Garvaghy Road, a July evening. There's a different air about Drumcree this year. A fire has gone out, it seems, and it's not all due to the weather.
A first indication was the absence of Portadown District Master Mr Harold Gracey from Carleton Orange Hall last Sunday morning. Traditionally, he has delivered a fire-and-brimstone speech to the marchers from the hall's first-floor window before they set off into the great green yonder.
District officers offered no explanation for his absence. Portadown District's information officer, Mr David Jones, was nowhere to be seen either. Generally available to media to trot out the hard line on all such occasions - this was a surprise.
Proceedings were handled instead by two younger officers, Deputy District Officer Mr David Burrows and District Secretary Mr Nigel Burrows, suggesting the torch was being passed to a younger, more moderate generation.
The presence of Grand Lodge heavy guns Mr Robert Saulters, Mr George Patton, and Mr Denis Watson, indicated the shift in the Portadown Lodge's leadership had the full backing of headquarters in Belfast.
Any doubts about what was happening in the Portadown Lodge were dispelled by Mr Gracey's speech at the Drumcree barricade on Sunday. He promised "the protest will continue under my leadership or a different leadership" and asked for support for young leaders in the lodge. While addressing the congregation in the church earlier he was effusive in his praise of Mr Saulters, a man he had previously castigated at Drumcree.
And, unlike previous years, Mr Saulters played to the gallery on Sunday, as if to bring Portadown on-side. He described the decision to ban the parade from the Garvaghy Road as "a slap in the face for enslaved people everywhere. It is a pat on the back for those who advocate genocide and apartheid." Sentiments, it must be said, which would have left Mr Gracey standing in his heyday.
When he spoke to The Irish Times this week it was clear Mr Burrows is a man about business. He admits little will happen this week - until the Twelfth and its aftermath is out of the way. He seemed anxious yesterday that the Garvaghy Road residents should know that the proposals Grand Lodge presented to the Parades Commission last Thursday were the same as the residents would have been aware of since last November. He did accept, however, this may not have been made clear to the residents last week.
While Mr Jones had told the Belfast Telegraph on Monday that all links between the Portadown Lodge and mediator Mr Brian Currin had been severed, Mr Burrows did not hesitate to say he knew nothing about that. He was also positive, if doubting, about Mr Breandan MacCionnaith's seeming shift of position from "No Orange feet . . ." to "Maybe Orange feet . . ." and towards the idea of a forum.
Mr MacCionnaith would not be drawn on anything, other than saying all would be on the table in talks between the two sides, where those talks were without precondition or pre-determination. He resisted discussion on the forum idea - now promoted by the Church of Ireland Primate, Archbishop Eames, and by the residents themselves before Drumcree IV (1998) - but did query the representative structure of such a forum.
Drumcree, it is becoming evident, will not be the same again.