The Luck of the Irish
With its rich literary heritage, local festivals and thriving cultural scene, visitors to Belfast will have plenty to write home about
words: ian sansom
IT WAS BELFAST, the late 1980s, and I was trying to write. Actually, my wife would go to work in the morning and I would cook for hours: soups and starters, pies, pastries, fish, meat, poultry, vegetarian, the whole heap. I’d wander down to the greengrocer’s at the Holywood Arches, in east Belfast, and then spend all day in our cramped little kitchen – looking out at the cranes of Harland and Wolff in the distance and down at the red-white-and-blue kerbstones and the loyalist flags and the bunting outside, and listening to BBC Radio Ulster, to the sound of people angry and upset about everything. It was just me, these angry voices and Delia Smith’s Frugal Food. This was back at a time when Nelson Mandela was still in prison in South Africa; before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution; a time when cookbooks didn’t have photos.
We’d moved to Belfast from London, newly married, having drifted around Europe. We’d lived in London, France and Switzerland – doing the things that groovy young people do: going to the cinema, theatre, concerts and galleries, and occasionally even eating out in restaurants.
The world was full of possibilities. “Waiter! Bring me a bottle of your cheapest champagne!” “Elvis Costello at the Royal Festival Hall with the Kronos Quartet? Let’s get tickets!” “An exciting young writer called Jeanette Winterson? I wonder what she’s got to say?” In London we lived in Zone 4, worked for a pittance, yet life was sweet. Arriving in Belfast felt like going from glorious technicolour to black and white. It felt like the lees, like a cultural desert; the only times we got out in the evenings was for ballroom dancing lessons, or visiting my wife’s family, 10 miles away down the coast in County Down, where even they would say, “What are you living up there for?”, as though we were living in a place of disease, like Oran in Camus’ great 1947 novel La Peste. In the end, we packed up and left, and didn’t return for a decade. When eventually we came back, all grown-up, post-glasnost, post-apartheid, post-everything, it was like someone had rearranged all the furniture. All of a sudden, all over Northern Ireland, you couldn’t move for culture.
Already taken place this year have been the Film Festival, and the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, and the Children’s Festival, and the Magnus Barelegs Viking Festival, but there’s still to come the excellent Open House Festival (www..openhousefestival.com), Celtic Fusion (www.celticfusion.co.uk), the West Belfast Festival (www.feilebelfast.com) and the 44th Belfast Festival at Queen’s University (www.belfastfestival.com); not to mention more mini-fleadhs and fests and local events and celebrations than you could possibly shake a stick at, an annual round of knees-ups and jigs as familiar now as a traditional tune from Kelly’s Cellars. Of course, I never go to any of them; I live here.
There’s a lot more to a country’s cultural life than its festivals and celebrations. Or a lot less. After Belfast’s failed 2002 bid to become a City of Culture, the Belfast artist and provocateur, Rita Duffy, summed up what a lot of people were thinking when she wrote: “Belfast is a unique place… truly unique in its lack of vision and the quality of its parochial thinking.” You don’t become Vienna overnight; it took the Viennese about three centuries.
You’ll doubtless already be familiar with the media’s sunshiney sketches of the New Belfast: the Waterfront Hall; the Odyssey Arena; the Lisburn Road; the bars; the clubs; a cheaper stag- and hen-night destination than Prague; a nice change from Dublin. You’ll doubtless also be familiar with the playing-out of the dark recycled myths of Olde Belfast, GK Chesterton’s ‘Black Belfast’: the taxi tours of the Falls and the Shankill; the kitsch souvenirs, the Boyne holy water; the palimpsest peace walls and murals; the sectarian attacks. Is there, you may be asking yourself – please, please? – is there anything else to be said or done about Belfast?
Well, let’s imagine for a moment it’s a Saturday and you’re on holiday, or business, or you’re Doctor Who’s new assistant and you’ve got the day off, and you wake up in Belfast. This is what you should do.
Get up and go to St George’s Market. “This is nice,” you’ll think, admiring the cast-iron columns and the vast light-filled space, designed by JC Bretland in the early 1890s. “I didn’t expect this. Lots of middle class people with children called Amelia. It’s like Islington, with accents.” You should buy a crêpe – Gruyère and spinach – from the French guy’s stall. Then you’ll need to buy your picnic lunch – artisan cheeses, breads, organic smoked meats and fish, some snacks. Then try another crêpe from the French guy – Nutella and banana. Then you’ll need a walk. You can walk everywhere. Above all, Belfast is small.
You’ll head straight to No Alibis bookshop on Botanic Avenue (www.noalibis.com), a bookshop so good it’ll make you want to weep. “Ah!” you’ll think, trying to decide between something hard-boiled and Scandinavian, and a history of bullfighting, “this is why I hate Waterstone’s!” You’ll end up spending lots of money on American crime fiction. If you’ve been browsing for long enough, you’ll be offered a cup of coffee. You’ll buy more American crime fiction. Then you’ll go a few doors up from No Alibis to Café Renoir, which is quite like being in New York, though with better scones. Your next stop will be Bookfinders, the second-hand bookshop and café on University Road, where you’ll spend the rest of your money on well-thumbed paperbacks by Ciaran Carson and the Longleys, and Muldoon, and Leontia Flynn, and Medbh McGuckian, and Sinead Morrissey, and Glenn Patterson and Robert McLiam Wilson, and the underrated David Park, and maybe a nice children’s book by Oliver Jeffers for your little nephew, and a Selected Poems of Louis MacNeice and CS Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, just for old times’ sake, and Jonathan Bardon’s Belfast: An Illustrated History. That should keep you going for a while. You’ll discover that they have readings at Bookfinders, and you’ll consider returning. Someone will mention the Arcadia Coffee House on North Street Arcade, where they have open mike and poetry slam type of things – see www..belfastpoets.com for details. “You’ll like Dan Eggs,” someone will say, and you will like him, you’ll like him a lot. Someone will mention Duke Special, pioneer of nu-vaudeville, and you’ll maybe not be so sure.
Have your picnic lunch in the Botanic Gardens and try and decipher the tattoos of toute Belfast. Head to the Naughton Gallery in Queen’s University (www..naughtongallery.org), which no-one outside of (and not many people inside) Northern Ireland have ever heard of, and which is admittedly just a corridor, but a great corridor; the very best. Now you’ll need a drink – but you won’t go to the Crown Bar, because there are too many tourists and you’re not a tourist. You’re a time-traveller, and you’re carrying about two suitcases full of books. You’ll go to the John Hewitt (www.thejohnhewitt.com), a bar named after a poet and run by the Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre. After talking to a man about John Hewitt you’ll go to the Linen Hall Library (www.linenhall.com) – the last surviving subscription library in Ireland – to find some books by John Hewitt. Someone will already have the books out. You’ll look at all the people shopping on Royal Avenue and you’ll think “Are they mad? You can do that at home.”
You’ll have forgotten this is their home; they’re not on holiday. But you are. So you’ll go to the Merchant Hotel, Belfast’s spanking new five-star hotel, max out your credit card and check in to the ridiculously expensive Brian Friel suite, and have an afternoon nap.
After your nap and dreams of Meryl Streep in Dancing at Lughnasa you’ll hire a car to drive up to Cave Hill (www.cavehill.freeuk.com). On the way you’ll listen to BBC Radio Ulster (FM 92-95, AM 1341) and you’ll think “This is really quite good. It’s sort of a cross between Radio 2, Radio 4 and National Public Radio in America. I wish I could listen to this at home.” You can, at www.bbc.co.uk/ northernireland/radioulster. At the top of Cave Hill you’ll gaze around you at the Mourne Mountains, and Strangford Lough, and Belfast Lough and you’ll think, “Doesn’t that cloud look like a bit like the head of Seamus Heaney on the cover of the original Selected Poems?”
The sure sign that Belfast has come of age as a 21st-century city is not that it has festivals, readings, concerts, or a farmers’ market, and nice coffee shops. The sure sign of a city on the up and up, culturally, is that the writers and artists and musicians can’t afford to live there any more. Me and my wife came back too late. I have to take the bus or the train up to the city these days, so we’re still in the equivalent of Zone 4.
