IT WAS a good morning for Alistair Simpson. Warm sunshine and warm words from passers by, "Congratulations on yesterday", one woman shouted from across the road. "The police were saying what a good job you did." The leader of the Derry Apprentice Boys smiled and said, "That makes a change."
Mr Simpson, dressed in suit and tie, was outside his house in the Fountain Estate on his way to church yesterday. "I made a promise to the people of this city that the march would be trouble free. And to the best of my ability that happened."
The fight over the Derry walls had turned into a battle for the high moral round. When nationalists wearing masks petrol bombed the RUC and rioted in the Diamond area early yesterday morning for the Apprentice Boys, the battle was won.
Nobody's basking in any glory, Mr Simpson insisted. Dignity and decorum had been maintained. And for the first time in the past three days, normality appeared to have returned.
A group of Spanish tourists wandered through the Fountain taking pictures of the Derry walls rather than the children playing in the remains of Friday night's bonfire. It was a different city to the place it had been 24 hours before when it was the stage for what was expected to be the first large scale violence since Drumcree.
At the Apprentice Boys memorial hall, they gathered to hear their leaders' decision. Outside the hall, with its fairy tale turrets overlooking the Bogside, a group of women talked about the decision to close off part of the walls.
Sure, They could probably only see the tips of the flags from over there, they said. And they probably couldn't even see that much because they would just be "lying in their beds all day" anyway.
Girls tried on their boyfriends' collarettes and felt hats as the wait continued. The sun shone on the nylon uniforms and dark suits. Elsewhere, some serious early morning drinkers were downing beer and cider. They stood outside the early houses and sat on their crates of beer, reaching in to re move a can every now and again.
At 12.25 p.m., Alistair Simpson stepped up in front of the green corrugated metal shielding the hall from the Bogside. "Put that phone off" he told somebody, before reading from a single sheet of paper. He promised the crowd the best parades ever and then delivered the carefully crafted line.
"This association intends to state our firm intention to walk these city walls at a time of our own choosing." Then it was a few bars into God Save the Queen before the crowd found the same key. "No surrender" they shouted in the gaps where the music usually plays.
Afterwards, local member Jim McBride muttered that it was quiet, a bit too quiet.
The Bogside would be only 200 yards away from around 15,000 Apprentice Boys, he said. "It doesn't take a genius to see that's a recipe for disaster." Over on the Protestant Waterside, the streets smelled of burgers and beer as the fast food stalls fed the thousands who had arrived from all over Northern Ireland.
Youths dressed in the South Belfast Young Conquerors uniform saluted each band with rattling rounds from plastic machine guns. Large grins on their faces. Each Lambeg drummer seemed to be trying to outbeat the last as they leathered into them, marching over the Craigavon Bridge into the city.
Over at Free Derry Corner Bogside, Donncha Mac Niallais told the crowd the rally had been called off. "Yep, peace has broken out over here," a disgruntled English journalist complained into his mobile phone. "It's all lovely and fluffy."
Five minutes later that seemed to change as the crowd moved towards Butchers' Gate, the entrance from the Bogside to the Diamond where the bands were marching.
Two RUC Land Rovers had reversed together to block the gate. Mr Mac Niallais asked the crowd to move back. No one budged. The Land Rovers were moved and the RUC stood 10 feet away. "People think that the RUC are gonna move down here and they're gonna allow the Apprentice Boys to march," Mr Mac Niallais said. "They don't trust the people up there.
At 3.20 p.m., drunken loyalists outside the memorial hall sang the Sash and chanted "U, U UVF" football style. The RUC, in the middle of a tea break, put on its riot gear and the camera crews left Butcher's Gate to catch the first real bother of the day.
A few bottles and stones, a handful of arrests and one injured photographer later, we wandered back to Butcher's Gate. Then a lone man in jeans and a denim shirt staggered down from the memorial hall towards the thousands of nationalists waiting at the gate. "Are you gonna sort this out or are we?" one of the stewards asked the RUC. The man whom they said was called Wesley was led out behind the RUC line and given a friendly pat on the back to, send him on his way.
After more skirmishes between RUC and loyalists by 6.30 p.m., the crowd at Butcher's Gate had dwindled to about 50 people. SDLP councillor, Mark Durkan, walked around, his tweed jacket over one arm. "Drop them," he warned the kids who had armed themselves with stones to throw at the RUC lines.
Flashpoint was the word of the day and the phrase for the tabloid and radio bulletins was "back from the brink".
The mood had been ugly, Mr Durkan said, when the crowd came to the gate. If the jeeps had not been moved before the majority of the crowd arrived, they would probably have been tumbled, he said.
"It wasn't an incident free day but in all the circumstances it has contained itself."
