It will take a lot more than speed ramps and traffic-calming measures to ease the tensions and suspicions along the Ardoyne Road, writes Paul Tanney from Belfast.
Even though she lived on the Ground Zero of north Belfast, the woman having coffee on the Crumlin Road with her partner shared the bewilderment of the rest of the world.
"We live on the Ardoyne Road, we thought it was all over. We'd even taken our shutters down but they're all back up now," she said.
Some 500 metres up the road a cleaner at the Concord community centre had moved from surprise to resignation. She believed the trouble would continue. "It didn't last long anyway, did it? It was too good to be true. We're totally fed up with it, we were just saying, 'Is that the start to the new year'?"
There are new speed ramps on the Ardoyne Road as part of the package of measures which was intended to end the conflict around Holy Cross primary school, but it will take more than traffic calming to ease tensions.
Mr Jackie Tweedie, another Ardoyne Road resident, albeit on the Protestant side, was also downbeat about the prospect of improved community relations. "No, I just can't see it; it takes just the slightest thing to spark things off."
Whenever girls leave Holy Cross primary school many of them go to Our Lady of Mercy secondary school on the Ballysillan Road. Here the windows of almost 20 cars were smashed by loyalists yesterday, some of who were said to be armed.
Many parents took their children away from the school early, and one girl, Kathy, said she was not coming back.
"It's too scary in case it happens again or even worse."
Her mother, Mary, said she would not force her. "This place; it's frightening and it's not getting any better . . . as it is she's having nightmares and I don't want her having any more."
Even by mid-afternoon, with the streets still clear of rubble, the tension was obvious. At the base of the Legoniel Road, Protestant youths goaded police officers. On the Crumlin Road, their Catholic counterparts spat at police officers and a brief stand-off developed after the PSNI grabbed one schoolboy.
At the Mercy Convent primary school on the Crumlin Road, loyalists threw fireworks at the school until they were confronted by nationalists and then separated by police.
As the afternoon wore on a group of 60 pupils from the boys and girls model schools became the latest group of children to be affected by the conflict. Saying their buses had been cancelled after attacks the previous day, they attempted to walk down the Arddoyne Road only to be diverted off it and held by the police on Hesketh Road.
Lower down the Ardoyne Road, a nationalist crowd gathered, trying to anticipate what direction the pupils would come.
At the same time, a Protestant woman attempted to walk from nearby loyalist Twadell Avenue up the Crumlin Road. Nationalists gathered round her and a scuffle developed, with one Catholic man using the shoulders of two woman as a launch pad to kick the Protestant.
The police intervened, wounding one nationalist in the head with a baton, and the woman was bundled away to a nearby ambulance station.
Back at Hesketh Road deliberations about what to do with the school pupils continued. At one stage it was suggested that they be ferried down the road by bus. One woman in a pink anorak was against any such a compromise. "Holy Cross never got on buses; our ones aren't getting on one either," she said.
After almost 90 minutes, it was decided to put the pupils into PSNI vehicles and ferry them past the nationalist crowd at Ardoyne shopfront.
Only seconds before the first vehicle went past, Mr Gerry Kelly of Sinn Féin had implored nationalists to disperse and not give Protestants a PR victory. The police vehicles zipped past the crowd who only belatedly saw the obscene gestures from the pupils inside.
"That's it, its all over, get off the road," said Mr Kelly.
"No, don't get off the road," said one teenage girl, whose call was echoed by others.
Any hope that the uneventful passing of the Protestant school children would be the end of the afternoon's events was dashed almost immediately. Only five minutes later the crowd surged up to the Ardoyne interface and began throwing stones and bottles at loyalists, allegedly because of an attack on a Catholic pensioner's home.
Loyalists also threw bricks and fireworks until the police and British army separated the two factions, who began attacking the security forces.
As darkness fell, the violence began to dwindle but everybody expected it to return.
"They're just on their tea break," one journalist said.
Ms Catherine Montgomery, a resident of the Glenbryn area, said she no longer felt safe walking down her road.
A former community relations worker, Ms Montgomery sends her daughter to an integrated school where she can be educated along with Catholic girls.
She feels bitter that her community is portrayed as the aggressors and says any trust there was with the Catholic people of Ardoyne has irretrievably gone. She did not know if the loyalist blockade of the area would resume.