality to take hold. Nearly everywhere in this rich and beautiful province looks normal, and nearly all its pleasant people behave absolutely normally nearly all of the time. But it isn't a normal place. That's what is worth saying.
It is a place that is suffering in the working out of its modern identity. The South has become extraordinarily complacent. The big debates about social legislation seem to have ended any debate. But in Northern Ireland, everything is up for reconsideration.
Well - not quite everything: the Roman Catholic Church doesn't seem to take the blame for anything, or have any intention of changing anything. But other institutions - republican, unionist, Orange - have all scrutinised themselves deeply. Northern Ireland is in the making as the Republic is not.
The fact remains that it is a very odd place. The first thing people do with each other when they meet a stranger is to suss out, from a thousand signals, whether the new person is a Catholic or Protestant. Of course, people everywhere do some kind of sussing out, to place the social or sexual or ideological identity of new people.
But where else in the so-called first world will the nuance of your Christianity be, perhaps, a murdering matter? In parts of Northern society you can't park a car or go into a pub or walk down a street because you're a Catholic or - much less often - a Protestant.
You can be denied a job or hunted from your home or simply killed, for being a Catholic or - much less often - a Protestant. There are whole social circles, from birth to death, which are exclusively Catholic or Protestant, even though it is a tiny place with a mixed population.
Because this is so, the whole society is infected by extreme sectarian self-consciousness. In polite society, when person A realises that person B is not One of Us, a barrage of empty small-talk is hastily erected. The art of giving absolutely nothing away in conversation, while appearing to be conversing normally, has been perfected.
This is the social and human gulf that matters. The two cultures as represented by individuals are always on the brink of suspicion and hostility.
There are many, many ecumenists, but on the whole, people believe the worst of the other side. Why wouldn't they, when three little boys can be burned to death because they're Catholic, or people gathering to commemorate their dead at the War Memorial in Enniskillen could be blown to bits for being Protestant?
I haven't found a way in to an understanding of Northern society. Perhaps I needed a workplace, or children going to school, or a leisure pursuit that would have involved a wide circle of acquaintances. But I'm still trying to learn.
Over the next few weeks I'm going to meet the Apprentice Boys in Derry - because everything in Derry is different from in Belfast - and then, to end with, I'm going to go back to the one place I've been in Northern Ireland that seemed to me a little bit of paradise.
There is no single topic or place or event that sums up the place. But as impressions go, there is just that one strong one, of the marks left by sectarianism. Westminster has put in place a great deal of anti-sectarian legislation. But the past is very near.
I haven't met any Catholic in Northern Ireland who has not been wounded in themselves or their community by the exercise of superior Protestant power.
And I haven't met any Protestant who really understands those wounds. The only exceptions to the polarisation, even, whereby you have to think of people as "Catholic" or "Protestant", are a few middle-ground liberals, and the handful of strenuously indifferent who say "a plague on both their houses". And even the exceptions revert to the sympathies of their origins when it comes to the tribal crunch, as it does around the Twelfth.
I tried to say more than that, or other than that, to As Others See Us. But basically, after seven attentive months, that's what I have to say.