I was sitting in a café in the centre of Belfast on Wednesday morning. I was glancing over the headlines and thinking about Manchester; then, without actually knowing why, I found myself counting the number of people around me.
There were 22. A couple of elderly ladies, chatting and knitting; a few men in suits, clearly talking business; a young mum with a pram and another child on her knee; members of staff; about a dozen people of various ages sitting by themselves - reading, chatting, Skyping, playing games, or surfing the internet on their phones, and all seemingly content in their own small world. I was there with Kerri, my partner, who is 32 weeks pregnant.
Had a bomb exploded in that café at that moment it would probably have killed all of us. Twenty-two people from all sorts of places and backgrounds. Twenty-two people with a huge individual network of friends and family between them, all of whom would have shared that horror for the rest of their lives.
Not 22 people who just happened to be, 'in the wrong place at the wrong time': but 22 people who were in that café at that moment because that's where they had chosen to be.
Terrorists rely on ordinary people doing ordinary things. They rely on them being where they would normally be, doing the sort of things they would normally do.
Because it's a bomb, or lorry, or machine gun in the midst of that very ordinariness which has the greatest impact in a world where information is shared in seconds and images go viral.
It's a world where much of the reaction to the terrorism is unfiltered and ill-considered and where rage is the default response of people who believe that their government is, 'too soft, too tolerant, and too hamstrung by legal niceties'.
I don't distinguish when it comes to terrorism. So I don't distinguish between terrorist organisations.
I never, for example, saw any difference between an IRA bomb and a UVF bomb. And while Isis terrorists tend to prefer suicide missions and civilian targets, there is, in essence and intent, no difference between terrorist groups when it comes to end purpose.
Killing is part and parcel of what they do. There have always been terrorist groups and there always will be terrorist groups.
And nor do I distinguish when it comes to my reaction to terrorism. When I was at school in the late 1960s/early 1970s, I remember people saying that 'all Catholics were the same'.
What they meant, of course, is that they regarded all Catholics as IRA supporters.
I never believed that to be the case. I have never believed that we can judge all the members of a group or race or religion by the actions of some members of it.
I hated it when we had our own departure and arrival gate at the airports and all of us from Belfast - irrespective of our backgrounds or beliefs - were herded together and treated as potential terrorists.
I hated being made to feel that I was some sort of threat to my fellow citizens across the UK. I hated it when people in London and further afield dismissed all of us as 'Paddies' who were nothing but 'bloody troublemakers'. I hated it when we all had to be searched when we went shopping in Belfast.
So no, I refuse to accept that hundreds of thousands of people who have lived quietly and peacefully across the United Kingdom should now be viewed and treated as terrorists or terrorist supporters.
They are not. I refuse to buy into the logic that all we need to do is isolate them, or round them up, or treat them differently or demand of them what we wouldn't demand of ourselves.
I was never a terrorist, let alone a supporter of terrorism, but I still remember how I felt when I was treated like one anytime I flew from Belfast in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yes, we have a huge problem with Isis and similar groups: and it's a problem that is obviously not restricted to the United Kingdom.
But don't kid yourselves that there is an easy answer. There isn't. It took a world war and millions of lives to conquer Nazism.
It has taken billions of pounds from a coalition of well-armed nations to take on Isis and similar organisations across the Middle East.
At this very moment there are men and women from various state forces infiltrating these organisations and working to break them.
The fight against them may not be as in-your-face as lovers of stupid cinema blockbusters and death-wallowing computer games would like it to be, but they are being fought against and they are being hampered and worn down.
The reaction of people like me isn't based on supposed tolerance or fuzzy hashtags. But I don't hate and I'm not going to be forced to hate.
I'm not afraid. I'm not cowed. I'm not going to support draconian overreaction. I'm not going to encourage people - as one desperate-for-social-media-followers blogger put it - to, "Stand Up. Rise Up. Do not carry on as normal."
I've never been manipulated by a terrorist group and I'm not going to start now.
I value my freedoms too much to allow either terrorists or simplistic overreaction to terrorism to remove them or water them down.
