With little traffic and few protesters, yesterday was a perfect day for a drive round Belfast.
In recent days there has been hardly a car on the roads as potential drivers, listening to a litany of blocked roads, stoning and rioting, decided not to risk their well-being and windscreens.
Yesterday normality returned. The "spontaneous and sporadic" protests called for by Portadown Orangemen were supposed to start at 3 p.m. and run until 6 pm. At 4.30 p.m. there was barely a pedestrian, let alone a crowd, at any of the flashpoints of the last fortnight.
On a journey round Belfast, taxi-dispatchers confidently assured this reporter that Carlisle Circus and the Crumlin Road would be impassable. As it was, the taxi-driver never had to drop below 30 m.p.h. and then only because a bus was unloading shoppers laden with purchases from the city centre.
The situation was the same everywhere. On the Shore Road in the north of the city over to the Albert Bridge Road in the east and Upper Malone in the south, the only manifestations of loyalist protest were Union flags and paramilitary flags fluttering in the breeze.
Small swirls of ash were stirred up by cars as they drove over the sites of previous barricades. The stains left by paintbombs and rough road surfaces where the tarmac had cracked under the heat of fires were the only indications of disruption.
At Westland Road in north Belfast, where shots were fired at nationalists last week, a group of five men stood at the side of the road talking. Farther up the road, a female RUC officer, in a pressed white shirt instead of riot gear, said that although there had been a small group of people on the road half-an-hour previously, "they just moved off themselves".