Being At Home In Belfast.

 When I was in Belfast, I sometimes had the strange sensation of being in a place for the first time, yet feeling at home in it. The weather, the people, the culture all seemed familiar. My home area – Argyll, land of the Gaels – was just across the water. So near yet so far and, interestingly, the term Gael can refer to both the Irish and the Scots.

I have to say that Z prefers Irish whiskey to its more robust cousin, Scotch whisky. So, on the advice of my brother, we went in search of his recommended Bushmill Black Bush whiskey which we tracked down in this well-stocked off-licence.                                           

    

I don’t think the years of maturity stated on the bottle have much meaning. Z can ‘keep them for good’ sometimes for years! I was interested to see later on that the Bushmill Distillery features on the twenty-pound note of the Bank of Ireland.                                                

We had excellent food: scampi, roast duck, lasagne and, of course, fish’n’chips – huge servings and impeccable, cheery service. A lovely wee story here: The Irish use - as do we Scots – an additional word for the second person plural pronoun: youse, the Irish version having a richer diphthong sound. On serving Angeliki her fish dish, the young waiter, wishing to mark that that our order had now been completed, said, ‘That’s youse!’ Angeliki, wishing to agree with what she had understood he said, responded, ‘Yes, that is huge!’!! 😄

                                

 It was the people of Belfast, though, who charmed and impressed me. They were artistic, resilient, imaginative, philosophic. I remember the advice of an elderly local sage: we have two ears and one mouth and we should use them proportionately.  Cool!

We had visited the magnificent City Hall and were interested to see that people who had been honoured by receiving the freedom of the city included the musician, Van Morrison, in 2013, the nurses of Belfast in 2015 and Sir Kenneth Branagh, doyen of film and theatre in 2017.

How fitting, then, as we flew from Heathrow, the in-flight film was none other than Belfast. It is, to an extent, a biopic of Branagh growing up in Belfast during The Troubles. And it has splendid Van Morrison contributions to the sound-track.                                                      

The recent Sinn Fein seat majority win in the Northern Ireland elections was ground-breaking in that they now constitute the largest party in the Stormont Assembly for the first time and could possibly lead to a North/South union in Ireland. That got me thinking and made even more poignant the final scene of the film. The words are spoken by the remarkable Dame Judi Dench in her role as the grandmother, as she watches her son and family leave for a better life in England.

Go, go now and don’t look back!

Could these be prophetic and express a future reverse movement of N. Ireland breaking away from Britain to reunite with the Republic?

 I would so much like Scotland to make a similar break-away movement towards independence!

Being In Belfast

 I must ‘fess up to wishing that the conference venue was to be held in Dublin, rather than in Belfast – how wrong can you be?  On our late afternoon arrival, we decided to find the venue and register. As we strolled over, we marvelled at the stunning architecture, the lovely River Lagan and became victims of a Belfast deluge! My first purchase was a sturdy umbrella!                                                     

Not impressed that we - two! - could not be accommodated for dinner at the hotel as they ‘had a group in‘, we trudged out  in what was now a fine drizzle in search of food. And we lucked out: some succulent scallops and a chilled Chardonnay made my day! 😊

 On Wednesday we attended some interesting conference sessions as well as some not so interesting ones so we decided to go for full-on tourism! Our first ….er….. port of call was the Titanic Experience. Now I had been fortunate to visit the touring Titanic The Exhibition in Victoria, British Columbia some years ago – a really, really must-see! It was magnificent: we were each assigned the ticket and persona of an actual passenger and actors dressed as crew members led us through the ship facsimile. One actually ‘chased’ me out of the first class restaurant (I was spellbound by the china, crystal and crockery replicas of the originals set on the dinner tables) since I was travelling steerage! We suddenly felt the jolt of the collision with the iceberg. An even more ‘moving’ experience was at the final section which housed the passenger lists of both survivors and victims; this we read to the background accompaniment of a bagpipe lament.  My assigned passenger had been a widow, on her way to America to make a new life for her children, left behind in Belfast. When I learned she had drowned, I wept.                                                          

In Belfast. The focus was, understandably, on the building of the ship and the first sea trials she made there. The exhibition building is a noble ship shape, but the prow was crying out for an outside balcony where dramatic couple-selfies could be taken!                                                               

Top of my list was the Hop-on, Hop-off bus tour and magically the sun shone warm on us for its open-top entirety. Can you see us both in this picture?  Our guide was informative and impartial.                                                            

 It was saddening to go down the Falls Road, murals outlining characters and victims of what are euphemistically referred to as The Troubles.                                                                 

We viewed the wall, sometimes referred to as The Peace Wall, dividing the Catholic and Protestant areas as we then drove down the Shankhill Road.

 I’ve been to the Green Line in Cyprus, the UN buffer zone separating The Republic of Cyprus with the Turkish occupied area in the north. I’ve been driven through a sentry gate in the UN- court-deemed-illegal West Bank Barrier segregating Palestine from the Israeli-controlled area.

 It was heart-breaking to see both and to see how they affect the lives of so many. Yet, I think that witnessing the Belfast boundary moved me most as it seemed so close to home.