A week and a bit before election day, and anoraks like party workers and political journalists are reviewing performances, weighing events: the poll that claims the DUP is 6 per cent behind Ulster Unionists; Sinn Féin 2 per cent behind the SDLP; David Trimble heckled on the Shankill; Mark Durkan laughing off the unionist politician who told him to "get out of" mainly Protestant Bangor; Martin McGuinness at the Bloody Sunday inquiry.
No matter how Lord Saville hedges his eventual conclusions, as the inquiry inches towards a close, the original picture still stands of soldiers running amok. Soldier witnesses have failed to present a plausible alternative. Army and police informants and ageing "official" republicans have had little effect other than to spin out the hearings and up the cost. To the surprise of no one with a grasp of the evidence, Derry's leading republican figure left the witness-box unscathed by claims that he contributed to the Bloody Sunday bloodshed.
Others might cringe at the offhand assurance that he left the IRA in the early 1970s, or his "I would rather die" than reveal the details of long-ago safe houses. For republican voters selective memories are not just permissible but expected. Martin McGuinness faces his electorate in fine shape.
Life is more difficult for David Trimble, eerily cheerful as always when another test looms. The Shankill hecklers were neither as numerous nor as abusive as in parts of his own constituency, like Portadown. The incident probably did more to daunt his Shankill candidate, Chris McGimpsey, who lives a distance from the shrunken old district. He is labouring to build the party profile from a constituency office and can take no reflected glory from his unpopular leader. "The Road" - referred to as though there is no other, like the neighbouring Falls - is a hard station for the most genteel of the unionist parties.
People displaced by paramilitary feuds are still in houses effectively allocated by the UDA and UVF, afraid to venture back into the streets in which they were born. But the worst of the murals used by Johnny Adair's UDA to mark territory are gone - the warrior ghoul with a rifle in one hand and Ulster flag in the other amid corpses on a battleground. Tiny gardens in front of elderly people's homes have been tidied, and some shops have newly painted doorways, mainly thanks to a group of young visitors from an evangelical summer camp.
A week ago loyalists, probably the UVF, killed a man in tiny rural Ballyclare, not the Shankill. A Christian activist trying to revive Shankill community spirit was cautious in his comments. The Ballyclare shooting should hurt the UVF's front party, the Progressive Unionists (PUP), he thought, though their leader said it was unauthorised. "You look for some integrity, and I'm not sure it's there," he said.
The PUP and DUP, as well as Chris McGimpsey and an independent, are competing for the Protestant voters on the perimeter of Catholic West Belfast. If they agreed a single candidate they could take one of the West's six seats: but then if they agreed a candidate they wouldn't be present-day unionists.
At his most optimistic, the activist thinks the Shankill "is not irrecoverable. I know you're saying here's a guy believes in miracles, but you have to keep on going even though it's thrown back in your face." The posse contending for Shankill votes would leave many cold. "They'll stay at home and it'll hit the UUs hardest."
Bangor is capital of the affluent "gold coast", and very different territory, spared much of the Troubles' violence. But unionist posters jostling for space tell a story of similar division: Ulster Unionists, DUP, PUP, a Conservative, four independents.
And the former MP for North Down, UK Unionist Bob McCartney, bouncing around the weekly market shouting at rivals and former allies. The SDLP leader, campaigning for an SDLP candidate in a constituency unused to nationalists, joked that he'd suffered a McCartney "punishment bleating".
This week's angry Bangor voices belonged to a thirty-ish Ulster Unionist candidate and an older man haranguing her because, he insisted, God Save the Queen is not sung at her branch meetings. "We play it every single time," she said. "There was a bit of a proposal for change, but we've stuck to that."
The onlooker might have thought it a DUP-UU spat, but these were two Ulster Unionists. "Mr Trimble did not stick to what he said. He changes policies willy-nilly," said the man. "We're talking about the national anthem here," the woman retorted. Later she said proudly that her branch was cross-community. It emerged this meant they had a single Catholic member.
Fought as ever in two separate arenas, the campaign moves into top gear.