Had I been writing this article six weeks ago I would have predicted that, by now, Northern Ireland would have been basking in the warm rays of shiny optimism.
It just shows how wrong you can be.
When the LVF leader Billy Wright was shot in the Maze Prison on a cold December day, the climate changed dramatically. The season of goodwill was over. The new year would be rung in to the sound of rattling gunfire. Billy Wright may have lived and died by the sword, but he was as entitled as anyone else to the security of Her Majesty's prison.
When INLA prisoners successfully hatched and executed a plan to kill him, they knew that it was as much an attack on the peace process as on the life of a sworn enemy.
The consequences were inevitable, but none the less savage for their predictability. Loyalists unleashed an unholy revenge on innocent Catholics. For a week or more it seemed impossible to turn a corner in Belfast without coming upon sprays of flowers at doorways or by roadsides.
The floral tributes, paradoxically colourful against a background of drab buildings and an even bleaker atmosphere, marked the spot where some poor soul had breathed his last.
As he listened to the radio in a queue of daytime traffic, waiting to go home from his day's work, a building site workman was approached by strangers who produced guns and blew his brains out.
A taxi driver eking out a decent living for himself and his family was abducted, brutally murdered and dumped like a dog by the side of the road.
A nightclub doorman, shot as he emerged into the night, staggered away from his attackers but was pursued and executed as he pleaded for mercy.
These were the searing images, in Belfast and around the North, that destroyed hope. So we buried our dead as we have so often done in the past 30 years, and moved on. To what? To watching as our politicians dance around the flames of a political settlement; to seeing the sparks fly at Stormont and in London; and to peering into the darkness for a flicker of hope. Hope is what keeps us going north of the Border.
Four years ago we hoped for ceasefires, got them, and lost them. After the events of the year thus far, it is difficult to appreciate that terror organisations have again given us at least a temporary respite.
Now we hope for an agreement we can all live with, but see our politicians scatter to their burrows like frightened rabbits once words like engagement, settlement and sovereignty are aired. Unionists won't engage Sinn Fein. Sinn Fein refuses to contemplate the prospect of a Northern Ireland assembly.
Yet, at the risk of making a fool of myself again, I have to say that we are again walking, albeit on glass, towards a brighter future. Undoubtedly in the rocky months ahead we will have more dead to bury, but somewhere in the labyrinth of political mystique surrounding the talks, there is a door marked reconciliation. All our politicians have to do is find it, and then push gently.
Sinn Fein pretends it is trying to find the door, but as this week's events have shown, the only one it is really interested in has "United Ireland" stamped across it in big green letters.
In the spaghetti alphabet of Northern politics, the UUP, SDLP, PUP, WC, Alliance and - when they have been rehabilitated following the UFF's "measured military response" to Billy Wright's killing - the UDP will be trying to find the sacred common ground which will be neither a return to a unionist-dominated Stormont, nor an annexation by Dublin of the Fourth Green Field.
The problem is that Sinn Fein - and some on the extremes of unionism and loyalism - may prefer to trample their own path, regardless of any consensus which emerges. This week, both Seamus Mallon and John Hume of the SDLP have been trying to nudge Sinn Fein in the right direction.
Should not the Ulster Unionists be doing the same? Or at the very least, recognising that any viable solution will require them to share responsibilities with republicans, instead of treating them like lepers?
It pains me to see the UUP, time after time, failing to recognise that in politics, timing and opportunism are everything. And now is the opportune time for David Trimble to take perhaps the biggest gamble of his political career and address Sinn Fein, within the talks, on the unavoidable issues with which the republicans are so visibly uncomfortable.
The myth is that Sinn Fein wants full engagement. The reality which is slowly emerging is that it has no real appetite for exploring the fine detail of establishing a new Northern Ireland assembly.
On this at least, unionists have everybody else on their side, and have nothing to fear by taking their message to Sinn Fein other than their own uncertainty. There would be no better issue on which to confront the Adams team, and at the same time take a step which has been rendered inevitable by the UUP's close association in the talks with loyalist parties which openly represent terror organisations.
As things stand, unionists continue to exhibit a remarkable capacity to alienate their friends as well as their enemies. Witness Jeffrey Donaldson's document-ripping exercise in London. The North's sharpest young unionist certainly made an impression on the world's media and consequently all those other unionists in Scotland, England and Wales, but in a way that recalled Ian Paisley in his heyday.
Deputy leader John Taylor's letter to the News Letter on Tuesday was also full of a brand of fiery invective that has been the hallmark of Dr Paisley's political career. It was directed against his own government. And regardless of its merits, David Trimble's reaction in the Commons to Tony Blair's Bloody Sunday announcement last week was seen by people throughout the UK as both bitter and churlish, another example of unionist belligerence.
As we trundle towards the May talks deadlines, and ultimately towards a new century, an altogether more imaginative and invigorating approach is called for if unionism is to become a dynamic force worthy of the new millennium. That essential process could start now. The way things are going in the current strand of the talks - that part which looks at Northern Ireland's internal arrangements - unionists can afford to be both confident and generous. I for one am just a tad depressed that as yet, there is little sign of either.
Geoff Martin is editor of the News Letter.