Edd's Travels: Belfast, Northern Ireland

The very first time I went travelling, it all started with a starry-eyed stroll in Manhattan at midnight. The second time began in a rickety taxi rattling through misty, mountainous Ecuadorian suburbs. And the third time found me stumbling around in a jet-lagged haze amid the pink sea of Tokyo’s fallen cherry-blossom leaves...

Trip number nine has been ushered in with a rain-soaked visit to Tesco, for eggs & Bran Flakes. It’s not that my travelling aspirations have narrowed. But one has to start somewhere. Anyway it’s nice to begin with such a short flight, and without any language barrier, although some of the accents here are mind-blowing. Already I have learned several new vowels.

I’m lodged in the back bedroom of a snug little two-up-two-down near the very top of the Shankill Road. The street outside is festooned from end to end with Union Jack bunting. I was tempted to be mischievous and ask ‘are you all celebrating something?’ My AirBnB host wouldn’t have been bothered, though. He’s Polish. He’s lived here long enough that he describes things as ‘grand’ with a conspicuously long ‘a’. It’s rather like when I used to hear French students in Glasgow adopting the universal Scottish application of the adjective ‘wee’.

Staying in a Loyalist area isn’t a deliberate choice on my part, it’s simply the chance outcome of my AirBnB filters: cheapness, privacy, and a desk on which to rest my laptop so that I can write all this bullsh*t. Anyway there’s nothing particularly ropey about the area, although I certainly wouldn’t wander around here in a Celtic shirt. In a non-sectarian spirit, I have walked the whole of the Falls Road as well. It’s got a nice big Sainsburys at the end of it.

The Loyalist and Nationalist areas are of course divided by the Peace Wall, which is a depressing oxymoron, because if there really was Peace then there wouldn’t be any need for a Wall. Tourist coaches trundle along it; inane graffiti (“It’s Nice To Be Important, But It’s Important To Be Nice”) is scrawled over it; and, inevitably, stupid smiling selfies are taken in front of it. I will refrain from further comment.

Setting aside the ghoulish disaster tourism (and I haven’t even mentioned the Titanic), Belfast is a really nice place and I’d be more than happy to come back here for a stag do. Somebody propose to somebody, pronto.