I’m back in Belfast for a little bit. I kept getting sick in London. Before Christmas and then again in January I was down, constantly, with colds and scratchy throats. And always against a backdrop of this feeling of overwhelming exhaustion, which would strike in the afternoon and force me to sleep for hours. It was so potent it seemed to have an almost mystical quality. It made me think of the field of magic sleepy poppies in the Wizard of Oz, which Dorothy and the scarecrow and so on stumble across on their way to find the wizard.
At first I thought I had covid again but it wasn’t that. Then I became convinced that London was sapping my life force. I was well over Christmas, which I spent back in Belfast (although in hindsight I was possibly just too continually hungover to notice being sick), and so it started to seem like the problem might be psychologically inflicted but geographical in nature. Also, I love many aspects of London. But if you work in media and you live there you are constantly at the risk of going to a party where you are likely to be introduced to someone who might, for example, announce that they consider a podcast to be the same thing as a play. There is just a lot of thrusting, and it can start to weigh on the soul a little.
My mysterious illness turned out to be a vitamin D deficiency. But by then I’d already decided a few weeks in Belfast would be the cure. In a strange way I think it kind of has been (I have also been taking supplements, I’m not a “healing crystals”/”power of positive thinking” type).
I haven’t been back here for more than about a week at a time since I was 22, for reasons I’ve been trying to articulate to myself. I really enjoy being here, I have friends I like seeing. I’ve even made some new ones this time. There’s family too. I guess covid was part of the distance I kept for a while. But I also wonder if I needed a bit of separation to process certain things or decide which elements of myself I needed to grow out of.
Then, at the same time, I’m wary of thinking too much about certain instincts. I believe that if you analyse a feeling too much you can turn it into something else. Sometimes you need to stay and sometimes you need to go; maybe it’s as simple as that. The relationship I have with Belfast is the one I have. And however complicated it can be, I do truly love the place. I once told my friend Mark I thought it looked exactly like New York, architecturally. He smiled (wryly, I would say) and laughed. “Well, sure, take that with you if you ever move back,” he said.
For a little while I felt weirdly angst-y about setting my novel here, as if I didn’t have a right to the place anymore. Eventually I just decided that the book which existed in my head was the one I had to write, and if the police decided to come and arrest me over it, well then so be it. It ended up being kind of about memory and nostalgia anyway. (Maybe everything I write is, I’m starting to think so.) So that fits.
Anyway, there are certain qualities of my book I’ve been thinking of while I’ve been back here. So much of the plot hinges around people randomly bumping into each other in pubs or bars or the street. Or gossip being exchanged constantly. And actually Close to Home by Michael Magee (a beautiful Belfast novel out in a few months, about which more in another post) does the same thing. I was thinking maybe I overdid that a little. But actually no, I think it’s exactly right. You do literally bump into everyone constantly here.
The second or third day I was back, I was on my way to meet someone and I bumped into an old friend of a friend type outside a shop, buying food for a hangover. Which made me late for the thing I was trying to do, and that seems to happen every few days. In fact it’s actually kind of hard to avoid bumping into people. Just the other weekend I accidentally went to the workplace of someone who, for a series of reasons, I am keen to avoid looking like I would be slyly turning up at the workplace of. I didn’t realise it was their workplace until I was already there, wandering around, and someone announced it. And then the same person who announced it was smiling expectantly at me. And so, if I was to leave the workplace, that would be its own whole thing.
Which was worse? I decided to stay. Thankfully they had the day off, it turned out.
Another example: I was taking a series of selfies in my favourite pub toilet mirror (I mean this light!) and the toilet behind me opened and someone I vaguely know emerged, a terrible witness to my vanity. I made polite smalltalk before slinking into a cubicle.
The gossip thing is true too. Once I wrote about how much I like advice columns because they feel gossipy and someone from Belfast emailed me saying he felt the same, and he thought it related to the “biz industrial complex” we’d both grown up with. By this he meant the thing of everyone constantly asking “what’s the biz” (as in “what’s the business”) and collecting gossip to spread it.
Everyone here loves to begin a story like: “So I was minding my own business (which literally nobody ever seems to be doing at all) when you’ll never guess what I heard/saw/etc etc”.
The nosiness is everywhere. The other day I was in the pub around 3 on a Saturday and was out of sync with the rounds of the people I was drinking with, and so buying drinks by myself. On my second Guinness the barman asked me: “So what’s your craic? Are you drinking by yourself?”
“Am I giving you the vibe of someone who would be drinking by themselves at 3 o’clock in the day?” I asked.
“Actually, yes.” He said, laughing.
The other day my mum showed me a photo she had been sent of someone’s wedding. “Right,” she said. “Spot what’s wrong with this wedding photo. I’ll give you three guesses. Nobody gets it on the first guess.”
And I think this can feel a little like surveillance sometimes. The other day I realised that I always feel, when I’m walking around the streets here, that someone might be watching me from their car.
I had been thinking a lot about why that is. I had an idea that part of the reason is that I was a teenage girl here. And teenage girls are constantly watched in this very intrusive way. Like in that John Berger quote: “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” Back when I was a teenager that was possibly even worse than it is now; I remember once a local newspaper columnist wrote an article about how girls at my school made their uniform so sexy by rolling up their skirts that it threatened to have dads crashing their cars on the school run. A bizarre tirade which (I hope) you’d never get away with now.
Well I was thinking maybe I carry some of that around with me when I’m her, the memory of existing in that state, being watched in that way. Then the other day I was out running and in the evening I literally got a message that said: “You alright? I didn’t realise you were about. I seen you out running earlier. I was driving in my car.”
Well, there’s the problem with analysing things too much!
Till next time xxxxxxx
Some Things I Liked Recently:
This piece by Mariah Kreutter on Jean Rhys and the spectrum of female behaviour and character traits as it appears in recent novels versus in hers.
My lovely friend Jess White’s substack. She reads absolutely everything and then writes about it, it’s great for interesting recs!