“Take it,” he said, holding it out to me.

I’ll admit, I’d zoned out for a bit. So when I focused and saw he was holding (sorry, but it’s true) a large phallic rubber object, I was very confused.

“It’s a rubber bullet. The British army slits them open and fills them with metal so they do more damage.”

I was standing in the most violent part of Belfast at the most violent time of year with an ex-convict IRA sympathiser.

And now I was also holding a rubber bullet.

(I can’t even tell you myself how I get into these situations, other than I’m endlessly curious and a bit too naive).

He’d started off by staring at me straight in the eyes saying, “It’s a political tour,” very meaningfully.

I’ve been on all kinds of tours, some of which have been accidentally political (including a UKIP voting llama owner who literally started our New Forest trek with “I’m not racist but…” and a Game of Thrones filming location tour with an Anna Soubry groupie).

But I haven’t been anywhere that’s scared me quite so much, even though I’ve been alone in the dark in an abandoned kindergarten in Chernobyl during a lightning strike, and been stuck in a freakish Grand Canyon snowstorm (pro tip: do not go anywhere near big holes when you can’t see your hand in front of your face).

What it turned out to mean was that I was standing in a memorial garden (garden = gravel and a plaque) looking up at a wall that resembled something from District 9. In the UK. In 2022.

We covered the Troubles in A level history, and I remember as a young child my parents telling me we wouldn’t be going into Manchester city centre because the IRA had bombed it. But being faced with this was a very different thing. My own ignorance, not for the first time, but in a situation I really hadn’t prepared for. (Can you even prepare for it?)

Even just existing in that context required a fine balancing act. I was standing there raised with the belief that the IRA were a terrorist group. He was standing there raised with the belief that the British Army were a terrorist group.

As a naturally confrontational person, somehow I didn’t feel angry. Just hatred/despair for the human race. Sometimes you feel like everything is such a mess and has been for so long that it just can never be untangled or fixed.

You can feel a heavy sense of the fragility of peace. It’s not real peace. In one sense it’s peace beyond imagination, with British and Irish able to have a civil conversation. But there are still pubs where your accent alone will get you a hospital stay. There are lots of sets of gates they lock at night.

There is a huge sense of suspicion and an incredibly frail co-existence. Like a house of cards. A house of cards represented by a massive fucking wall that stretches for miles.

As we left after signing the peace wall, kids threw stones at the car. On the way back to the hotel, we saw the police trying to talk down a man attempting to jump off a bridge.

I don’t know if he jumped.