Colm O'Regan: A family trip to Belfast, the best-built city in Ireland
A trip up the North. The first time we’d been up there as a family. It’s funny the old things I’d forgotten and the small new things I’d noticed.
You still get that little text message welcoming you to the UK phone network. There is confusion as you read it and wonder whether you’ll be charged roaming or not “what with Brexit and all”. We’ve lost track of so much of the toing and froing that Brexit is now like close-contact tracing. You’re asking someone “remind me again what the current rules are”. That UK phone text always feels like someone’s been watching your car from behind a rocky redoubt high in the Ring of Gullion and texted as you passed.
Speaking of the Ring of Gullion, another landmark on the road at the border is the sign welcoming you to it. It’s a large brown sign with a logo that has white squiggles in a circle on the side of the road which I have passed for 20 years and never could quite interpret and only now have I googled and found that it represents a ring dyke – “an intrusive igneous body that is sometimes circular formed from a collapsed caldera”.
I remembered that the road is older than the newish motorway on the Southern side. We got our swanky motorway and on the northern side, their still making do with the Derry Girls-era version of A Fine Road. But we would have loved that quality of road back in the 90s when we were spending weeks stuck on the outskirts of Fermoy or Drogheda behind silage.
Because we were staying outside the city and had the children with us, this was most definitely a fact-remembering mission. There were no 11 am Bellinis and taxis between dens of iniquity. A disproportionately large amount of time was spent in Claire’s Accessories. A great old traditional Belfast shop which I believe is only found there and in 3,468 other locations worldwide. But we did go to W5, a big science and play museum for children where I learned about how drugs are made, the Law of the Lever and the Water Cycle. We also did not experience the finest haute cuisine Belfast had to offer. No one asked us did we want to try the wine. There were a couple of visits to a nicer level of all-you-can-eat-buffet called Cosmo. It's a swankier laid out place than some of the troughs I’ve been to before. The lighting and design has a bit of class as you put your 8th slice of pizza, prawn crackers and Some Sort of Chicken Curry all on your plate at the same time. And that’s after the first dessert raid.
So it was the most uncomprehensive of city-breaks but even then it was possible to be struck by a few things. Belfast is a fine-looking city. The best-built city on this island. It still has buildings there that you could describe as having some sort of architectural style -as opposed to evoking a forward-looking paradigm, an energetic vision for Ireland Inc. They don’t seem to be building as many hotels everywhere. There is dereliction but you feel they might restore it rather than wait 10 years, shrug and knock it. They have a thing called a ‘train’ which goes to the ‘airport’. And there seemed to me more space for pedestrians to just be in. And sometimes sit down.
And drivers don’t crash the lights as much. Honestly, I noticed it. There’s actual respect for the Green Man. Maybe that’s part of the Good Friday agreement. For that alone, we’ll be back.
