I'm in Belfast. \u00a0I was last here in the mid-1980s, somewhen. \u00a0It seems a different life, and certainly a different city. \u00a0To take around 40 years to revisit an important part of my own country seems, at best, thoughtless. \u00a0And I have never ventured into its glorious hinterland although I've been to Ireland, the republic, half a dozen times. \u00a0Not everyone here would say that this place is \"my own country\", of course, and I do understand why. \u00a0<\/p>\r\n
Until I read a review of Fergal Cochrane's\u00a0Belfast: The Story of a City and its People<\/em>, I had no idea that Philip Larkin lived here for a few years in the 50s. \u00a0He memorably wrote about it in The Importance of Elsewhere<\/em>. \u00a0<\/p>\r\n Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home, \"draughty streets, end-on to hills\" strikes an immediate chord as you walk around, although \"dockland\" in Larkin's sense seems long gone as must have the sound of the selling of the silver darlings<\/a>. \u00a0But the lines brought back smell and taste memories of my grandmother frying fresh herring in oatmeal for tea.<\/p>\r\n We're working here with people native to this place and I'm looking forward to listening to, and talking with, them about it as the lives of people here receive so little consideration in the rest of the UK, and when they do it is usually through the lens of political division whether within Stormont or clouded by Brexit.<\/p>\r\n
Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,
Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:
Once that was recognised, we were in touch.
Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint
Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable,
The herring-hawker's cry, dwindling, went
To prove me separate, not unworkable.
Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments
It would be much more serious to refuse.
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.<\/p>\r\n