Belfast Once More
Inspired by my recent experiences at the Celtic Media Festival, I flew to Belfast this morning for a collaborative chin-wag with Susan Lovell. She’s my opposite number at BBC Radio Ulster. There’s no messing about with Susan. I had barely peeled off my coat when she guiding me to a table around which she had gathered her senior team. We talked for an hour. Music programmes seemed to offer the most obvious opportunities for co-operation. The Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow, for example, is a big hit with the BBC Radio Ulster audience. We also discussed pipe music, folk, jazz and, well, everything save the kind of thing you used to see buskers do with a paper and comb.
Susan flashed through the agenda with the air of a woman who believes the office walls will close in on us if we linger beyond our allotted time. Actually, that’s not a bad idea for BBC meetings. In fact she had a taxi waiting to take both of us to meet another of her colleague’s who was waiting in a trendy restaurant near Queen’s University. This part of the city looked, to my eye, to be an upmarket area but Susan’s colleague told me that it was getting a reputation for disorder.
“People have been known to just walk into someone else’s flat and fall asleep in a stranger’s bedroom!”
“Well,” I said, “Who among us hasn’t done that?”
“Yes…but in our student days.”
“No, I was thinking about last week.”
An hour later I was in a taxi heading for Belfast City Airport. The driver told me he was a big fan of BBC Radio Scotland, but only at weekends when he listened to the football coverage.
“Scottish teams have such wonderful names,” he told me, “Hamilton Academicals, Queen of the South, Inverness Caledonian Thistle…oh there’s nothing like that here.”
But it’s the Irish who have the real way with words. Even the airport information screens had a poetic quality to them. They didn’t just tell you if a flight was delayed or on time, not, they also offered a lifestyle choice.
“Relax and shop” said the screens.
So I did.
