Troubling times

Many years ago, I emerged from a meeting in a hospital, with some of the managers and one of my colleagues, into pleasant sunshine made more attractive by the prospect of a congenial lunch ahead.

Nothing unusual about that. I’ve been working in the healthcare sector since 1985. To be out with a group of executives is normal to the point of banal. The aspect most out of the ordinary, this being the British Isles, was the sunshine.

But then the everything changed. As we stepped off the pavement, we moved into what might have been Beirut. To our right and left, in front and soon behind us were armed soldiers, crouching down with their assault rifles resting in the crook of their elbows, helmets low over camouflage painted faces.

My colleague and I, unnerved, fell silent but the hospital people just kept chatting easily, implicitly answering a question I hadn’t asked: how do we behave now?

And then I had the classic experience of such situations: one of the soldiers looked straight at me and smiled. He was a soldier no more. He was a young man doing his job, and that job meant that what for me was simply a pleasant spring day, for him was a day of wariness in which he was a target.

That moment didn’t take place in Beirut but in Belfast. In the course of more visits to the province than I can count, it was just one of many times I directly felt the effect of what we euphemistically call ‘the troubles’. 

On another, I was struck by the Israeli flags flying in a loyalist area.

‘Is there an official visit?’ I naively asked.

‘No,’ laughed my host on that occasion, ‘some of the nationalist boys have taken to flying Palestinian flags out of solidarity, so the unionists put out Israeli ones.’

Whatever one side did, the other did the opposite. It was sterile, hopeless, unremitting hostility.

But then I was back again soon after the Good Friday agreement. The transformation was extraordinary. 

On my first visit to the city, I’d been put up in the Europa Hotel, which seemed proud of its status as Europe’s most bombed. One side of the building was boarded up, the rooms out of service. The approach to the reception area was through a chicane but, in a very Irish way, unmanned so I could walk through unobserved and unchallenged. Opposite were the offices of the Ulster Unionists, sporting the slogan ‘Keep Ulster British’, which struck me as curious since Ulster isn’t in Britain at all.

As I was on my own, I decided to pop out for a drink in the evening, but quickly abandoned the idea. I’ve never been anywhere so eery. Empty streets, silent pubs, at 9:00 at night. And of course no-one was thinking of anything innovative in the way of food or drink: a sandwich meant two bits of white bread with ham or cheese in between, variety being offered only by the pickle; tea and coffee were virtually indistinguishable in their appearance, and sometimes their taste, served in huge mugs. And the place was bristling with weapons.

In recent years, it’s become unrecognisable. Coffee shops serve cappuccinos and espressos. You can get salads or noodles in fast food shops. Sandwiches are offered with a choice of types of bread, even baguette, and contain outlandish fillings such as brie. Brie? In Northern Ireland? Lord Carson must be spinning in his grave.

And in the evenings? The place is brimming with life. Young people, old people, all sorts of people, wander the streets. The pubs are loud and lively and cheerful. You can get weird cocktails (from experience, some of them very weird), wines, foreign beers. A fun, friendly, fashionable city.

So it’s depressing to see Nationalists and Loyalists rounding on each other again, over who can march where, who can shout what slogans at whom, who can sing what songs outside what buildings.

Going back to old ways?

It was a funny old place back then. But it wasn’t much fun. 

Who on Earth would want to go back to all that?

Belfast

We’re just back from Belfast, a city that has always held a special place in my affections, ever since I found myself going there regularly for work in the eighties and nineties. Like another of my favourite cities, Berlin, it’s somewhere that has suffered, and that suffering has marked it but also matured it, made it more interesting, both in the physical aspect of the city and in the character of the people you meet there.

In my early visits, it was a pretty surprising place. I remember coming out of a meeting and finding myself right in the middle of an army patrol – soldiers, rifles in hand, moving in short burst up the street, then crouching to check on any possible hostile movement. It was a shock but then I noticed that the people I was with were simply walking through the group as though it weren’t there – the smiling faces of the men in suits, armed with briefcases, simply weaving their way in amongst the blacked-up faces of the men in uniform, armed with automatic weapons.

This weekend it surprised me again, but for the opposite reason. It surprised me by its sheer normalcy. One of the mundane effects of the troubles, one of the effects on everyday life, was that Belfast seemed stuck in a time warp compared to Britain. At a time when British eating habits were being transformed, Belfast clung on to the old traditions – as one of my friends pointed out to me, in those days the range of sandwiches on offer would be ham and pickle or cheese and tomato. Today brie or chorizo is on the menu, in cafés where coffee, as in most places round Europe, means espresso or latte or cappuccino or Americano, not just a spoonful of nondescript powder dissolved in warm water. Just the same banal modishness that we find everywhere, you might say; but in a city whose outmodedness had been such a characteristic for so long, that kind of banality is exciting and refreshing.

I was particularly delighted by St George’s Market. It was heaving with people (in the past shopping, particularly in the city centre, was something that you did quickly, almost furtively, in order to get home fast before anything unpleasant – potentially life-threatening – happened to you). And the place was a wonderful mix of different sounds and smells and flavours – I saw food from India, from China, from Spain, from the West Indies, as well as from Ireland (the latter on a stand offering either Irish stew or Curry, a combination that has to be an eloquent tribute to how far things have come). The profusion was exhilarating, and I loved the way it showed the tediousness of all those ghastly racists in organisations like the British National Party , with their desire to replace this kaleidoscope by the dull homogeneity of mono-culture.

It was great to spend a weekend in a city which is emerging, and emerging rapidly, from a long tunnel of pain. It shows what can be achieved just as soon as we can silence those who are prepared to kill and maim in the name of religion or, even more trivially, over what colour of flag we live under.

All that nonsense produces lots of wonderful material for songs and films. But it can’t hold a candle to the sheer pleasure that Belfast is now enjoying, of being able to live in peace at last.