DOING the Saturday shopping or paying a weekend visit to relations was a surreal experience for people in Catholic areas in the North at the weekend, but they seemed to take it in their stride.
Morning showed the extent of devastation on the streets. Car tyres crunched over broken glass bumped over bricks and ploughed through smoking embers.
The acrid smell of burned paint, fabric, rubber and timber hung in the air in west and north Belfast. Drivers negotiated the remains of makeshift barricades made up of an astonishing array of materials.
There were supermarket trolleys, lengths of railings, entire sections of scaffolding, blackened gas cylinders, tree branches, chicken wire and other garden fencing, drainpipes, broken bottles and rubble of all kinds - much of it still smoking gently in the morning sunshine.
Occasionally, RUC armoured Land Rovers sped up and down the roads, some of them bizarrely decorated like abstract paintings with paint splashes of various colours.
Drivers had to watch out carefully for the rioters' special anti tyre device lengths of planking with nails driven through them and laid across the road with the sharp side upwards.
On York Road, in the vicinity of the New Lodge area, the RUC had erected a "Road Closed" sign, which most people ignored. Further down the road a group of some 30 children, most of whom looked under 10 years old, clustered around a smouldering barricade. An RUC Land Rover slowly approached from the other side. The children dashed forward. The Land Rover retreated.
Along the top storey of the nearby multi storey Artillery Flats, a huge sign had been erected and would have been easily visible to the Orangemen parading for the Twelfth in neighbouring areas.
In 5 ft high letters it spell out the ominous and provocative message: "Drumcree Church will burn - INLA". Another placard beside it demanded, more mundanely: "Rename Our Flats."
Burned out cars, trucks and vans were piled one on top of the other on the pavements at the entrances to side streets around Duncairn Gardens and along the Antrim Road. Here and there the blackened shell of a building with the blue flashing lights of the fire brigade outside.
Up in the Oldpark district more `Road Closed' signs warned off routine traffic. Passing them, one came upon an incongruous war zone.
At the rear of the black steel and concrete bunker like Oldpark barracks, a dozen British troops in camouflage crouched at the ready, peering around corners and backed up by two huge armoured cars.
Two little girls sat happily in the sun on a low wall, chatting to a nervous `squaddie' who was using it for cover. Some 50 yards down a road strewn with rocks and debris, a group of youths manned a chicane barricade of burned out vehicles and assorted masonry.
Some local traffic, and even taxis, was being allowed through, but the soldiers watched the scene through their gun sights with wary eyes.
West Belfast was difficult to get to, as the steel security gates on most access roads had been securely locked for days. But inside the cordon life was continuing as normal, except for occasional evidence of recent conflict - smouldering embers, piles of pallets, the shell of a burned out Group 4 security van and other wrecked vehicles.
On the Protestant Suffolk estate, off the Glen Road, Union flags still fluttered. Demolished traffic bollards were the only signs of some recent disorder.
But the supermarkets and the garden centres were open and busy. Bus services to the area had been suspended for fear of hijackings, but there were plenty of black taxis.
Everyday life went on. The towering army RUC bases with their banks of observation cameras and their high flying Union flags were ignored.
A few groups of young boys explored the wrecked vehicles and sometimes, almost casually, bounced a stone or two off the occasional passing police vehicle.
These were very much the junior players. The senior league rarely kicks off before nightfall.