This is where Marty and I have differing opinions about Belfast. We took the double decker bus tour today around Belfast, and I admit, I felt like a Pheasant during open season. I am a little paranoid I know, but with good reason.
Here is my view. West Belfast depressed the hell out of me, and the "peace fences" that designated the different jurisdictions were formidable in their presence and challenging to my subjective experience of how people should live together. I understand completely why, it is simply seeing this which challenges your own reality. How people live in these tenuous circumstances, with the rack and ruin that surrounds them is beyond me. Burnt out buildings and derelict buildings with skinny dogs and neglected cats that pervade all the back yard gardens you look into. I felt voyeuristic and unnerved, by our ability to look into people’s lives from the comfort of our tourist bus.
Children playing in crates and large truck tyres scattered in derelict, neglected sections, staring at the tour buses like Romanian bloody refuges…..ok a bit dramatic…but this is what it looked like to me.
The murals in West Belfast, which tell the history of the scars it has endured, are powerful in their presence, and despite the tour guides insistence I did not want to get off the bus to take a better view. Barbed wire and high-rise concrete fences shrouded the churches, hospitals and most predominantly the police stations, which were heavily armed.
Now it was at this point that my camera went flat, which initially pissed me off, and then I was thankful that I could not photograph this, as 50 million other tourists on our tour bus were hanging over the edge of the bus with camera flashes popping saying “Gawd Shaaarron would you take a God dam look at that”. Talk about sitting ducks for a sniper.
The rest of Belfast carries on immune to my observations, and yes it is beautiful, and yes it is worth exploring but I was relieved to get on the M1 and head out of Belfast and travel to Amagh where we are staying tonight in the Charleston Hotel. The same big-breasted woman who would not let me ride Conne-Simon runs this Hotel, I am convinced. They have charged us an extortionate rate and then have just told us that there is no water tonight as the road works guys have dug up the mains. I don’t mind, I will simply drink a few ciders and reflect on the fact that we have electricity and the Audi is parked behind the Hotel protected by high barbed wire and security cameras.
So, goodbye Belfast, thank you for the experience….but I am thrilled to be a kiwi and have the life we have. God save the Queen.
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