AS the English media, elements of which are keen to show the hicks from Belfast just how this journalism thing is supposed to work, will doubtless realise within weeks or months, we are deep in the part of the news cycle where flags make a headline or three.
Each year, flags start to make their presence felt in the window between the start/collapse - it's usually one or the other - of political talks at Stormont and the summer-long carnival of the marching season.
A distinctive feature of what passes for political discourse in Northern Ireland is the frequent and effective use of the sectarian dog whistle.
It is little surprise, therefore, that flags are hung on the lampposts that the dog visits, with the same aim - to mark out territory.
All that is depressing enough, though probably not as dispiriting as when politicians hold the dog's lead while it cocks its leg.
Which brings us to the lamentable response of the new South Belfast MP, Emma Little-Pengelly, to the loyalist paramilitary flags which have appeared in a housing development in her constituency.
There is plenty of reason to dislike flags, of whatever stripe, being erected on any public furniture, but those which have appeared in the Global Crescent and Cantrell Close area carry the additional insult of being erected in a new development built with the specific aim of creating a 'shared neighbourhood'; sharing between the UDA and UVF is not what was envisaged.
Ms Little-Pengelly is no stranger to the idea of 'shared neighbourhoods', nor the Stormont executive's Together: Building United Communities strategy which sired it, because she was one of the special advisers who helped dream it up.
As with most of these back-of-the-envelope Stormont wheezes, little of substance seems to have come from it.
This makes the south Belfast housing development all the more unusual, for it seems to be that rarest of things, a tangible outworking of a Stormont strategy; a reasonable person might surmise, therefore, that the preservation of its cross-community character was all the more important.
And who better to protect this tender shared neighbourhood space from the spectre of paramilitaries and their flags than one of those who designed the TBUC scheme?
Anyone, apart from Ms Little-Pengelly, seems to be the answer.
Having canvassed opinion in the area - as if the presence of loyalist paramilitary flags in a shared space was up for debate to begin with - the new MP declared that people "didn't want a public fuss around this matter".
This may indeed be a genuine position, though it seems unlikely that most folk living in a self-declared cross-community would think so, and Ms Little-Pengelly seems to have overlooked the larger possibility that people scared of having their windows broken and their cars vandalised would want to distance themselves from a "public fuss".
Of course, another reason the folk who the MP met on the doors might been less than forthcoming in their criticism of the flags is the fact that her Westminster candidacy won the endorsement of a UDA house magazine and the Loyalist Community Council, which represents upright members of society who are in no way connected to criminality, such as the UDA, UVF and Red Hand Commando.
Ms Little-Pengelly concluded that the whole thing was "more complex" than she had imagined.
This might be a vaguely credible position for, say, an English newspaper coming fresh to the Northern Ireland story to adopt, but it strains credulity towards breaking point to imagine that someone who has been at the heart of the Stormont administration and the DUP for years finds anything to do with flags particularly "complex". Does she think we came up the Lagan in a bubble?
In the background of this saga are the perennial problems that surround flags: the apparent powerlessness of the 'authorities', including the police, to do anything about them; the fact that anyone with a cherry picker, a fluorescent vest and a bag of cable ties can hang flags wherever and whenever they wish; the flexing of paramilitary muscle they represent, with all the intimidation and threat and sectarian impulse that implies.
The whole shoddy episode is Northern Ireland 2017 in microcosm, and an utterly depressing commentary on the lack of political and civic progress that has been made by the Sinn Féin and DUP duopoly.
The insincerity of the DUP in particular when it comes to shared space and united community initiatives is simply underlined when one of TBUC's architects cannot be bothered to stand up for its aims, modest as they are. Those working for cross-community progress must, at times like this, feel abandoned. Or feel like putting up a white flag.
George Orwell wrote, famously, that: "Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
To Orwell's "Conservatives to Anarchists" we could add various grand initiatives centred around Stormont - Together Building United Communities, Social Investment Fund, Fresh Start, Renewable Heat Incentive and so on.
"Pure wind", especially when it encounters unwanted flags, wouldn't be in it.