WELL, here we are and where are we? (as they say in Belfast).
The one absolute certainty is that the British general election campaign the longest this century has only one week to run.
By this time next week the die will finally be cast. Mr Major and his ministers, Mr Blair and his ministers-in-waiting will repair to their constituencies and await the verdict of the people.
After all the millions of words written and spoken not to mention the multi-millions of pounds spent on advertising, election broadcasts and the like the pundits and pollsters will fall silent, leaving the voters to their final reflections and that date with destiny.
By any standard, May 1st is destined to prove of historic importance and significance in the political life of Britain. On the one hand, the biggest post-war swing is needed to take Mr Blair into Downing Street and end 18 years of Conservative power. On the other, Mr Major hopes to defy the odds again and claim an unprecedented fifth Tory term. Either way, history will be made.
Yet there is this curious lack of any sense of history in the making.
That was borne out yesterday by a prediction from Bob Worcester, the chairman of Mori, that the actual poll next Thursday week could fall below 70 per cent.
And for all that "New" Labour's victory has seemed preordained, commentators are still finding it difficult to read, let alone call. Pollsters like Mr Worcester, of course, concede no ground to the doubters. They say we should ignore fluctuations in Labour's headline lead and look at the Tories seemingly stuck around 31 or 32 per cent. In rough terms 39 per cent would take them into hung-parliament territory.
They need 43 per cent to win a seemingly impossible mission with just a week to go.
And yet, and yet ... some election veterans can't quite believe the polls. For some, of course, this is a defence mechanism, the memory of past defeats still painfully fresh. While praying for a Labour win, they fear something might rob Mr Blair at the last, and so won't allow themselves to believe it until they see him and Cherie smiling outside the door of No 19.
Others quote anecdotal evidence from the doorsteps. A friend returned yesterday from the north-east. His impression, an echo of our own trip to the midlands, is that the Tories' doorstep experience doesn't hear out the wilder predictions of a Labour landslide. Mr Major himself insists the polls are just wrong. And there was curious corroboration earlier this week from two newspapers firmly in the anti-Conservative camp.
The London Independent pulled its writers off the election battle buses, sent them into a series of marginal constituencies, and concluded it's not yet over out there.
The Guardian's own focus group poll also reflected negative attitudes to Labour in the marginals, with confusion about what Labour stands for and doubts as to whether Mr Blair can be believed.
Labour insiders say they have equally good accounts from canvass returns in marginal seats, and that the country will not elect a Conservative Party torn from top to bottom over Europe. That accords with the conventional wisdom that voters most of all, dislike party disunity.
Yet it is to Europe that Mr Major constantly returns in what already has proved a perverse election. A constant drip-feed of good economic news has failed to capture media attention.
Everybody talks about education as their great passion. But in reality plans to transform the educational system are, by definition, long-term projects even if they are believable.
People with strong independent studies to sustain them seem reluctant to believe the tax-and- spend promises of either of the main competitors. Even the best efforts of Michael Howard and Jack Straw seem unable to set the pulses racing at the thought of a new era of draconian measures to restore "the queen's peace".
The conventional "issues" seem capable of commanding only cursory attention. And the economy, on which elections are finally meant to turn, struggles to get a look-in. The same wisdom says elections are never determined by issues of foreign policy. Yet Mr Major insists Europe, or more precisely the single currency, provides the defining issue of the doorstep campaign.
Despite the all-too-evident risks, the Prime Minister keeps hammering away with his anti-federal message. Something or someone is telling him that this issue can make the difference.
And Mr Blair is receiving the same message if the speed with which he rebuked Jacques Santer is anything to go by.
The Tories, of course, might be simply demented. But the opinion polls between now and the weekend will surely tell if Mr Major has awakened the sleeping giant of English nationalism. Pending a decisive shift, they will simply dismiss the polls as mistaken.
But last night, as they awaited confirmation of the ICM poll for this morning's Guardian, they found comfort in the 26 per cent of voters who intend to vote but won't declare or have not yet decided for whom. And they noted that, at this point in the 1992 campaign, the polls recorded a Labour lead of six points, 14 off the final result.