So I'm extra-ing. I'm in a room that stinks of menthol with a couple of sad faced middle-aged guys (middle-aged even by my standards). My role is "office-worker-diner" and I fully expect to be making tedious small talk over a glass of cold tea. Some of the other extras have turned up, they have brought "costumes". I'm glad somebody is taking this seriously. Actually EVERYBODY is taking this seriously. They all look flustered and terrified and they never stop running about. They tend to be quite thin. This is quite weird.
The actress has turned up. She's a bone thin red head and is gracious to everyone, bobbing around smiling and grinning at all the extras. Actually everyone smiles at me. This is because I have grey hair, a good suit and I'm chatting to Susan the producer. I look like I might be money! I'm not.
Aidan Gillen turns up. I'd forgotten he was in this but there he is strolling about with his famous face on. He's in the Wire! He's in Wake Wood! I've seen him performing analingus on a minor in "Queer as Folk". He's pretty charming. In fact everyone is. They're all really nice. It's not like the movies at all.
The bloke next to me, an extra WITH A LINE, won't stop going on about "Withnail and I". None of the other extras have seen it.
My dining partner turns out to be the casting director in a guise. She is a woman called Jude. Every time we go out of shot, which is often, we are very peripheral, I'm stricken with a need to say "now you're Jude the Obscure". But I don't because we are miming speaking to each other. Well I am. She pisses herself laughing every time the cameras roll. It's a great ice-breaker.
There are about twenty takes of the one scene that I'm in and everyone fluffs every line every time. I expect they can do something in the edit. The extras don't even really appear to be acting. I expect that's difference between acting acting and movie acting. Certainly they're playing "small".
The drama certainly escalates after I leave. The next scene is a car accident and the venue for the shoot, for some reason, is a notorious loyalist South Belfast enclave called "The Village".* There is trouble. Gangs appear, rocking the vehicles, ripping off wing mirrors, putting through windows. The trouble escalates and several of the extras are beaten up, one of them so badly that the last thing he hears before losing consciousness in the bin he has been dumped in is "leave him I think he's dead."
I never see this side of Belfast. Maybe I've been lucky. There were the Short Strand riots just after I moved over and then a short spate of bloodless bombings,(not bloodless in intent, mind). But generally I feel safer in Belfast than I did in London. So this sort of fucking idiocy is always a useful, and timely reminder that there are still blood-thirsty, indoctrinated morons out there willing to cut you to pieces on the trumped up charge of your religion. A film company brings a camera crew to your place, so what do you do? Wreck it, kick the shit out of it, make sure they never come back. It's not as if Belfast, dying on its arse and useful mainly as New York's stunt double, needs the film industry.
If Game of Thrones fucks off this year, you clever bastards, what will you watch on your hooky plasma-screens. Morons.
*This was an unbelievably stupid idea, however. What the fuck were they thinking?
Showing posts with label belfast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label belfast. Show all posts
Tuesday, 10 January 2012
Friday, 18 November 2011
Old people and the young people they hate
The service industry is rudimentary in Belfast, the sort of customer care package you might you might expect in a Trappist gift-shop; silent, other-worldly and focussed on less trivial matters than serving food. The staff at Chicken Cottage are more interested in my spiritual diet than serving me salty, leg-shaped batter. And, frankly, so am I.
I'm in the Connswater Shopping Centre and I'm hungry. I'm test driving some new contact lenses from Specsavers and I'm looking good in an "I've had a wash" sort of way. Though I AM sweating. Connswater always makes me sweat so I spend the first five minutes of every opticians appointment here defogging my glasses and trying look as if I haven't just escaped from a chain-gang. They must think I'm as phobic about eye-tests as other folk are about dentists and Norns about lettuce.
Maybe it's the people you meet here. A trip to the Connswater is like flicking through the pages of a medieval bestiary, or checking the guttering on Notre Dame. Face after face looms out from under the strip-lights, a panopoly of scrunge-tastic Reidian sports: gummy, drooping, off-kilter, top-loaded, some with bits off, some with bits added. It's like a channel five documentary entitled "When Faces Go Wrong".
Heaven help me, I flee to Burger King, a counter-intuitive move at best, but I WAS hungry. And there was nobody else about to see my secret shame. That's not quite true, the staff were there. But again, that's not quite true either. They were there but they really weren't. Schroedinger's staff. I saw a couple of backs. A big fat lad emerged from the fryers, gave me a startled look like a rumbled cat, and snuck back in again. I craned my head around the side of the fryer but I could not engage. So I left it.
I moved over to "The Streat". The pun's not really working there because it's not on a street but in a shopping centre and the puns not really working there because there's nothing particularly appetising about streets. Tarmac? Dog shit? Litter? I can get that at home.
I ordered a "French Connection" paninni ( brie, bacon, far too much onion marmalade and something that may once have been spring onion but was now clearly savoury pot-pourri) and a large latte. I waited while the girl diligently set about constructing it from its constituent parts as carefully as if she were making a bomb in the back of a moving vehicle.
The odd thing about The Streat is that it had a staff of four: the girl doing the stuff, another girl tinkering with the coffee machine, a man who bobbed in and out without touching the sides and a chap who stuck his head around the corner like a meerkat in a baseball cap. None of them seemed to be doing anything at all, until the "French Connection" was plated (trayed). Then the other girl snapped into action. "Anything else?" she said.
"Well there was supposed to be a large latte as well," I said.
She shot the drone a look and the other girl dutifully put down her knife and came over to start on my latte. The entire transaction took just under ten minutes. That's a whopping E.T.A. for a sandwich. But I expect I'd still be waiting for the Whopper.
I'm in the Connswater Shopping Centre and I'm hungry. I'm test driving some new contact lenses from Specsavers and I'm looking good in an "I've had a wash" sort of way. Though I AM sweating. Connswater always makes me sweat so I spend the first five minutes of every opticians appointment here defogging my glasses and trying look as if I haven't just escaped from a chain-gang. They must think I'm as phobic about eye-tests as other folk are about dentists and Norns about lettuce.
Maybe it's the people you meet here. A trip to the Connswater is like flicking through the pages of a medieval bestiary, or checking the guttering on Notre Dame. Face after face looms out from under the strip-lights, a panopoly of scrunge-tastic Reidian sports: gummy, drooping, off-kilter, top-loaded, some with bits off, some with bits added. It's like a channel five documentary entitled "When Faces Go Wrong".
Heaven help me, I flee to Burger King, a counter-intuitive move at best, but I WAS hungry. And there was nobody else about to see my secret shame. That's not quite true, the staff were there. But again, that's not quite true either. They were there but they really weren't. Schroedinger's staff. I saw a couple of backs. A big fat lad emerged from the fryers, gave me a startled look like a rumbled cat, and snuck back in again. I craned my head around the side of the fryer but I could not engage. So I left it.
I moved over to "The Streat". The pun's not really working there because it's not on a street but in a shopping centre and the puns not really working there because there's nothing particularly appetising about streets. Tarmac? Dog shit? Litter? I can get that at home.
I ordered a "French Connection" paninni ( brie, bacon, far too much onion marmalade and something that may once have been spring onion but was now clearly savoury pot-pourri) and a large latte. I waited while the girl diligently set about constructing it from its constituent parts as carefully as if she were making a bomb in the back of a moving vehicle.
The odd thing about The Streat is that it had a staff of four: the girl doing the stuff, another girl tinkering with the coffee machine, a man who bobbed in and out without touching the sides and a chap who stuck his head around the corner like a meerkat in a baseball cap. None of them seemed to be doing anything at all, until the "French Connection" was plated (trayed). Then the other girl snapped into action. "Anything else?" she said.
"Well there was supposed to be a large latte as well," I said.
She shot the drone a look and the other girl dutifully put down her knife and came over to start on my latte. The entire transaction took just under ten minutes. That's a whopping E.T.A. for a sandwich. But I expect I'd still be waiting for the Whopper.
Saturday, 22 October 2011
Don't rain on my pomade
If Eskimos have forty words for snow, and they don’t, the people of Belfast have only one word for rain: weather. I’ve lived here for six months now and during that time I estimate that there has been less than a week of dry days. Rain doesn’t pour down torrentially every day, there’s no sense of it being “monsoon season”. But the rain does like to keep its hand in; usually a short burst, usually in the afternoon, usually on me after I have dragged myself from my pit, had a pot of tea, and finally have enough energy to leave the house. I venture out under beaming skies and return as though I’ve been through a car-wash, my hair flush to my scalp, my glasses a domino mask of condensation.
I’m not a meteorological expert. I don’t even know what the relationship between giant, dinosaur-clobbering rocks adrift in space and how the heavy the local precipitation is. But I bet it centres on Belfast. I don’t really know how clouds work either. They seem to react to stimuli like a nine year old Spanish boy at his birthday party; anything will open the flood-gates.
(I don’t know what it is about Spanish or Italian boys but they do seem to be extraordinarily lachrymose. Maybe nine is about the age that a Spanish mother stops breast-feeding and they realise that they’re never going to have it so good again. Perhaps that’s the age that their adult teeth grow in. Surely only a savaged nipple can compromise an Italian mother’s love for her bambino. Again I claim no special knowledge of relative dental growth in Southern Europe. I’m talking about clouds here!)
I should point out that the six months I’ve spent in Belfast included the summer months. I don’t know what the winter has in store for me, beyond discontent. But I imagine there will be some rain. Actually I imagine there will be nothing but rain. Some of Belfast is reclaimed marsh-land. A river, the Farset, flows under the City Centre and is perhaps responsible for the city’s unique bouquet, somewhere between a peaty whiskey and a four-egg fart. The rest of Belfast is permanently under water. If you were looking for a likely candidate for Atlantis I would quit Crete and the Greek islands and start dusting for a series of small walls in the North of Ireland. Except I’m not sure a brush would cut it here – bring a bucket and spade.
Say, at some time immemorial, a catastrophe occurred on the magical island of Atlantis. A tidal wave ripping through it and carrying a lump of blasted hyperborean rock across the waters till it nudged the coast of Glengormley, the impact pushing up the black, forbidding mountains that collar the city.
This would explain an awful lot. It would explain the Formorian characteristics of the local populace; skin as white as fish bellies, the piscine protrusion of those smoky eyes – like haddock on a duvet of ice in a shop window. The sort of mouths that fall open, naked without something hanging out of them: a fag or hook. Even the hair gel is wet-look, as if a constant reminder of drizzle was needed even indoors. They’ve dropped the gills and some of the webbing but that’s as far as it goes for Belfast’s aquatic apes.
I’m not from here. My hair sticks up in the air as a matter of course, like an afro designed by efficiency experts. It’s doubtful that it even qualifies as hair. It’s more like a pelt, the sort of thick grubby stuff hanging off a were-wolves’ arsehole. I need to tamp it down with aggressive hair-wax just to pass myself of as human. Belfast washes the humanity from my head. It bleeds into the gutters, flowing into the Farset.
I’m not a meteorological expert. I don’t even know what the relationship between giant, dinosaur-clobbering rocks adrift in space and how the heavy the local precipitation is. But I bet it centres on Belfast. I don’t really know how clouds work either. They seem to react to stimuli like a nine year old Spanish boy at his birthday party; anything will open the flood-gates.
(I don’t know what it is about Spanish or Italian boys but they do seem to be extraordinarily lachrymose. Maybe nine is about the age that a Spanish mother stops breast-feeding and they realise that they’re never going to have it so good again. Perhaps that’s the age that their adult teeth grow in. Surely only a savaged nipple can compromise an Italian mother’s love for her bambino. Again I claim no special knowledge of relative dental growth in Southern Europe. I’m talking about clouds here!)
I should point out that the six months I’ve spent in Belfast included the summer months. I don’t know what the winter has in store for me, beyond discontent. But I imagine there will be some rain. Actually I imagine there will be nothing but rain. Some of Belfast is reclaimed marsh-land. A river, the Farset, flows under the City Centre and is perhaps responsible for the city’s unique bouquet, somewhere between a peaty whiskey and a four-egg fart. The rest of Belfast is permanently under water. If you were looking for a likely candidate for Atlantis I would quit Crete and the Greek islands and start dusting for a series of small walls in the North of Ireland. Except I’m not sure a brush would cut it here – bring a bucket and spade.
Say, at some time immemorial, a catastrophe occurred on the magical island of Atlantis. A tidal wave ripping through it and carrying a lump of blasted hyperborean rock across the waters till it nudged the coast of Glengormley, the impact pushing up the black, forbidding mountains that collar the city.
This would explain an awful lot. It would explain the Formorian characteristics of the local populace; skin as white as fish bellies, the piscine protrusion of those smoky eyes – like haddock on a duvet of ice in a shop window. The sort of mouths that fall open, naked without something hanging out of them: a fag or hook. Even the hair gel is wet-look, as if a constant reminder of drizzle was needed even indoors. They’ve dropped the gills and some of the webbing but that’s as far as it goes for Belfast’s aquatic apes.
I’m not from here. My hair sticks up in the air as a matter of course, like an afro designed by efficiency experts. It’s doubtful that it even qualifies as hair. It’s more like a pelt, the sort of thick grubby stuff hanging off a were-wolves’ arsehole. I need to tamp it down with aggressive hair-wax just to pass myself of as human. Belfast washes the humanity from my head. It bleeds into the gutters, flowing into the Farset.
Saturday, 8 October 2011
Went to see "the Painkiller" at the Lyric, which is a gorgeous theatre, with enormous impasto portraits of Paul Brady and Duke Special all over the foyer. Me neither. So a glowing review for the theatre; the play - not so much. The play was based on Francis Veber's 1971 farce "Le contrat" which became a film in 1973 as "L'emmerdeur", with Jacques Brel as a cuckolded shirt-salesman. It then became "Buddy Buddy" in America, one of Billy Wilder's worst films, and then again, back in France in 2008 as "A Pain in the Ass". So a fresh, untested property then.
It was...okay. It was very much like a 1970's French farce, men leaping through doors, losing their trousers, homosexuals getting the wrong idea about things; a silly sod triumphing over a middle class doctor. The physicality was impressive, Branagh getting most of the laughs for his over-played arseing-about; the gay room-service guy sweeping up the rest of them. It was just a bit...Rentaghost. (I should say that the audience loved it and it got a standing ovation - except from us three mardy-arses)
Afterwards we went for a meal at the Welcome Cantonese restaurant* where I had a delicious crab (all the better for not having eaten for two days!) and then we went out for a beer in town.
Belfast on a Friday night is an interesting place; "interesting" being a euphemism for "terrifying". There are a lot of drunk, near-naked children walking the streets of Belfast, pissing, vomiting and snogging, though rarely simultaneously. And incredible amount of screaming. Really everybody is screaming all the time. We (the "we", I should point out, being myself Dee and Chris, the pair of them kindly allowing me to ruin their date night. I should further point out that Dee was neither crabby or hungover at any point in the evening) went in and then immediately out of Laverty's (It was blaring "Dude looks like a lady" and there were no seats - I'm so very old!) and then on to Kelly's Cellars, where a little fey ginger boy befriended us by talking about sado-masochism and calling Chris a dead-eyed werewolf. Finally it was off to Muriel's which is decorated with hundreds of pairs of pants and was hosting a hen-party. We fled.
It was however a great night out. Thanks fellas.
*The Cantonese restaurant was called "Welcome". They don't specifically welcome Cantonese people - the service was fairly indifferent.
It was...okay. It was very much like a 1970's French farce, men leaping through doors, losing their trousers, homosexuals getting the wrong idea about things; a silly sod triumphing over a middle class doctor. The physicality was impressive, Branagh getting most of the laughs for his over-played arseing-about; the gay room-service guy sweeping up the rest of them. It was just a bit...Rentaghost. (I should say that the audience loved it and it got a standing ovation - except from us three mardy-arses)
Afterwards we went for a meal at the Welcome Cantonese restaurant* where I had a delicious crab (all the better for not having eaten for two days!) and then we went out for a beer in town.
Belfast on a Friday night is an interesting place; "interesting" being a euphemism for "terrifying". There are a lot of drunk, near-naked children walking the streets of Belfast, pissing, vomiting and snogging, though rarely simultaneously. And incredible amount of screaming. Really everybody is screaming all the time. We (the "we", I should point out, being myself Dee and Chris, the pair of them kindly allowing me to ruin their date night. I should further point out that Dee was neither crabby or hungover at any point in the evening) went in and then immediately out of Laverty's (It was blaring "Dude looks like a lady" and there were no seats - I'm so very old!) and then on to Kelly's Cellars, where a little fey ginger boy befriended us by talking about sado-masochism and calling Chris a dead-eyed werewolf. Finally it was off to Muriel's which is decorated with hundreds of pairs of pants and was hosting a hen-party. We fled.
It was however a great night out. Thanks fellas.
*The Cantonese restaurant was called "Welcome". They don't specifically welcome Cantonese people - the service was fairly indifferent.
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
The Bloat Man's Call
I keep trying to cook things. It's easy to let things slide, to live off takeaways and stodge. Round my way it seems to be a way of life. There are four fish and chip shops within easy walking distance (one of them in a petrol station!). There are five or six Chinese takeaways, two Indians, three or four kebab shops, a couple of "diners" and one or two restaurants that describe their food as "real", which in local parlance means a fry-up in the daytime and an Irish stew at night, none o' that fancy shite the foreigners brought with them: good, honest, hearty cholesterol in a soda farl.
There are also a lot of fat people. Fat people eating their breakfast rolls, an entire cooked breakfast in a bap, in their cars. If you see a thin person they are either a) a gangling adolescent or b) an alcoholic. Everyone else has been gently rounded out like modern cars; no hard edges. They would be aerodynamically smooth if they tripped and fell down a hill, their faces flushed at the end of it from embarrassment not wind resistance.
And I am one of them. I wobble amongst them, padded like a madman's bedroom. I look like I'm four months gone. Four months gone in the head, at least. I walk a lot, I have a powerful jutting arse and legs like a ballerina, there's no problem there. But upstairs, chins sag like a melting Vienetta, tits tumble and my belly looks like dough dropped on a barber-shop floor.
Something needs to be done. I can't afford a gym and I can't run on the one-and-a half-legs that prop me up like a fucked Victorian camera. Diet seems obvious - fresh veg, fruit, grains. Healthy, nutritious stuff, adding grist to bowel-movements and de-furring the arteries.
They don't have that stuff here. Or if they do I don't know where the fuck it is. The onions are watery and "mint" is one of the staples of the herb garden. The big three herbs here are "Basil" "Parsley" and "Mint". I've no problem with mint in a Mojito, but in food? A pea soup? Trad lamb? What the fuck else? I'm sorry. I'm taking it out on mint.
But...the bread! The bread is so bad. My local "baker" doesn't even sell bread. Their stock model seems to be based on whatever Greggs does, plus some french fancies. Its all flakey pastry and processed meat and fondant fairies.
I mean I could go on...I could go on...I'll go on...
Another day where the petty triumphs are pathetic in the extreme. Up before mid-day: one point. Have a bath: one point. Clean the house: a point. Sort out recycling and bring the bins back in again: go on, have two points. Go shopping and come back with just wine and cheese: going to lose a couple points there, John (though not as bad as yesterdays ultimate bachelor shopping basket: lasagne for one, cheapest red wine in the shop, loo-roll and fabreze!).
Maybe a hundred words of proper writing done. Better than yesterday. That all got deleted first thing. Ah, well. I'm going to have my picture taken tomorrow - the battered old boat still has something about it!
There are also a lot of fat people. Fat people eating their breakfast rolls, an entire cooked breakfast in a bap, in their cars. If you see a thin person they are either a) a gangling adolescent or b) an alcoholic. Everyone else has been gently rounded out like modern cars; no hard edges. They would be aerodynamically smooth if they tripped and fell down a hill, their faces flushed at the end of it from embarrassment not wind resistance.
And I am one of them. I wobble amongst them, padded like a madman's bedroom. I look like I'm four months gone. Four months gone in the head, at least. I walk a lot, I have a powerful jutting arse and legs like a ballerina, there's no problem there. But upstairs, chins sag like a melting Vienetta, tits tumble and my belly looks like dough dropped on a barber-shop floor.
Something needs to be done. I can't afford a gym and I can't run on the one-and-a half-legs that prop me up like a fucked Victorian camera. Diet seems obvious - fresh veg, fruit, grains. Healthy, nutritious stuff, adding grist to bowel-movements and de-furring the arteries.
They don't have that stuff here. Or if they do I don't know where the fuck it is. The onions are watery and "mint" is one of the staples of the herb garden. The big three herbs here are "Basil" "Parsley" and "Mint". I've no problem with mint in a Mojito, but in food? A pea soup? Trad lamb? What the fuck else? I'm sorry. I'm taking it out on mint.
But...the bread! The bread is so bad. My local "baker" doesn't even sell bread. Their stock model seems to be based on whatever Greggs does, plus some french fancies. Its all flakey pastry and processed meat and fondant fairies.
I mean I could go on...I could go on...I'll go on...
Another day where the petty triumphs are pathetic in the extreme. Up before mid-day: one point. Have a bath: one point. Clean the house: a point. Sort out recycling and bring the bins back in again: go on, have two points. Go shopping and come back with just wine and cheese: going to lose a couple points there, John (though not as bad as yesterdays ultimate bachelor shopping basket: lasagne for one, cheapest red wine in the shop, loo-roll and fabreze!).
Maybe a hundred words of proper writing done. Better than yesterday. That all got deleted first thing. Ah, well. I'm going to have my picture taken tomorrow - the battered old boat still has something about it!
Wednesday, 22 June 2011
Belfast Kills Me
So...notable events. Kelly's back on the steroids. Tori visits us from the Spa Town over the weekend. Poor Tori. We get word that while Kelly is being summoned to the hospital from her counsellor's office, across town Granny Mullan becomes ill and is admitted to hospital. She dies the following afternoon. Sunday and Monday Kelly spends at the wake (I only manage the Monday)and Tuesday is the funeral (they do things quickly here). Meanwhile riots break out in the Short Strand area of east Belfast (confusingly it is apparently the UVF beating the shit out of a strongly UVF area. But that's local politics for you - I don't understand it at all). Helicopters buzz the house all night.
Today Kelly is irritable from the get go - even doe-eyed Dee can't raise her spirits. People instantly panic that the steroids are sending her manic again, even though the situation, circumstances, symptoms and dosage are all different. I attempt to convince myself that sometimes a crab is just a crab. But I'm kidding myself.
Have found out that the shoes that I bought in London, without trying them on, are the wrong size. I asked the assistant for the right sized shoes and he brought me the wrong ones. I just spent an hour circumnavigating the city, which has no street signs or if it has they are obscured by scaffolding on a semi-permanent basis. I found the "Doc Shop" in the incongruously delightfully named "Pottinger's Entry". The shop is empty bar the bloke behind the counter. He is a standard Belfast male in that he is fat and bald with blurred tattoos on fore-arms that are crossed over his chest. Before I came to Belfast I would have found this look a threatening proposition but it's so ubiquitous here that it has no meaning at all - skinheads have spunked their currency in this town!). His arms remained crossed throughout our transaction. "You didn't get those here," he said. "I know," I say, "I got them in London," "Let's have a look at them, then," he says. The bag is between us on the counter. He makes no attempt to move so I open the bag and show them to him. "I can't do anything about it. We're an independent," "So why did I have to show you the shoes?" He shrugs.
On the bus home I'm sat between a crying baby and three shouting tramps. Belfast your'e pushing me.
Today Kelly is irritable from the get go - even doe-eyed Dee can't raise her spirits. People instantly panic that the steroids are sending her manic again, even though the situation, circumstances, symptoms and dosage are all different. I attempt to convince myself that sometimes a crab is just a crab. But I'm kidding myself.
Have found out that the shoes that I bought in London, without trying them on, are the wrong size. I asked the assistant for the right sized shoes and he brought me the wrong ones. I just spent an hour circumnavigating the city, which has no street signs or if it has they are obscured by scaffolding on a semi-permanent basis. I found the "Doc Shop" in the incongruously delightfully named "Pottinger's Entry". The shop is empty bar the bloke behind the counter. He is a standard Belfast male in that he is fat and bald with blurred tattoos on fore-arms that are crossed over his chest. Before I came to Belfast I would have found this look a threatening proposition but it's so ubiquitous here that it has no meaning at all - skinheads have spunked their currency in this town!). His arms remained crossed throughout our transaction. "You didn't get those here," he said. "I know," I say, "I got them in London," "Let's have a look at them, then," he says. The bag is between us on the counter. He makes no attempt to move so I open the bag and show them to him. "I can't do anything about it. We're an independent," "So why did I have to show you the shoes?" He shrugs.
On the bus home I'm sat between a crying baby and three shouting tramps. Belfast your'e pushing me.
Monday, 2 May 2011
The Chronicles of Nornia
I've been in Belfast a month now. I've walked around, been in a couple of pubs, sourced pine-nuts and survived the Easter licensing laws. I'm no longer terrified all the time. But how did I get here? What have I seen? What were my first impressions of this small and forbidding city? What follows is an account of my first trip into the city solo, from a month ago...Was I ever that young?
Finally made it out into Belfast. It's been so long since I've written anything that the pen feels clumsy and foreign between my rusted fingers. I hope it wears off...
It takes about forty minutes to walk into the city centre from where I live (which may be called Ballyhackamore or Belmont or Knock or Dungalvan - they all seem to be fairly interchangeable). The city centre is full of enormous and impressive Victorian buildings and if I had trouble working out some of the blue-plaque venerables in London I haven't got a fucking clue over here: one was for an "Irish National and Librarian". There's one for C.S.Lewis (Irish apparently; his house is no longer there and they haven't even bothered to name the estate they built on it after him! Swizz!). I'm also about five minutes from Cyprus Avenue ( Made famous by Van Morrison's Astral Weeks' song "Madame George" which has no tune...as I found out when I attempted to hum it to my incredulous in-laws).
This wasn't my first foray out of the house. Oh no. Over the weekend Kelly and her sisters decamped to Gulladuff leaving me time to get the house un-packed and everything sorted out. One of the things I determined to do was replace my lost phone-charger ( I packed it in a clever, secure place that I wouldn't forget - it's lost to the ages now!). I'd been on a reconaissance mission in Deidre's car before-hand and realised that the way into town was down the lengthy Newtownards road (pron. "Newtown-ARDS - took me a week to master that). Unfortunately for me the Newtownards Road, like many of those modern roads that they have now, goes in two separate directions, and I found myself confidentally toddling along a motorway toward Stormont. This didn't deter me in the least - I could see a McDonalds on the horizon and a McDonalds means people and people are a large constituent ingredient of major metropolitan conurbations.
I walked for seven miles before reaching a place called Comber and then got a bus going in precisely the opposite and found a Carphone Warehouse where they stung me for twenty quid for a phone charger which was exactly twenty quid more than I paid for the phone. I knew there was something wrong about the route I was taking but I just couldn't quite put my finger on it. Then I realised...there hadn't been any mountains in the City-Centre the last time I had been there. Around the outside,sure; there's more purple fringes around Belfast than on Caesar's book-mark. But not in the City-Centre itself. That was the clue.
The good thing about living where I live is that no matter how rough I look or what I'm wearing when I go out, unless I meet my inlaws, I know I'm going to look better than anyone I meet. The people of East Belfast couldn't be called vain. Mostly they're in tracksuits; at best it's jeans and a collar-popped polo-shirt. Their face's suggest a early encounter with forceps; there are red ragged ears on every street-corner (literally on Saturday mornings). And there are the angry flushed faces (and these are faces that need flushing) hovering over cheap suits on every lamp-post. Not because they've been strung up, Mussolini style, (at least not yet) but because it's election time in Belfast. I've never known it not to be election time in Belfast; never known these worrying Tesco Branch manager portraits not to be hanging from street-lamps like so many gibbets.
Qualifying this I would say that these musings (never amusings) are based upon a week and a half's immersion in Norn culture, during which time I've been out of the house a grand total of three times and have spoken to two Fasties. One was a bus driver and that didn't go well. The other was a taxi driver and that went very well because I was half pissed and therefore half confident. That's a fifty percent success rate. I think that's probably got a slight edge on London.
Hello, present day John here again now. I would like to point out that I went on a lengthy walk this morning (at one point joining the Belfast Marathon) and I saw two people who I thought were better looking than me. They were younger than me. And it has been a long week.
Finally made it out into Belfast. It's been so long since I've written anything that the pen feels clumsy and foreign between my rusted fingers. I hope it wears off...
It takes about forty minutes to walk into the city centre from where I live (which may be called Ballyhackamore or Belmont or Knock or Dungalvan - they all seem to be fairly interchangeable). The city centre is full of enormous and impressive Victorian buildings and if I had trouble working out some of the blue-plaque venerables in London I haven't got a fucking clue over here: one was for an "Irish National and Librarian". There's one for C.S.Lewis (Irish apparently; his house is no longer there and they haven't even bothered to name the estate they built on it after him! Swizz!). I'm also about five minutes from Cyprus Avenue ( Made famous by Van Morrison's Astral Weeks' song "Madame George" which has no tune...as I found out when I attempted to hum it to my incredulous in-laws).
This wasn't my first foray out of the house. Oh no. Over the weekend Kelly and her sisters decamped to Gulladuff leaving me time to get the house un-packed and everything sorted out. One of the things I determined to do was replace my lost phone-charger ( I packed it in a clever, secure place that I wouldn't forget - it's lost to the ages now!). I'd been on a reconaissance mission in Deidre's car before-hand and realised that the way into town was down the lengthy Newtownards road (pron. "Newtown-ARDS - took me a week to master that). Unfortunately for me the Newtownards Road, like many of those modern roads that they have now, goes in two separate directions, and I found myself confidentally toddling along a motorway toward Stormont. This didn't deter me in the least - I could see a McDonalds on the horizon and a McDonalds means people and people are a large constituent ingredient of major metropolitan conurbations.
I walked for seven miles before reaching a place called Comber and then got a bus going in precisely the opposite and found a Carphone Warehouse where they stung me for twenty quid for a phone charger which was exactly twenty quid more than I paid for the phone. I knew there was something wrong about the route I was taking but I just couldn't quite put my finger on it. Then I realised...there hadn't been any mountains in the City-Centre the last time I had been there. Around the outside,sure; there's more purple fringes around Belfast than on Caesar's book-mark. But not in the City-Centre itself. That was the clue.
The good thing about living where I live is that no matter how rough I look or what I'm wearing when I go out, unless I meet my inlaws, I know I'm going to look better than anyone I meet. The people of East Belfast couldn't be called vain. Mostly they're in tracksuits; at best it's jeans and a collar-popped polo-shirt. Their face's suggest a early encounter with forceps; there are red ragged ears on every street-corner (literally on Saturday mornings). And there are the angry flushed faces (and these are faces that need flushing) hovering over cheap suits on every lamp-post. Not because they've been strung up, Mussolini style, (at least not yet) but because it's election time in Belfast. I've never known it not to be election time in Belfast; never known these worrying Tesco Branch manager portraits not to be hanging from street-lamps like so many gibbets.
Qualifying this I would say that these musings (never amusings) are based upon a week and a half's immersion in Norn culture, during which time I've been out of the house a grand total of three times and have spoken to two Fasties. One was a bus driver and that didn't go well. The other was a taxi driver and that went very well because I was half pissed and therefore half confident. That's a fifty percent success rate. I think that's probably got a slight edge on London.
Hello, present day John here again now. I would like to point out that I went on a lengthy walk this morning (at one point joining the Belfast Marathon) and I saw two people who I thought were better looking than me. They were younger than me. And it has been a long week.
Wednesday, 27 April 2011
The Chronicles of Nornia
My knee has been stiff for the last few days so I decide to go for a walk. Frankly I need the exercise; my sedentary lifestyle and ready-meal diet has seen me swelling like a happy prick and my brilliant idea of swapping drinking litres of red wine for litres of full fat coke hasn't exactly done wonders for my...well, anything. So I go for a walk aiming for a park called Orangefield. I know where Orangefield road is and I head for it thinking it'll lead to the park. It doesn't. It leads to an Orangefield Grove, and to an Orangefield Grove, an Orangefield Way, an Orangefield Straight, an Orangefield Path, an Orangefield Straight and Orangefield Clippings. There is no park. I continue on through similar permutations on the word Sandhill before finding Clarawood which was likewise diffuse. But Clarawood did have a park and a millenium park at that, made up of a series on concentric circles; like Basingstoke - or hell.
Leaving it I happen into the Clarawood Estate which has only one way in and one way out, like the whale that swallowed Pinnochio. As I am in there I am buzzed by men driving around in cars, like flies round the ceiling, their tattooed elbows hanging out of their window. I'm suddenly reminded of the Shankhill Butchers and mince at speed away from the cruising killers. Every man I see is either bald, tattooed or smoking and most are all three and doing something with their cars. I am reminded of my childhood, of that sense of suburban otherness (I never left the house as a child so everything seemed odd and strange when I went outside. Basingstoke, though far more suburban, I knew with contemptable familiarity). It's street after street of smalled, named houses; stone-clad where they aren't pebble-dashed. It's like Portslade, near Brighton, where I grew up in seventies except the cars have all swollen to monstrous proportions; all cow-catchers and chrome. I don't know what people are doing with all those cows they must be easily, possibly inadvertantly, catching.
Every house has a rusting basketball hoop fixed to the front of the garage.
While I'm terrified of the men (and men everywhere) the women are delightful. They smile. They say hello. They aren't even selling anything. After London it's a revelation. By the end of the walk I am actually returning smiles and hellos. If I could have tipped my hat I would have done - my hair will not tip. And at no point during this fairly pointless circuit (I end up back at Orangefield Road and go home) am I pepper-sprayed.
I call that a result.
Leaving it I happen into the Clarawood Estate which has only one way in and one way out, like the whale that swallowed Pinnochio. As I am in there I am buzzed by men driving around in cars, like flies round the ceiling, their tattooed elbows hanging out of their window. I'm suddenly reminded of the Shankhill Butchers and mince at speed away from the cruising killers. Every man I see is either bald, tattooed or smoking and most are all three and doing something with their cars. I am reminded of my childhood, of that sense of suburban otherness (I never left the house as a child so everything seemed odd and strange when I went outside. Basingstoke, though far more suburban, I knew with contemptable familiarity). It's street after street of smalled, named houses; stone-clad where they aren't pebble-dashed. It's like Portslade, near Brighton, where I grew up in seventies except the cars have all swollen to monstrous proportions; all cow-catchers and chrome. I don't know what people are doing with all those cows they must be easily, possibly inadvertantly, catching.
Every house has a rusting basketball hoop fixed to the front of the garage.
While I'm terrified of the men (and men everywhere) the women are delightful. They smile. They say hello. They aren't even selling anything. After London it's a revelation. By the end of the walk I am actually returning smiles and hellos. If I could have tipped my hat I would have done - my hair will not tip. And at no point during this fairly pointless circuit (I end up back at Orangefield Road and go home) am I pepper-sprayed.
I call that a result.
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
The Chronicles of Nornia
Belfast: land of the erotic clown. The accepted look for teenage girls here is simillar to the young boys of ancient Rome in Fellini's "Satyricon". How many young men have never seen their girlfriends naked because of the obfuscating two inches of brick-dust plastered over their bodies. Each sexual encounter must leave the bedroom looking like a German porn-set. I don't know when it starts but it starts young: the crowification of the hair, the tandori-ing of the skin, the pornstar plucking of the eye-brows. The boys, conversely, don't seem to make any effort at all; pull on the trackies, pop the collars, a quick rinse with Oxy 10 and they're out the door!
It's different to London and I'm old. And I'm not good with change (which is why my pounds don't look after themselves - in every sense). Don't get me wrong - I'm not Liz Jones! I'm not going to move to the country and slag off the locals until I get a shot-gun blast through the letter-box (I don't have her readership for a start. Or her FABULOUS figure!). It's certainly not WORSE than London (and god knows I was sick of that place) and in many ways far better. But it is different. Well...it would be.
The house we live in (a spacious two-up two-down, in a quiet mews) is heated with oil. Obviously this is no odder than heating your house with gas. But actually, for some reason, it is odder.Maybe because a giant oil-drum isn't a feature of most London gardens. I have already tangled with THE OIL MAN (where, in true buck-toothed, silly-ass style, I didn't get his jokes, fumbled the meaning of the words "cheque" and "check", forgot how to use a padlock and tripped over a step into my garden. As he left he gave me a look last given by a Spartan mother depositing her child on a hillside.). What kind of oil is it? Can I top up with Mazola if we're running low and I need a bath? Or is that the equivalent of trying to make toast with a lit fart?
Then there are the peculiar taboos around drinking (please note: the only things I seem to have noticed about Belfast after living here for the best part of a month are: teenage girls, my own house and booze. And the fact that I can't seem to get a duck anywhere. These are my concerns. Quite the everyman).
I'm in "Horatio Todd's" a bar that actually sells beer other than Harp and Guinness but because it's Good Friday they can't serve alcohol until five o' clock in the evening. So I'm scribbling furiously in a booth listening to Amy Winehouse and supping delicately on a ginger beer. Incidentally, I didn't initialy order a drink - I stepped into the pub and the barman took one look at me and said "There's no alcohol till five o'clock, pal! It's the law!" I didn't much care for the "pal" or his assumption of my ignorance of the law: I was ignorant but I don't expect people to be able to read it from my stupid face! The person behind me at the was also English but as he was a colourful cockney the exchange was louder, brighter, took far longer and ended in back-slapping bonhomie while I skulked on my bench.
It's twenty minutes later; the cockney still seems to be ordering his drink. He keeps floating back and forth to bar as if distracted always on the point of finalising his order. The bar-man doesn't seem the patient type and indeed doesnt seem to be displaying any patience at all; he's acting as if this were entirely normal behaviour. Belfast seems unknowable even when a Cockney is introduced into it. The cockney seems to have the hang of it far more than I do - though, in fact, his skin DOES look far more comfortable than mine!
It's different to London and I'm old. And I'm not good with change (which is why my pounds don't look after themselves - in every sense). Don't get me wrong - I'm not Liz Jones! I'm not going to move to the country and slag off the locals until I get a shot-gun blast through the letter-box (I don't have her readership for a start. Or her FABULOUS figure!). It's certainly not WORSE than London (and god knows I was sick of that place) and in many ways far better. But it is different. Well...it would be.
The house we live in (a spacious two-up two-down, in a quiet mews) is heated with oil. Obviously this is no odder than heating your house with gas. But actually, for some reason, it is odder.Maybe because a giant oil-drum isn't a feature of most London gardens. I have already tangled with THE OIL MAN (where, in true buck-toothed, silly-ass style, I didn't get his jokes, fumbled the meaning of the words "cheque" and "check", forgot how to use a padlock and tripped over a step into my garden. As he left he gave me a look last given by a Spartan mother depositing her child on a hillside.). What kind of oil is it? Can I top up with Mazola if we're running low and I need a bath? Or is that the equivalent of trying to make toast with a lit fart?
Then there are the peculiar taboos around drinking (please note: the only things I seem to have noticed about Belfast after living here for the best part of a month are: teenage girls, my own house and booze. And the fact that I can't seem to get a duck anywhere. These are my concerns. Quite the everyman).
I'm in "Horatio Todd's" a bar that actually sells beer other than Harp and Guinness but because it's Good Friday they can't serve alcohol until five o' clock in the evening. So I'm scribbling furiously in a booth listening to Amy Winehouse and supping delicately on a ginger beer. Incidentally, I didn't initialy order a drink - I stepped into the pub and the barman took one look at me and said "There's no alcohol till five o'clock, pal! It's the law!" I didn't much care for the "pal" or his assumption of my ignorance of the law: I was ignorant but I don't expect people to be able to read it from my stupid face! The person behind me at the was also English but as he was a colourful cockney the exchange was louder, brighter, took far longer and ended in back-slapping bonhomie while I skulked on my bench.
It's twenty minutes later; the cockney still seems to be ordering his drink. He keeps floating back and forth to bar as if distracted always on the point of finalising his order. The bar-man doesn't seem the patient type and indeed doesnt seem to be displaying any patience at all; he's acting as if this were entirely normal behaviour. Belfast seems unknowable even when a Cockney is introduced into it. The cockney seems to have the hang of it far more than I do - though, in fact, his skin DOES look far more comfortable than mine!
Thursday, 31 March 2011
The Red Face of Ulster
I live in Belfast now! Not that I've really been out of the the house, barring the welcome party awaiting us as we got off the plane (which left me incapacitated for the next day. The sort of hang-over which turns your teeth to rubber and thwarts all ambition). Since then I've left the house to visit IKEA (wok, loobrush, various bins and about fifty feet of shelving!)and M & S (no booze in the M & S - is this a protestant thing?).
We had a shelf building party after the trip to IKEA - myself, Kelly, Paul and Mo got to work with screw-drivers and inscrutable instructions, rendered in pan-European pictographs - and, as usual when confronted with a practical task, I failed utterly and bafflingly. I followed the instructions to the letter and when I righted the thing on the kitchen floor it split at the sides likes Des O'Connor on his sofa. What made it worse was that it wasn't written off - Deidre's boyfriend Chris appeared and, manfully, after alighting his steed, picked the thing apart with a claw hammer and fixed the bastard! I have sinced packed my testes into a drawer - I shan't be needing them here.
It's slowly but surely coming together - still bags and boxes everywhere but it's starting to look vaguely as if WE live here. Can't find my phone charger though...still...
We had a shelf building party after the trip to IKEA - myself, Kelly, Paul and Mo got to work with screw-drivers and inscrutable instructions, rendered in pan-European pictographs - and, as usual when confronted with a practical task, I failed utterly and bafflingly. I followed the instructions to the letter and when I righted the thing on the kitchen floor it split at the sides likes Des O'Connor on his sofa. What made it worse was that it wasn't written off - Deidre's boyfriend Chris appeared and, manfully, after alighting his steed, picked the thing apart with a claw hammer and fixed the bastard! I have sinced packed my testes into a drawer - I shan't be needing them here.
It's slowly but surely coming together - still bags and boxes everywhere but it's starting to look vaguely as if WE live here. Can't find my phone charger though...still...
Friday, 25 March 2011
It's not my birthday
Moving house is pure, unadulterated, inexpurgated hell. I reccomend doing somthing different. Shit, I've just checked the time - It's not my birthday any more. Being forty is now the sort of thing I just have to get on with.
Piss. Horror. Wank. Terror. Piss.
Piss. Horror. Wank. Terror. Piss.
Sunday, 27 February 2011
Belfast and Loose
Just left Kelly at Heathrow, endlessly zig-zagging through customs, looking, in her triangular blue coat and pink hat, like a child's drawing. And about the most perfect thing in the world. I held her all the way down on the train, which went the wrong way, rather difficult for an underground train you'd think and you might be right, but our genius train-driver managed it, detouring via terminal four. But we had plenty of time and the drivers mistake was a chance to claw back some romance from the jaws of misery.
It all went very well; we were unharried and methodical, both areas where I traditionally excel (though Kelly will tell you that I'm more inclined to exhale, heavily and often, like a put upon teenager).It was almost fun except that she's gone and gone for a week. She has requested that I sort out my teeth.
Four years ago when we met it was not my snake hipped dance moves that entranced her (now sadly replacement hip moves) nor the lustrous silver crown adorning my head ( which now resembles the ghost of a hayrick ) but my dazzling smile. My teeth. The teeth that are now fenced off to stop druids attempting to celebrate the solstice at them. My teeth. The teeth that resemble a graveyard where actual teeth are buried. My teeth: the unlucky horse-shoe, the slashed seats in the stalls; the brown cornflakes in the packet. Not so good my teeth but, four years ago...dazzling. What happened? Two things: red wine and bruxism. Which sounds like a Club of Queer Trades song. I suffer from a medical condition called bruxism (street name: teeth-grinding). It sounds harmless enough but the constant erosion of my teeth from nocturnal gurning has left my molars looking a coastal granite shelf. At night I pop in a gum-shield like a dozy boxer. I should have a spitoon by the bed. The red wine is fairly self explanatory. Added to the fifty cups of tea I drink a day and you have a fairly sound basis for my butterscoth smile. I may as well have a plaster stretched over my mouth. I mean they're not Martin Amis bad but put me in a smock and you've got yourself a relief simpleton!
Kelly is very keen on me to get them sorted. My body has taken a bit of a pounding over the last four years and it's becoming increasingly difficult to lick me back into shape - there are no takers on that one. I'm aging in dog years, time-lapse dog years and something needs to be done. She'd like me pretty again. I'll give it a go.
* * * * * * * * * * *
On the way back from Heathrow on the train. An elderly woman gets on at South Kensington. She is dressed from head to foot in fur (she even appears to be wearing fur trousers). She looks like a cross between Joel Grey in Cabaret and Edith Head. An attractive Asian girl opposite me leaps up to offer her a seat (note that I don't). The old woman isn't having it. She insists but the old woman is adamant: she's going to stand. Neither one of them seems willing to back down. They stand either side of the empty seat in a standoff until the Asian girl gets off at Green Park and the old woman immediately sits down in the seat opposite. She smiles at me.
It all went very well; we were unharried and methodical, both areas where I traditionally excel (though Kelly will tell you that I'm more inclined to exhale, heavily and often, like a put upon teenager).It was almost fun except that she's gone and gone for a week. She has requested that I sort out my teeth.
Four years ago when we met it was not my snake hipped dance moves that entranced her (now sadly replacement hip moves) nor the lustrous silver crown adorning my head ( which now resembles the ghost of a hayrick ) but my dazzling smile. My teeth. The teeth that are now fenced off to stop druids attempting to celebrate the solstice at them. My teeth. The teeth that resemble a graveyard where actual teeth are buried. My teeth: the unlucky horse-shoe, the slashed seats in the stalls; the brown cornflakes in the packet. Not so good my teeth but, four years ago...dazzling. What happened? Two things: red wine and bruxism. Which sounds like a Club of Queer Trades song. I suffer from a medical condition called bruxism (street name: teeth-grinding). It sounds harmless enough but the constant erosion of my teeth from nocturnal gurning has left my molars looking a coastal granite shelf. At night I pop in a gum-shield like a dozy boxer. I should have a spitoon by the bed. The red wine is fairly self explanatory. Added to the fifty cups of tea I drink a day and you have a fairly sound basis for my butterscoth smile. I may as well have a plaster stretched over my mouth. I mean they're not Martin Amis bad but put me in a smock and you've got yourself a relief simpleton!
Kelly is very keen on me to get them sorted. My body has taken a bit of a pounding over the last four years and it's becoming increasingly difficult to lick me back into shape - there are no takers on that one. I'm aging in dog years, time-lapse dog years and something needs to be done. She'd like me pretty again. I'll give it a go.
* * * * * * * * * * *
On the way back from Heathrow on the train. An elderly woman gets on at South Kensington. She is dressed from head to foot in fur (she even appears to be wearing fur trousers). She looks like a cross between Joel Grey in Cabaret and Edith Head. An attractive Asian girl opposite me leaps up to offer her a seat (note that I don't). The old woman isn't having it. She insists but the old woman is adamant: she's going to stand. Neither one of them seems willing to back down. They stand either side of the empty seat in a standoff until the Asian girl gets off at Green Park and the old woman immediately sits down in the seat opposite. She smiles at me.
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