Twenty - no, I cannot tell a lie - thirty one years ago I was revising for my A level mock exams. As a wise pupil of Limavady Grammar School, I worked hard for the mocks and did very little for the real thing. Anyway, I wonder how I might have reacted back then if a prophet had wandered into the school library with a message for me. Something like "Brian, in 31 years you will be married a lovely girl from Portadown."

"Where?"

 "You know - that suburb of the new city of Craigavon that you're learning about for your A level Geography. Also, you will be the Church of Ireland rector of a wee country church just outside that city. Your wife will be a school librarian the same as Mrs Larmour in a school in the wonderful new city. You will have three children. The first will have landed this day in the town of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, (I cast a quick glance at the map on the wall), the second is sitting an exam in Liverpool, probably in the same exam room that you will be sitting in in 1980, and the third will be revising for his mock GCSE (a what?) in Geography, learning about how not to design a new city. As for you, with your religious prejudice, you will, on this day in thirty-one years, be having morning coffee with the Cardinal. When the day is done, you'll type it all into a TV screen and people in America will read about it."

That would have been quite a daydream!