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!