David Adams: There are some conversations you just wish you'd never had. A couple of years back, at a British Irish Association (BIA) conference in Oxford, I got chatting to a well-informed and long-time observer of the Northern Ireland peace process.
He asked me if I had ever considered that our problems might well be insoluble.
I (untruthfully) mumbled something about it certainly having crossed my mind, but that I had never allowed the thought to linger for long. To admit that our situation was impossible to resolve would mean giving up and abandoning all hope.
It can be difficult enough living in Northern Ireland, I said, but without hope it would be well-nigh impossible.
He told me how he had reluctantly arrived at this conclusion. He reckoned that we need a clear political winner on one side or the other for us to be able to move on. But, with the two communities so evenly matched in terms of numbers this just isn't possible.
And, not unlike the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, their respective numerical strength allows either side to remain too intransigent for any compromise to work.
A classic stalemate, if ever there was one.
My hope wasn't much of a shield against his history and reason, and I had to concede he might well be right. I pushed the conversation to the back of my mind and gladly returned to the more positive prospect of further BIA discussions on possible ways forward.
It proved not to be quite that simple, however. The idea had been planted and I could only push it as far as my subconscious: it would steadfastly refuse to be erased completely. And so, every now and then, this notion that things might indeed be irresolvable creeps forward and does battle with my more naturally optimistic inclinations.
As a pro-agreement unionist reflecting on the state of play within mainstream unionism at the moment, I must admit, now is one of those times. Optimism took to the hills a few weeks ago, and hope, like the last man standing, is taking quite a battering.
After the debacle at Hillsborough, we are now facing into an election with little prospect of anything positive awaiting us on the other side. With its inimitable brand of the politics of the promised land, we have the DUP saying that it can negotiate a new, as yet undefined, but much more unionist-leaning agreement.
The fact that it had every opportunity to involve itself in the negotiations that led to the current agreement, but declined, is conveniently forgotten. And the fact that every other serious player, most notably the SDLP and Sinn Féin, is insistent that a new agreement will not be negotiated is simply ignored.
As always, the DUP isn't short of a scare tactic or two to point up the perils of the present agreement. Posters depict Sinn Féin's Gerry Kelly as minister-in-waiting for policing and justice.
That devolution of policing and justice to the assembly is barely on the political horizon yet - much less anyone having been allocated the portfolio - is neither here nor there. Scare tactics don't depend on having any close relationship with reality.
But the DUP is at least united around its promise to march the electorate, en masse, into some post-election, pro-union utopia.
By contrast, unity within the Ulster Unionist Party seems to be confined to little more than a disparate collection of personalities and groups sheltering beneath the same political title.
Aside from those high-profile candidates at either end of the Good Friday spectrum who long ago nailed their colours firmly to one mast or the other, the UUP electorate has little idea of the particular views of many of the individuals they are being asked to vote for.
So chameleon-like is this large group in the middle, it would take a polygraph test to determine where each of them actually stands on the agreement. Even then, depending on which direction the political wind happens to be blowing at any particular time, the results you get today might not bear much resemblance to future readings.
So, it is from this political talent pool of the confused, the confusing and the deliberately misleading that the mainstream unionist electorate must choose their future representatives. The hope that somehow - miraculously - we might just manage to elect enough people with the vision to lead us forward seems a forlorn one at best.
Post-election we can look forward to endless arguments about the status, breadth and remit of any future discussions. And, as if that weren't enough, discussions around who will speak to whom, how they might manage it and who has a mandate to speak authoritatively on whose behalf, will all be waiting just in case our MLAs somehow manage to stumble their way through the first set of problems.
A classic stalemate indeed.
In hindsight, it seems perversely appropriate that my hope and optimism were challenged by naked realism, not amongst the suitably dreary steeples of Fermanagh or Tyrone, but while standing beneath the dreaming spires of Oxford.