Down the Cliftonville Road I headed, desperately trying to reach the nearby New Lodge Road. They wouldn’t dare follow me there. All around it was like a ghost town. No lights, no people. But on a straight road, they outran me, forced me up on to the pavement and into the wall of a church. More than at any other time in my life in Belfast, I thought this was the end. As I slumped over the steering wheel, one of the four wrenched open my door, pulled me out by the scruff of the neck and threw me across the bonnet of my Fiat Strada.
‘Who the **** are you? Who the **** are you?’ he screamed. As I tried to answer, I began to realise that there was something even odder to this already odd scenario. He was English. And although he was now pressing a gun into the side of my head with some force, I began to think this mightn’t be as bad as it looked. It’s one of the very few times in my life that I have tried to use my television profile to get me anything.