GOING to school for the first time can stay etched in the mind for a lifetime. First-day butterflies, the hand clutched in anxiety, an escaped tear - such are the usual experiences of turning up at primary school.

Less expected on the first day of the new school year are hundreds of riot police, armed soldiers, a helicopter hovering noisily above, a hastily-erected safe corridor, and hundreds of hostile adults, some screaming "scum, scum", "your kids are animals", "Fenian scum" and even "Fenian bastards".

As Esther Holmes, mother of six-year-old Roisin, was quoted as saying: "And all we were trying to do was get our kids to school."

Of course, this was no normal back-to-school day, that date in the calendar seemingly heralded by weeks of dread adverts and shop window displays reminding children that the never-ending holiday will in fact end.

No, this was Northern Ireland, that corner of the United Kingdom where elephantine memory curses everyone to never forget anything, to remember all ancient hurts as if they occurred the day before. Where children can be subjected to a barrage of spitting hate when all they are trying to do is get to school.

The Holy Cross is a Catholic girls' primary school inside a staunchly Loyalist enclave which lies in the largely nationalist area of Ardoyne, north Belfast. So much it is possible to learn from reading the newspapers and watching the television. What cannot be discovered by these means is how on earth Loyalists screaming at Catholic children proves anything at all.

The internecine convolutions of history in Northern Ireland are beyond the grasp of many of us. We watch the news, scratch our heads and sigh, reminded again of how potent and pointless hatred can be.

This week's rancorous school run is just another image from what to many of us remains a strange place haunted by ugliness. Do these people, on whatever side of the divide, members of whichever faction, want to lead a normal life ever again?

In spite of the great hopes for the 'peace process', all we ever seem to proceed towards is more hatred, more stagnant left-overs, more hateful slogans on the wall. It's a puzzle and sometimes those of us who watch from the mainland wonder if anything will ever change - or even if the competing factions want to change. Being defined by sectarianism must give some of these people a role, a place, a sense of unyielding certainty.

Take away the conflict, and what have they got?

Oh, I don't know. It's a puzzle and a pain. As ever in Northern Ireland, the first lesson the young Catholic girls of Holy Cross learned this week was that people will hate them for their religion, and that they in turn must hate back.

As one of the cartoonists put it, above a picture of a little girl arriving home with bandaged arm and blackened eye: "We had religious education on the way to school today."

HERE'S a lesser sort of modern mystery: why is anyone interested in anything Victoria Beckham does? The pierced lip that wasn't, the mock grunge look, the silly egotistical website, the Sellotape helping out her cleavage, her husband's haircuts (even the half-shaved eyebrow that filled a whole newspaper page), all are bits of trivial nonsense.

Yet we soak it up even when we don't want to know, in thrall to the dictates of vacant celebrity.

So I sympathise with those who chucked fruit and veg at Victoria as she sang (or pretended to sing) her new single, Not Such An Innocent Girl.

Not such an interesting girl, I'd say.