The pubs in the town were full, with fellows standing outside, pints in their hands. One pub had sunshades, tables and chairs in a garden with a man playing well-known tunes on an organ: Yesterday, The Way We Were. Further up a crowd sat in a run-down bar and listened to a live band play pop songs. I had a few drinks and decided that there wasn’t much future in this festival, and left to walk across the border into Strabane.

The army were stopping some of the cars at the checkpoint but they paid no attention to me as I wandered by. There was nothing happening in Strabane. A few kids hung around an amusement arcade; the pubs would remain shut all day as this was the North. The Fir Trees Hotel was at the other end of town. The woman at reception said they could accommodate me for one night only. The hotel bar was open; it was doing good business.

For the entertainment of guests, the hotel had provided a free copy of a magazine called the Ulster Tatler, full of fashion photography, with a column on social life in Belfast by a woman who called herself ‘The Malone Ranger’ and went to parties on the Malone Road. There wasn’t a word about the Anglo-Irish Agreement, signed the previous November by the British and Irish governments, which had increased tension in the North and sparked off a campaign by Protestants with the slogan ‘Ulster Says No’. The North according to the Ulster Tatler was full of wild parties, nice big houses, good-looking women wearing expensive clothes, and great restaurants. Over the next few months, I was to discover that things were, in fact, rather different from the world depicted in the Ulster Tatler.

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