I began the foray that I'm making into Northern Ireland in something of a romantic haze. I happened to spend my first evening sitting in a hall behind a pub in Mullaghbawn in south Armagh, listening to some of the most beautiful sounds in the world. Fiddle and guitar. A woman's voice speaking her poetry. A local man telling a story. A singer like a goddess, over from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, who seemed to be sung by her songs.
I walked back to the house I was staying in through the icy dark and the great span of stars seemed too lavish and intense for Ireland. You don't see the British army hardware in the dark. And the next day, the car slipped and slid through snow over the hills to Forkhill and Newry, again in a landscape where the marks of the modern had been erased.
All you could feel was the ancient rises and falls of the land. I crossed the Bann River, raging and black in a sleet-storm, the way rivers are in songs, and made my way into Belfast.
I was in a historical dream. I might have been anyone coming down to Belfast Lough in any century, I vaguely thought. And as for geography - there is no geographical Border. We are all one.
I was woken from all this pretty smartly. I was woken, to be precise, from the modern version of this timeless, placeless, dream - the one that says that we're facing into a new millennium now and there's no point in looking back to history. The one that says there is no geography now; there is only the planet of information technology. What happened was that I wanted the very symbol of the borderless brave new world - a mobile phone service.
So I went into a bright, modern shop in Belfast to acquire one. Nothing, in principle, could be easier. If I was flying into Dusseldorf or Milan or Washington this morning I could get off the plane and hire a phone and start using it. You simply proffer, as I did in Belfast, that other symbol of the borderless state - your credit card.
I've got cash on that credit card in one-desk banks in dusty villages where no one has ever spoken English. I've bought things on that credit card far and wide. I paid for a hotel room in Bamako, the capital of Mali, in the middle of Africa, on that credit card, and the charge, suitably converted into Irish pounds, turned up on my statement within days. Not, however, in Belfast. They wouldn't take my credit card. And they wouldn't take cash, either. If I wanted to sign up for mobile phone service I would need to be credit-checked. But I couldn't be credit-checked because - and I quote - "we're sorry, but our computers don't pick up the South." So my record with Eircell didn't count, or my job or my house or my blameless and hardworking life. I couldn't have a phone. And this within sight, practically, of the State of which I am a citizen.
I did what I'd do in the South - I tried the personal route. The only person I knew was the estate agent. He gave me a lift to the head office of the mobile phone service his company uses. He introduced me and left. Myself and the dog hung around, miserably reading irrelevant brochures, while the problem presented by my being a Southerner was dealt with. But basically, the situation was the same. They gave me a reduction - down to £300 sterling - on the cash deposit they wanted. But they could not check my personal credit record, or would not.
They allowed me to sign up when they got a sterling account number for The Irish Times. But as individuals, it seems we start our financial lives from the egg when we move 10 minutes north of Dundalk.
I mentioned this little episode to someone who is a graduate of Queen's University, and who lives in Dublin. A few years ago, he said, he signed up for a Queen's credit card - an affinity card, one of those cards where a small percentage of your expenditure goes to the sponsoring body.
His bills started arriving in Dublin in sterling. He complained, and they said sorry, but that's just that: they didn't do a conversion to Irish pounds. And the banks are all-Ireland institutions. Wouldn't you think they could manage a database of the mere five million who live on the island? But then - wouldn't you think the telecommunications industry would communicate?
Whereas I've just remembered that I'd better buy an adaptor for attaching my laptop to a Northern phone socket (the ordinary phone in Belfast having been sensibly activated by British Telecom with no credit check, but a bill limit of £100). The yoke I have on the end of my phone works fine all over the USA. It works in Spain. But it doesn't work up the road . . .
It is in the context of these small but telling instances of unthought-out practical barriers between us that I think of the North/South bodies the politicians are discussing at Stormont. Well, discussing is doubtless too calm a word: they're arguing tooth and nail about them.
As I understand the latest document to arrive at the Stormont talks, the Janus-faced nature of Northern identity is to be recognised by some form of East-West liaison on the one hand, and forms of North/South liaison on the other. The argument at present is about whether North/South bodies will have executive powers or not, powers which, roughly speaking, nationalists want, and unionists do not want.
Executive powers to do what? I ask myself. Could anyone give us a few concrete examples? Executive powers over which actual people doing what actual things? You can't just have abstract executive powers. They must in some way impinge on the daily lives of the common people.
How is progress to be made in tourism or agriculture or any shared field if there is nobody to lean on the banks to make North-South dealings easier? Could there be an all-Ireland Ombudsperson to whom complaints could be made on consumer matters, perhaps before referring them on to the national Ombudsperson? If progress isn't possible in this most dynamic of all the sectors of capitalism, where is progress possible?
This is not just about making things easier for the likes of me to move around the island. This is about modernisation - about wholeheartedly embracing the opportunities that now exist for enlarging the scope and simplifying the mechanisms of everyone's daily life.
But maybe I'm whistling in the wind. Things may actually get worse. If the Republic enters EMU and the UK does not, then this island is going to be in unique difficulties. The days when it only took a few hours to get a mobile phone service may well yet seem like Paradise.