It is Just Belfast

I've long struggled to explain Belfast.  What is it about the city that makes it so indescribable?  What is it about the city that makes it itself?  I thought I had settled on a comparison to Bruce Springsteen's music.  Both have a rugged, working-class attitude that scoffs at the establishment.  At once, they enjoy being what they are, but seem upset that they were not asked.  They also both have an existential and poetic bent; Belfast will always be what it chooses.



Today, as I descended the steel stairs wheeled next to the plane, I found Belfast exactly as it should be.  It was a rough landing, coming in from Heathrow: the sure sign of typical Northern Irish weather.  The pilot had casually mentioned a 'fresh' breeze, which, in Hiberno-English, can range from an uplifting thermal perfect for flying kites to the howling juggernauts that blow in from the Atlantic.  It was somewhere in between, but much further from the Mary Poppins imagery than an older gentleman behind me was prepared for.  He was shocked that we had to deplane and walk to the terminal in the wind and rain.  I smiled and thought to myself, 'It's Belfast.  You were perhaps expecting Gilligan and a drink with an umbrella?'  That might have been harsh, but I had just come off of a trans-Atlantic flight.

But that thought struck me as somehow important.  It is just Belfast.  Unapologetically so.

This thought resurfaced in my mind several times throughout the evening and into the night.  Anthony, one of the lads with whom I lived during my M.A. here at Queen's, picked me up and we meandered through the City Centre at rush hour, past the Ardoyne, past St. Anne's Cathedral, past the Royal Academical Institute, and finally onto the Dublin Road that leads to the University Quarter.  While there were several noticeable changes, most seemed cosmetic at best: this building was under renovation and that one was finished and reopened.  But Belfast, as a whole, has remained largely unchanged.  I find that comforting.