Nervously I alighted from the train. People were milling around, all speaking in that funny accent. As I walked the streets I kept looking over my shoulder: there had been so many reports of violence in this town lately. But the punters were just walking about with blank expressions on their faces, doing their day's shopping.
"You just get used to it after a while," a man in a bar confided. "You have to get on with your life." In the corner, I spotted some politicians on a TV programme, shouting each other down. What a bunch of demagogues: who votes for these people? Here and there on the streets I could see a police officer eyeing me suspiciously. I suppose they're just doing their job but it still makes me nervous. Everyone I met was very friendly but their eyes couldn't hide those inner feelings of insecurity. In the evening, many of them headed for the pub to drown their sorrows. I made my excuses and left for the station.
The journey took two hours but it felt like two years. As I handed my ticket to the attendant I said: "They're very nice people down there in Dublin, but it's great to be back in Belfast."
Actually, I may have said "wild nice" instead of very nice. I notice these stray words and phrases creeping in, such as "wee" instead of little. "Hold on there a wee minute," I told somebody over the phone. A few more months and it will probably be, "Houl' on there yew, a wee mahnut, wull ya?"
That's what happens when you go native. There's a joke about Belfast getting its own version of Hello magazine, which would be called What About Ye? Or maybe the name is How's You?
As Patrick Kavanagh would say, I have lived in important places: New York, Moscow, but mostly dear old, dirty Dublin. In some ways, Belfast is more different from Dublin than the others. If there is a word that sums up the difference it would be that, after a spell in the Athens of the North, the seventh city of Christendom strikes one as smug, or at least complacent.
The things you Southerners put up with, in your complacency. The price of the pint, the price of a taxi - when you can get one - the doctor charging you £20 for taking your temperature, the fees in some of those posh secondary schools. Ulster thrift being what it is, we know the value of a pound - we certainly know it's worth more than your punt. And don't talk to me about this Celtic Tiger - talk to the young couples down there who can't afford to buy their first house.
A senior Dublin politician - now mired in scandal like so many others - once said to me that if there ever was a united Ireland, Northern business folk would sweep their Southern counterparts aside. The problem was to persuade them to exchange "the clear blue skies of Ulster for the grey mists of the Free State".
After all, peace is beginning to take its first baby-steps up here. We're about to pack up our troubles in our old Belfast Agreement and smile, smile, smile. If the violence were ended and the bigotry defused, this could be a very good place to live. Even Margaret Thatcher is said to have been astonished at the quality of the roads and the schools - and she never even got to taste the pint in the Crown.
It will be interesting to study the impact on the ground if the Assembly gets a "fair wind" and a new Northern Ireland administration starts taking decisions that affect peoples' everyday lives. A senior unionist told me he gets a "stench of corruption" every time he lands in Dublin but he admitted the lack of an indigenous administration may have helped the North keep its relatively clean image.
The fact that there are so many issues which cannot be discussed or can only be raised in a guarded fashion on religiously-mixed social occasions has stunted the growth of Belfast's chattering classes. It's startling sometimes to see how the Dublin middle-classes can become so obsessed with an issue - the Bishop Casey saga was a good example - that they think and speak of little else for a fortnight or more, as radio and television programmes echo their concern.
An English friend confided that he enjoyed working here but would be glad to get back eventually to a place where it never even occurred to him to wonder if somebody were Catholic or Protestant. But who knows, maybe a few years under a new dispensation will start to change that.
It may be even more interesting to watch the impact a lasting peace settlement has, south of the Border. Will the Celts embrace the Scots-Irish or has this all been about pulling down the shutters on the problem from the start? One of the first tests will be how generous Southern politicians are when it comes to sharing the gravy with their Northern cousins in the cross-border bodies and through the new North-South Ministerial Council. Nobody here is holding their breath.
