If you keep tabs on the state of northern society, late August is when you measure up the summer. Not that bad, or atrocious? From the years when rioting sputtered throughout the weeks from the Twelfth to the anniversary of Internment Day, the graph has been steadily downward.
People with long faces and short memories sometimes mope about "unchanging" violence. They are right that inter-community aggro was endemic more than 100 years before Northern Ireland came into existence. They are wrong that the level and duration of violence has been as bad in recent years as during the Troubles.
But chalking up a less than miserable marching season is risky: know-alls tend to muster, chanting "just you wait". Sure enough, last September brought pitched battles with police and army on one side, facing Orange marchers and bullets and pipe bombs from the loyalist paramilitaries who supported them. At Ardoyne, Catholic rioters of primary school age marked the marching season by stoning marchers, followers, police and media. The bulk of 2005's summer aggro, however, was as usual visited on Catholic families in largely Protestant places.
Police and government did not cope well. The September episode was tallied with the summer's saga. Authority decided that loyalist violence was the expression of demoralised Protestant unionism and must only be penalised with a light touch. Hard for republicans to complain, since much of the peace process has been built on a similar approach to their followers.
Police stood well back this summer during stand-offs between an ousted faction and the UDA leadership now acceptable to the Northern Ireland Office. The phenomenon of blatantly criminal paramilitaries is mid-makeover.
Loyalist areas have been deluged with community-building, enterprise-developing grants and are in line for more. In all of them, decent and hard-working pioneers of local enterprise are fretting that the money will disappear, as so much did in previous eras, into the coffers of madeover paramilitaries, under one name or another.
The unionist parties have little that is useful to say. Their problem is that the disparity between republicans and loyalists is too visible to deny but too unflattering to recognise.
Sinn Féin majors in a self-righteousness that blanks out the toll of IRA death and destruction. But they get some things right, and re-invention of their heartland as a vibrant district makes for one of the most telling comparisons with the loyalist legacy.
The West Belfast festival each August irritates many, not solely unionists, by radiating smugness as it trucks concerts, readings, exhibitions and plays into streets once identified with disorder, destruction and death. This year the festival premiered a play by north Belfast Protestant playwright Gary Mitchell, which focused on a fractured working-class family and explained loyalist anti-Catholic violence as inevitable manifestation of a dysfunctional community. Loyalists have repeatedly threatened Mitchell, forcing him and his wider family out of their homes. The play is a brave response, but unfortunately bravery has never guaranteed artistic merit.
Sharp lines struggled through a fog of weak writing, good performances sat beside bad and the audience, unchallenged and implicitly flattered, did its best to chuckle appreciatively. So, artistic shortcomings there may be, but preparation for the festival, the swathe of outsiders who arrive to perform or watch and the good publicity generated, has relegated bad memories and replaced riots as intended.
A ritualised and peaceful commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the hunger strikes trundles on, with only spurts of dissident criticism - and the spectacle of a chunk of Newry's newly-successful economy going up in flames. Sinn Féin hardly needed to churn out dismissal of vain and foolish "micro-groups". The flames satisfy only the unpolitical, who have approved of nothing since republicans began fighting elections to take seats.
Unionists across the spectrum, from liberal to hardline, insist they have no clout with loyalists, and must not therefore be accused of ineffectual condemnation. They miss the point. A few nights ago in fractious north Belfast someone hacked away casing to get at a family's heating-oil tank, and set it ablaze. The resulting explosion wrecked a bedroom where a young mother and baby had been asleep. The police, sometimes cautious to a fault in attributing motive, called this a sectarian attack. And so it was reported in the liberal unionist Belfast Telegraph. But true to decades of deliberate blandness, the Telegraph did not get around to describing the target family as Catholic. The paper now has fine reporting on allegations of collusion between police and loyalists, among other subjects. Pointing the finger inside the family in a way that prompts thought has to be consistent, and unmistakeable.