Belfast’s own Peter Barron blogs on the end of British army operations in Northern Ireland after 38 years. Having taken a call from the IRA announcing they were going to blow up Whitehall Place, walked through streets paved with broken glass after having had my windows blown out in the Bishopsgate bomb, and having spent the day of the first IRA ceasefire watching John Hume pad around his Derry home in carpet slippers, Northern Ireland was part of my formative journalistic years. But in the words of John Goodman in Barton Fink, I was “just a tourist with a typewriter.”

Talking to participants in “the troubles,” it often seemed that terrorist violence was like salt – it gave their lives a mortal flavour, and lent obscurity an importance their everyday existence could never hope to match.

Now they have peace, and just the police to take care of them. Still, I grew up in rural Norfolk: pop. 0.83m; plod 1,500. Northern Ireland: pop. 1.75m; 9,100 police officers. The army may be gone, but there is still a long, long way to go…