DAVID Trimble often strikes people as something of an angry man, and the First Minister has certainly been spitting a fair amount of blood over the past week or so.
A week ago Mr Trimble travelled to Dublin for top-level talks with friend Bertie. (The Ulster Unionist leader genuinely does rate his personal relationship with the Taoiseach.)
The reason for the trip, to his mind at any rate, was a bit of pre-agreement unreconstructed nationalist nonsense. On the road to Good Friday, he had battled hard to establish that the new cross-Border implementation bodies would derive their authority from, and be answerable to the Stormont Assembly and the Dail.
However, during the recent negotiation of the consequent Anglo-Irish treaties (eventually signed on Monday), he apparently detected an SDLP-Foreign Affairs-SinnFein plot to reinstate the Framework Document notion that the cross-Border bodies would be free-standing, have a life and authority of their own and, crucially, could survive the collapse of the Northern Ireland Assembly.
Mr Trimble left Dublin content that he and friend Bertie had the issue sorted. However, he hadn't allowed for Seamus Mallon's complaint that there could be no deal about which he had not been consulted - or Gerry Adams's reported direct appeal to Mr Blair to confirm that there could indeed be cross-Border life beyond (or after) Stormont.
So while on the Thursday the deal was on, the next day it was off. Irish officials were dragged back once more to the negotiating table, only concluding the agreement to Mr Trimble's satisfaction on Sunday afternoon. (The essential political cover for him was that the treaties should be read in conjunction with the Belfast Agreement, which makes clear that all institutions established under it are interlocking and interdependent.)
The timing was crucial. Mo Mowlam had set Wednesday March 10th as the target date for the transfer of powers to the Assembly and the triggering of the d'Hondt mechanism for the allocation of ministerial posts in the executive and Mr Trimble had written his own script for the final stage of the game.
Last Saturday he captured the headlines by announcing that he had invited Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness for crunch talks at Stormont. They had met before, but this meeting, it was explained, would be of a different order - not least because it was the first initiated by the UUP leader himself.
In the view of some Belfast observers, he was "playing it brilliantly", but his intention was clear. On the back of concluding the treaties, he could announce that everything was in place, except a start to IRA decommissioning. In face of expected republican intransigence on the issue, the First Minister would regretfully announce that the March 10th deadline had fallen.
Miscalculation number two? Certainly Mr Trimble had not reckoned on Dr Mowlam's view that the deadline she had set was hers to withdraw. She did, on Monday, and without consulting Mr Trimble. In "just a mo", it seemed the Secretary of State had brought down the UUP leader's carefully crafted piece of theatre. It also seemed she might not have accurately calculated the likely unionist reaction to and interpretation of her decision to extend the devolution deadline.
The wires on Monday night carried the conviction of a string of unionist Assembly members that her motive was to buy time in which to press Mr Trimble to shift his position, and the confident (indeed hopeful) prediction of "the rejectionists" was that he would eventually oblige her.
Mr Trimble himself, travelling to London for the Commons debate on the implementation bodies, was incandescent. To him and to his aides it seemed once again, as one of them put it, that Dr Mowlam would "always go out of her way to accommodate the paramilitaries and dump the blame somewhere else".
The UUP leader had calmed somewhat by the time the Commons debate got under way at 10 p.m. - his earlier fury translating into some "regret" about the Secretary of State's decision. His good humour was restored as the week progressed.
Indeed, it was a smiling and visibly relaxed David Trimble who emerged with colleagues from Thursday afternoon's session with Mr Blair and Dr Mowlam.
It was notable that Dr Mowlam was there. In the past she has remarked that it's best "I leave David to Tony". However, at this critical juncture, neither side can afford ambiguity or misunderstanding as to their respective positions and, if appearances are anything to go by, Mr Trimble's understanding of the Blair-Mowlam position left him positively cheerful. Sure, Dr Mowlam had denied him his "confrontation" with Sinn Fein by her announcement on Monday but he was presumably happy with her explanation of it.
AS A SOURCE close to her later defined it to The Irish Times, Dr Mowlam's decision was to check "the air of unreality" attending the situation generally, and the position of Sinn Fein in particular.
According to this source, Sinn Fein right to the last had not grasped London's inability to put Mr Trimble to the sword - or the impossibility of the situation which would result if it did, namely an executive comprised exclusively of nationalists and republicans.
As he set off yesterday with just about everybody else for the week-long jolly in America - sources close to Mr Trimble insisted he was under "absolutely no pressure" from Downing Street to shift his ground.
Yes, he may think Mo Mowlam missed a trick by prematurely shifting the deadline, yes, he saw advantage in confronting Sinn Fein with the prize and the price on Tuesday, but his apparently contented view is that his good friends, Bertie and Tony, will now confront Sinn Fein and the republican movement with the same offer, at the same price, on March 29th.