World running out of fresh vegetables. Irish don't like yoghurt. Chamber of Commerce say 'no' to Portadown hotelier because she is a woman. (Mind you, she looks good in her hot pants.)

This is the North in 1972 and journalists previously employed on such frothy stories as these, now have the job of reporting the Saturday night bombings and the barricading of the ghettos. One of those reporters, Malachi O'Doherty, goes home to streets patrolled by Provo gunmen. The army and the IRA hold fire to let his mother walk to work between them. The moralistic columnists on the paper he works for, The Sunday News, say the IRA is 'a disease carrying vermin' and Malachi wonders if he is infected.

The question of where a young man fits in between these equally absurd and opposed worlds, is a moral challenge that faces O'Doherty as Belfast inches inexorably and indulgently towards civil war.

But first there are stories to write and even a bear to fight. Will Ulster Vanguard declare UDI? Who is dumping bodies in back alleys? Will the girl in the boutique get her tits out for the photographer? How much more of this can a man take?