He was a lone marcher, but as one man swaggered drunkenly heading up the North's largest parade he swiftly secured audience approval. "Yee-haw!" roared the crowd from the pavement as he sat on the bonnet of a moving RUC vehicle on Belfast's Ravenhill Road. "Yee-haw!" they guffawed when he performed a wobbly march that proved even more of a crowd pleaser than the rows of besuited Orangemen who followed sombrely behind.
It was the morning after the bonfire night and alcohol had taken its toll on more than a few Twelfth revellers in Ormeau Park.
As early as 9.30 a.m. a group of women and children gathered close to the Drumcree-style barrier erected at 7 a.m. by the security forces to block the route of the local Ballynafeigh Orange Lodge. The women drank yellow pack beer, tossing the empty cans into the front garden of a library before discussing why the Orangemen should be allowed down the lower Ormeau Road.
"The Catholics shouldn't be up at this time of the morning anyway," said Sadie. "They don't know it, but blocking the road makes it a better day. It means we'll show those bastards over there that we can march whether they want us to or not."
Ormeau Park was to become Orange Park for the second year in a row. Members of the Ballynafeigh District had marched towards the barrier shortly before 11 a.m. and held a short service there in opposition to the Parades Commission ruling which banned them from the lower Ormeau. Some members of the nationalist community watched proceedings through binoculars from the far side of the bridge flanked by the ubiquitous international observers.
The marchers were a sea of shiny shoes, bowler hats, collarettes, drums and pipes. Of the three marching bands, two were Scottish. Their impressive silk banners depicted scenes featuring William of Orange and Dan Winter's cottage. The still-functioning traffic lights in front of the barrier played out their symbolic sequence - flickering from green to orange before inevitably the red light would appear.
Deputy County Grand Chaplain the Rev William Hoey led the service. He denounced the barrier as an "obscenity" before inviting the marchers to join in a hymn, The Lord is My Shepherd.
Afterwards, the bands struck up what sounded suspiciously like The Fields of Athenry.
"It is that song but we changed the words," explained Orangeman George Smyth.
Low lie the fields of Ballynafeigh, where once we watched the Orangemen go by. On the 12th day of July we will see our banners fly, it's so lonely around the fields of Ballynafeigh.
He and his friends were surprised by the amount of media attention their mini-standoff had garnered. "It's just a family day out, there will be no trouble, you see people you haven't seen for a while, you eat a burger or maybe a curly sandwich made freshly five days before," he joked.
At around noon, the Ballynafeigh bands and marchers moved off through the park, up through Ravenhill Road on their way to meet up with the main Belfast parades. They formed a guard of honour for the thousands of Orangemen from nine other districts who joined them on Sunnyside Street. Crowds lined the streets, they sat in deckchairs with flasks of tea and boxes of buns. Some wore red, white and blue wigs, carried inflatable hammers or donned Union Jack masks. Even the pets joined in - a Yorkshire Terrier called Pebbles was seen wearing a sash.
From the back of a large truck, senior Orangemen made evangelical speeches, religious rhetoric sprinkled with indignant ire. While some of their brethren gave them their undivided attention, others lay asleep on the grass.
Barbed wire fencing had been erected at the Ormeau Road entrance to the park by the RUC to stop the two communities meeting.
Away from the park, Belfast seemed uniformly grey and unappealing. A place of grey skies, grey smoke, and grey ash smouldering on the remains of the massive bonfires.
The smell of cheap beer hung in the air as the crowds flooded into the city-centre at around 7 p.m. And Orangeism's grand day out was over, at least until next year.