You have to admire a city which named its airport after a libertine and
drunk whose most famous utterance was ‘I spent a lot of money on booze, women
and fast cars - the rest I just squandered.’ Most airports honour politicians; Belfast
chose the footballer George Best. When I remarked on this, Laura was startled
and said blithely that most people still refer to it as Belfast City Airport.
Which is not surprising since, unlike New York’s John F Kennedy airport (JFK) or
Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport (CDG), the three letter abbreviation, BHD, does
not reflect its soubriquet.
A single storey house, parallel to the road and separated from it by a
strip of tussocky grass. Set lower than the road, rain had seeped under the
ill-fitting front door and, despite a whirring humidifier, the hall was
suffused with the smell of damp wool. Inside, rooms off a corridor whose
windows, covered by blinds, overlooked the road. Mine, a small cell higher than
it was wide; pale yellow walls; a wonky self-assembly wardrobe; a metal-framed
single bed of the type you’d expect in a prison. A low wattage light with a
corona of tiny flies, the ceiling smeared where they had been dispatched by a
previous occupant; a wall calendar, open at December, with an asterisk marking
the twenty first.
Opposite, a modern detached house behind ornamental metal gates with elaborate
finials attached to pillars topped by brick castellations and moated by sterile
lawns. Curlicued bargeboards and Georgian uPVC windows slightly too small for
the intended grandeur. Even the picket fence was assembled from white plastic
bars slotted into white plastic posts. A charmless glossy perfection,
reminiscent of the buildings created in online games such as SimCity. Similar
nouveau riche dwellings were interspersed with dismal pebble-dashed bungalows,
but there were no older buildings lovingly renovated or rows of gentrified
workers’ cottages.
It reminded me of a book I’d seen in a motorway service station comprising
photographs of lonely roundabouts, the nexus of empty roads.
There was no one to be seen.
