Most people start repeating themselves as they get older, but few have developed the habit as deliberately as John Hume.
The SDLP leader's so-called single transferable speech has been the cause of much despair among journalists, many of whom use the description ironically, unaware that, like many other phrases now current, it was the SDLP leader who coined it.
Humespeak, a dialect in which even Gerry Adams has achieved fluency, has become the official language of Northern Irish politics. And the man who once explained "I say it and I go on saying it until I hear the man in the pub saying my words back to me" will use the same technique yet again today when he delivers his 19th annual leadership address to the party conference.
Hume has lost weight as a result of a series of operations recently; but recovering at his house in Donegal last week, he had lost none of his single-mindedness. Above all, he was not about to apologise for being repetitive. "I take my job seriously. And if the job is to lead people forward, I won't do that in one speech," he said. "So therefore I keep repeating the language and ideas until they get right through to the grassroots. It's like teaching. You don't expect students to pick up lessons the first time either."
Even his house on the Inishowen peninsula could have been chosen to illustrate one of his themes, the primacy of people over territory. "Imagine, that's the North over there," he says, pointing across Lough Foyle towards north Derry, "which, although in the North, and the north of the North, is not as far north as the top of Inishowen, which is in the South."
The SDLP leader is territorial, however, on the question of Sinn Fein usurping his party's position. The SDLP has never been stronger, he insists, winning its highest vote ever in the European elections and becoming the North's largest party (measured in votes rather than seats) in last year's Assembly poll. Electoral gains by Sinn Fein reflect a reduction in republican abstentionism rather than any seepage from the SDLP, he adds.
He is pragmatic about Sinn Fein's increased profile of recent times. One of the most striking images of the peace process was the Hume-Trimble handshake onstage at Belfast's Waterfront Hall last year. But the SDLP leader and his party have been in the wings since then, as media set-piece after set-piece has placed David Trimble and Gerry Adams in the spotlight.
This is temporarily unavoidable, Hume believes, and will do no long-term damage. "The people of Northern Ireland are highly politicised, given their experience of 30 years. They're well aware of the role the SDLP has played in bringing us to the Good Friday agreement, and they're also well aware that the difficulties in implementing that agreement exist between two other parties."
Suggestions that the SDLP has suffered from his dominance and a habit of doing his own thing, - "a tendency to identify the most powerful and influential people and go off into corner huddles", as the late Paddy Devlin complained - are equally rebuffed. "My God. I hope you're not suggesting I shouldn't do everything I can on behalf of the party to influence the situation."
For all the repetition, Hume does have new ideas. He speaks enthusiastically of exploiting the communications revolution to make Ireland "the offshore island to the USA and Europe". He would also like to see the Diaspora signed up to Ireland's economic cause by issuing a "certificate of Irish identity" (not the same as citizenship, he adds quickly) to all of Irish descent: "Imagine the impact of that".
By contrast, he says he has never given any thought to his position in history, which may record him as the legitimate heir to Parnell and O'Connell, leaders of constitutional nationalism who sought to engage the men of violence of their times.
One long-time observer says Hume is well aware of the inheritance: "He knows exactly what he's on about, the whole resonance of the New Departure in 1879 and all that." But the SDLP leader, who insists his proudest achievement was the role he played in setting up the credit union movement, says his approach to the Northern Ireland problem has been a simple one. "What I did was logical," he said. "To analyse the problem and on the basis of that analysis, that it was the people who were divided, not the territory, and that we needed an agreed Ireland based on respect for diversity and so on, to use every influence I had to try and solve that problem."
He is convinced that the new politics about to emerge will transform society, North and South; a transformation still being held up by the inability of the Ulster Unionists and Sinn Fein to find a compromise.
"But once the institutions are finally up and running, then, to use another of my repetitive phrases, we can start spilling our sweat and not our blood. Then the real healing process can begin."