There's a big tricolour flying at the junction of the Stewartstown and Shaws roads and I hate it.
It was put up at Easter and nobody bothered taking it down and now every time I pass it in the car I end up tut-tutting like Victor Meldrew.
The thing is almost surreal in its total and utter pointlessness.
It's flying outside a girls' school and a housing estate and I wonder if any of the children put their hand on their heart and recite the Soldier's Song as they make their way to school in the morning, or if the hearts of local residents soar every time they look out the window and see it fluttering atop the lamppost.
Rather I suspect they view it – if they notice it at all now – with the same kind of slightly pained indifference that I do.
I suppose it could be worse, it could be flying round the corner at Finaghy crossroads or up the road a bit near the Suffolk estate where it would suddenly find a purpose – annoying the Prods.
My daughter has a tricolour in the corner of her bedroom and I like to see it there because she put it up where only her friends and family can see it for reasons of her own – perhaps because she hates flags in streets as much as I do.
I don't care whether they call themselves Catholics or Protestants, nationalists or unionists, republicans or loyalists. Anyone who ever put up a flag at a mixed or interface area needs a good kick in the behind.
I particularly resent the tricolour that flies on top of the New Lodge flats and I feel as angry as any DUP elder as I drive along the Westlink and wonder why the New Lodge thinks that the Irish flag is interchangeable with the two-fingered salute.
Might it not be better to put a banner saying "these flats are hell-holes" or "give us proper homes"?
It could be worse, of course. I could be a loyalist and live in Mount Vernon or Portadown.
There, and in countless other places like them, the desecration of flags is the rule rather than the exception.
It's our culture, the flag-flyers tell us. But you wonder what kind of warm glow of affirmation or approbation comes from union flags flying from 100 consecutive lampposts, flags which will be left there throughout the autumn and winter until they turn into filthy rags that no self-respecting mechanic would wipe his hands on.
Of course, the people who put flags up in the street by the containerload care about flags immeasurably less than those of us who like to see them in public places only now and again.
If they valued and treasured the things they'd sound a trumpet as the flags were run up at dawn and fold them carefully when they were taken down at nightfall.
But loyalists have no more respect for the symbols of their own faith and their own culture than they do for the fenians who can't find it within themselves to move down south where they belong.
For while they give the tricolour a quick death on the eleventh night bonfire, their own union flags and Ulster flags are left to wither and fade and gather dirt.
Of course, as far as the flags issue is concerned, we're asked to believe that one's as bad as the other, when nothing could be further from the truth. A stray flag on the Shaws Road can be seen as the drop in the ocean that it is when one drives into Carrickfergus on a summer's evening.
And while you'd have to drive around Twinbrook and Poleglass for half an hour before you'd find a tricolour (if indeed there are any at all), the existence of even one is enough for unionists to wheel out the big lie that West Belfast is as bad as Lisburn.
