I bought a pot of excellent marmalade the other day in the beautiful city of Derry. It is called King William's Orange Preserve and it is packed for the Ulster Society in Brownlow House in Lurgan; a horrible baronial pile, by the way, where branches of the loyal orders gallantly hold their meetings under blackened rafters amid the smell of ashes, because they refuse to be shifted by the various parties who try to burn the place down. This marmalade comes, like almost everything in Northern Ireland, with tribal credentials.
But at least it is only marmalade. I bought it at an event in the crowded programme of a festival, the Apprentice Boys of Derry Maiden City Festival, which is "an exploration of the city's heritage and of the contribution of Protestant culture to its development through drama, art, poetry and pageant."
The festival means that the Apprentice Boys are opening themselves up to the society around them, not on a political level but through amiable things like a graffiti art competition, a comic play about the traitor Lundy, a display of military uniforms, and drill in the Guildhall Square, an Ulster-Scottish traditional poetry reading, and the big Relief of Derry pageant they put on this weekend.
The Boys are welcoming the likes of myself to their imposing Memorial Hall up on the walls of Derry, a building I never thought to set foot in. It is an astonishing place, full of rooms stuffed with Protestant memorabilia and basement meeting halls and with one strange high windowless room, like a torture-chamber, with a big iron hook in the ceiling, from which, in fact, they hang the metal frame of the giant effigy of Lundy they make each year. The Memorial Hall also has a lively bar, where members can take a drink to the accompaniment, on formal occasions, of a flute band up in the balcony. Who would have thought it?
I don't like the feel of places where self-selected all-male groups carry out their rituals. The president/abbot/grand master or whatever sits up on such-and-such a chair: this is the presidential gavel; that there is the vice-presidential gavel, those are the portraits of past worthies up to their spectacles in medals, decorations, mitres or some other regalia. I don't know why men want to bond and make hierarchies as Masons or Knights or Apprentice Boys or anything else.
But they do. They like meeting. If you have to have such places, the meeting-rooms in the Derry Apprentice Boys' Hall are such splendid examples of Victorian neo-Masonic decor they should be preserved untouched, flock wallpaper and all, for posterity. I didn't like being in the rooms, but I felt honoured to be shown them.
In fact, there was something almost childishly exciting about crossing such thresholds. These are first steps we're all taking, involuntarily or voluntarily, in finding out about Northern Protestant culture. I speak for more than myself, I'm sure, when I say that I never really understood what exactly the organisations they call the loyal orders are for, or why they want to march around, especially when their marches are bitterly offensive to their Catholic neighbours.
The orders have been both incomprehensible and sinister. The halls and lodges and regalia and symbols and handshakes and oaths and so on of the Orange Order, the Royal Black Institution and the Apprentice Boys are out of bounds to strangers. There's been no ordinary, amiable, way of dealing with them.
There aren't any women to talk to, for instance, apart from a few women's Orange lodges, though presumably it wasn't men in bowler hats and collarettes who made the marmalade. Not surprisingly, when on top of this secretiveness the orders are exclusively Protestant in a society which until recently was ruled in their own interest by Protestants, they have not been attractive to contemplate.
But in Derry at least the Boys are making a huge and genuine effort at public relations. The Apprentice Boys have issued a blizzard of printed material from which the reader does indeed gain a respectful knowledge of the issues at stake at the Siege of Derry. You begin to see the noble side to preferring William to James. The museum rooms in the Apprentice Boys' Hall give you an insight, too, into the loneliness of Ulster loyalism, especially during the second World War. The process of discovering sympathy for all this is a surprisingly quick one. In moments, it is the Bogside Residents' Group which seems like the sullen party, too ready to assume being understood.
There are great times ahead for lovers of Ireland as the treasure trove of Northern Protestant culture is discovered. But that doesn't mean that the culture is value-free or that it does not have a political role. I have been taken aback recently to find myself bracketed with pro-Union journalists because I enjoy and respect much about Northern Protestantism.
Actually, the journalists I've been bracketed with are not so much pro-Union - that's just opportunism - as viciously anti-Sinn Fein, and I personally am not anti-Sinn Fein. The magazine of the Apprentice Boys, The Crimson Banner, reveals a politics I don't agree with and political perceptions I don't share.
I couldn't have had a better time in Derry last week. But the Mayor, though a charmer, is DUP, which means he opposes the Belfast Agreement and will try to make the Assembly, which I think is the best hope for the future of Northern Ireland, unworkable. A jovial Apprentice Boy I was talking to did say, about Catholics, "You breed them, we feed them," and never noticed the shock on my face at this would-be joke.
Donncha Mac Niallais of the Bogside Residents' Group was referred to continually as "Donkey". There are differences between us at every level, from the trivial to the profound.
Still, to wander the 18th-century corner of the City of Derry, at last welcome there, is a huge advance. As a place, it is so perfect and so empty of people that it is like the set of a BBC classic serial. Mrs Alexander wrote There is a Green Hill in the Bishop's Palace there, looking across at Creggan, where now the new temples to shopping rise over the little roofs, and James's army was encamped just across and down from the walls at what was then the cow bog, and those cannon on the walls are real, Cromwellian cannon - republican cannon, once, now trained on the republicans of the Creggan and Bogside. The little grove of trees outside the Memorial Hall is where Colmcille and his people settled themselves down, on the slope above the soggy plain of the Foyle.
History has been so long and so eventful here that the marks of thrown paint and the "IRA" graffiti on the door of the Apprentice Boys' Memorial Hall are almost carrying on a tradition. The Mayor quoted in his speech opening an exhibition about the siege: "A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid . . ." A whole side of Protestant sensibility is now coming out of hiding. How right that it should be happening in the special place that is Derry.