Things out of their accustomed places look like symbols. There was a thriving bar in the Downpatrick Cricket Club until the clubhouse was burnt down last week. The place was a busy social centre as well as a sporting club.
The fire was started in the night. Next evening, eddies of smoke still rose from the ruins, where club members, aimlessly and in shock, poked and pulled among blackened heaps for what they could salvage.
Somehow, the cash register survived and someone had balanced it on a flower tub, out on the asphalt of the car-park. There it sat, in the summer air, an unsentimental reminder of the companionship people had in this club. The people were both Protestant and Catholic.
About half the club members were from one community and half from the other, as the arsonists would have known. But that didn't matter to them.
"Put your faith in the LORD," a nearby board says, "and have not confidence in men." It is just as well that so many people in Northern Ireland take such exhortations literally and try to live by them. Forgiveness is achieved, for example, in near-impossible circumstances because forgiveness is Christian.
In the case of Downpatrick, the people who cared for the cricket club have to accept that they can't have confidence in their fellow townspeople. It was locals who must have planned, even if they didn't execute, the night out with the flammable liquids and firelighters.
First they went into the centre of town and climbed on the roof of a Protestant-owned business. They lifted the slates and poured liquid in and started a blaze which went on to burn down a whole row of shops, including Catholic ones.
Then they went to the club, a corner of velvety green sheltered by a little hill. It was undefended. Why would anyone want to harm it? It has been 20 years since there was any kind of trouble in the town.
The president of Downpatrick Cricket Club lives in a bungalow across a hedge from the clubhouse. When he was woken in the middle of the night, and went out to look at the blaze, it was the first burning building he had ever seen. His wife said: "Imagine, this has been going on in Belfast for 30 years!"
He thought - the same as you or I would think - that the fire brigade would be on its way. But that's why the shop up the town had been torched, to stretch the firefighting resources.
And what looked like a bomb had been left at the entrance to the cricket ground. A pipe, with wires coming from it, very much delayed the fire brigade getting through.
And so £500,000 worth of bars, indoor nets, and function rooms burnt down before its officers' incredulous eyes.
And with the buildings went the irreplaceable sepia photographs of old cricketers and the records of teams of long ago. And also destroyed was the club's pride and joy, the vast silver-and-gilt Senior Cup, which was 112 years old. They're keeping the fragments of the cup which people picked out of the wreckage. The shards are in a carrier bag. It is pointless. There is absolutely nothing to be done with the bits of wrought silver, now melted and black.
A fair bit of thought went into the destruction of the clubhouse. That's what makes the event so Northern Irish.
It might happen anywhere that urban vandals would destroy something other people loved and took pride in. But Downpatrick can be sure the cricket club was destroyed because of cricket's association with Englishness and England's association with Northern Ireland. It makes no difference that this is an utterly unreasonable basis for burning down this clubhouse.
The club has been mixed throughout its 150 years. It is mixed now. Its senior officers have been and are Catholic as well as Protestant. Its best players have played for Ireland, not England. None of that made any difference.
Children still practised their cricket out on the field last week, indifferent to the adults standing around in little groups gazing at the ruins, trying to come to terms with their loss. To listen to them, the arson attack was completely inexplicable.
"You hear people talk of co-operation across the religious divide," one man said, "but here, there wasn't even a divide."
On the face of it, that's true. There has been power-sharing on the local council between the unionists and the SDLP for many years. But that's not enough. Well-meaning institutions and individuals often seem irrelevant to the deep currents of sectarianism which run underneath the surface of Northern Ireland.
A few days before the arson attacks there was an Orange march in Downpatrick. There is a residents' group which strongly objects to the local Orangemen's plan to parade through the town centre on July 13th. The Orangemen haven't done this for 15 years because theirs is a parade which rotates around different venues and it hasn't been the turn of Downpatrick until this year. Last time, of course, there were no residents' groups to make their feelings plain.
The representative of the residents tried to give a letter of protest to those leading last week's small parade. The letter wasn't accepted. Nobody would take the letter. "The Orange Order does not engage in dialogue," it says.
Meanwhile, some Protestants see the destruction of the cricket club as part of a pattern of intimidatory arson attacks. In the last year in the general area, a rectory has been set on fire and the rector and his wife forced to move; a Protestant undertaker has been put out of business; a school for the disabled was burnt; and two Orange halls were set on fire.
This campaign will not make the slightest difference to the political realities in Northern Ireland, any more than burning down the cricket club will. But it certainly affects the social realities. As do unwanted Orange parades.
The sour, mean and wilfully unimaginative attitude of one lot of people to the other lot manifests itself in big things and small. And this is the moral of last week's sad scene at the cricket ground, so seemingly non-political.
Politics are the long-term answer to the hostility expressed in the attack. This week's Assembly elections may seem less than exciting to the Southern reader. But they are the only thing on the horizon which might, in 10 or 20 years' time, make a difference to thinking and feeling on the ground.
They might make Northern Ireland safe for cricket. It isn't safe now, for cricket or any other pursuit quite as innocuous.