March 1973. I was a young barrister in a case at the Old Bailey.

I don't remember all that much about the defendant we were representing - but I vividly remember the old Ford Cortina in deep racing green parked outside the Bailey.

I'd passed this vehicle at lunchtime on my way back to my chambers and I remember scurrying past it after lunch, worried that I was late for the start of the afternoon's hearing.

There had been any number of bomb warnings at the time.

This was the height of the Provisional IRA's terrorist campaign on the mainland, as well as in the province of Northern Ireland itself.

Almost all the bomb warnings were hoaxes; so one became very nonchalant about them.

That afternoon an usher came into court, whispered to the judge's clerk, who whispered to the judge.

He then told us that he was adjourning on account of a bomb warning.

We were told to leave the building, whilst all the prisoners were sent back to their cells in the basement.

We went downstairs, ambled out into the street - the Old Bailey - after which the "Central Criminal Court" has its familiar name.

I'd gone 50 yards north up the street when there was the biggest bang I'd ever heard in my life.

I looked behind, and saw, as if in slow motion, bits of the Ford Cortina, racing green, flying through the air.

I dived for cover behind a post box - where I found myself cuddling a tramp.

A split second after the explosion, there was something much worse - a trail of shards of glass from the plate glass windows in the office blocks around.

A small piece lodged itself in my backside: otherwise I escaped unscathed.

I was lucky. This particular outrage was the occasion of a photograph which went round the world of a blood splattered counsel swathed in bandages.

And given what could have happened, what often happened in outrages like that, we were all pretty lucky.

From recollection there was one death.

Others, and especially those living through the decades of the troubles, have been less lucky.

Some families, on both sides of the Catholic/Protestant divide have lost loved ones in every generation.

The hatred all this has engendered is so deep I often thought that the troubles would go on and on.

It felt like that even as John Major and his government made significant steps forward in the peace process in the mid-1990s.

And when the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, though a huge step forward, it was by no means the end of the story.

Fast forward to March 2007. The announcement on Monday that power-sharing will begin between Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party in May does not end the story either.

But it is such a remarkable achievement that it almost takes the breath away.

The idea of Gerry Adams and the Reverend Ian Paisley sitting by side and smiling for the cameras would simply have been inconceivable a decade, or even five years, ago.

I was struck on reading the reports of their meeting that journalists, hardened by reporting on years of violence and endless negotiations which often seemed to be going nowhere, were unanimous in hailing the extraordinary events on Monday without a scintilla of that cynicism which so often pollutes the media these days.

It is also sends out a message of hope to other parts of the world where such is the deadlock and animosity between two sides that a solution seems impossible.