Last week the Lisburn Road, where I am living, was the right place to be, because the huge Belfast Twelfth Orange parade passed my door on the way out to the field at Edenderry, and even more importantly, passed it again on the way back, after the service and a few drinks and a distinct veer to the playful. I watched it all, and even followed it, out to Shaw's Bridge.
That morning I'd been where the media focus was, down at the Ormeau Road, where local residents reject the feeder parade from the local Orange Hall. But along most of its seven-mile route the main parade is prepared for with delight. The Lisburn Road was lined from early morning by hardy family groups with flasks and umbrellas and babies and grannies propped up on garden chairs who were plopped back into the car between showers.
I've seen Patrick's Day parades and Corpus Christi parades and Macnas parades and every other kind of parade the south has to offer. I've seen Irish parades in America. But I never saw such a genuine people's festival as the Twelfth parade in Belfast. It is a wonderful thing to have happening on our island, and the only pity is that the South knows nothing about it, and the North has no plans to share it with the South.
It is also very big. There were about 9,000 to 10,000 people (nearly all of them men, of course, though there were occasional lodges of formidable women, some sensibly costumed in matching plastic macs) in the parade itself. But thousands more watched it or walked along with it or went out to the field. People waited beside the road for hours, and laid out picnics on traffic islands and queued for chips and bought Orange flags and gospel music cassettes and spicy chicken pieces from the stalls on the way to the field.
Even the sudden torrential downpours didn't daunt them. And it occurred to me, as it would to any southerner watching - especially in the light of the savage divisions on this island shown up by recent events - what are we to do about the fact of these people?
Because when we're finished displaying our contempt for Orangeism we are left with the fact that it is part of the identity of the largest minority on the island. That identity, clearly evident on a day like the Twelfth, has positive and, indeed, charming aspects, as well as the negative we are all so good at describing. Since we shouldn't want to destroy it, and it is in any case beyond our capacity to destroy, we have to come to terms with it.
The Orange Order was founded on and continues to perpetrate sectarianism, we now know how to say. But how vivid is this history and this purpose to ordinary members, leaving aside the extremism to be found in Portadown? How much does history inform anyone's attitudes, nowadays? Are there analogies in our own culture?
I've reassured English tourists, for example, who know hardly anything about this country, that they'll be very welcome and perfectly safe if they choose to holiday here. All they know about the Irish is that they have been fighting with the English for hundreds of years, and that Irish people put bombs in their cities.
I've explained that though this is so, individual Irish people have nothing whatsoever against individual English people and do not for a moment consider them enemies. I think this kind of distance between rhetoric and reality might also be credited to unionist and even loyalist thinking about people different from themselves.
Northern anti-Catholicism sounds ferocious. The people depicted on the great banners carried in the procession - Martin Luther, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Carson - were, to put it mildly, anti-Catholic. The most aggressive bands were named Protestant Boys, or Defenders. There was an occasional chilling moment: I saw a thuggish young man up at the field wearing a UFF T-shirt.
"Not till the last Republican is poisoned," part of the slogan printed on it said, "will the UFF rest." It is hard to think of anyone wearing a Provo T-shirt which vows to poison unionists feeling free to join a gathering anywhere in the south. But the fact remains that superficially amiable relations between most Protestants and most Catholics are perfectly possible, and a society doesn't need anything more than the superficial to work. And even if such relations were not possible, they would have to be made possible.
I was brought up to repeat after my teachers of religion: "Outside the Church there is no redemption." But I don't believe that Roman Catholics at present actively perceive non-Catholics as doomed souls. Maybe they're still doomed in principle, but in practice the thought never crosses anyone's mind. The same de facto acceptance is there in the North.
Protestant people have Catholic neighbours and friends and in-laws and get on as well with them as with anyone else, even though all the fault lines in the society pass between Protestant and Catholic.
It may seem odd to say this when the murders of the little Quinn boys have shown up the evil sectarianism which is undeniably on a spectrum with Orange separatism and triumphalism. But Orangeism exists in other guises.
The parade was an Orange parade and it was full of brio and skill and pride. The men out in front twirling maces, the Atlas-like drummers, the children holding the guy-ropes of the banners, the exuberant variety of flute and accordion and fife and concertina music that came from the bands high-stepping by - all this is not despicable.
And it isn't a dead heritage, on its way out. It obviously has roots deep down into the way of life of working-class Belfast Protestants. Lots of the bandsmen are young. And as for flirting - I never saw so many teenage girls in pedal-pushers, teetering on stilt sandals, with their little bosoms held as self-consciously in their tank tops as a couple of eggs, followed by so many shaven-headed boys with lager cans in their hands.
Coming back from the field, lots of the bands had dressed up as Arabs, or were wearing daffodil masks, or Union Jack wigs, and some of the big men danced in the rain. The family group at my front gate were very, very happy by then. "Have a wee vodka, dear, or a beer," they kept saying to me. The occasion was as Orange as you can get. And, believe it or not, it was fun.
It is harder to say this than to heap more coals on the Orangemen's heads. Nevertheless, peace and mutual tolerance on the island will not come from sneering at each other's cultures. Particularly when the sneers come from ignorance, like ours about Orangeism. I've rarely seen anything as sad as the Ormeau Road that Twelfth morning, when the Orangemen walked silently through the cloud of black balloons let loose by the silent protesters.
People shouldn't be driven to such division! Better by far to put a carnation in your bowler hat and walk behind a band playing The Fields of Athenry, or to bop to the tune waving your paper cup in the air we have to share.