A concert and a medical appointment led to a two-night stay in a hotel in Belfast, right around the corner from where the 1970s Irish trad group, The Bothy Band, entertained a full house with their breakneck jigs and reels.
Band leader Dónal Lunny opened with:
“It’s great to be here. At our age, it’s great to be anywhere.”
Audience members remembered absent friends, felt twinges of their own mortality and settled into a stunning two hour set that blew away cobwebs and the intervening fifty years since we’d last been at a Bothy Band concert.
I was on crutches. The Waterfront Hall staff, civil and professional all, provided a courtesy wheelchair and a disabled-friendly seat I could manoeuvre into and out of. I travelled to Belfast by train, leaving my own wheelchair and mobility scooter at home.
The medical appointment was set for the afternoon following the concert. My wife had plans for the morning – a search for a new pair of hill-walking boots. I no longer get into the hills. Because I couldn’t walk, I glode. That is, I took the Glider. I glided east, then I glided west, across Belfast.
I took Glider G1 heading east, boarding at Lanyon Place, which is more a busy city road than a place, directly opposite Central Station, which is about to be superseded by an Integrated Transport Hub on the western side of the city centre, named Grand Central Station. Words such as ‘hub’ and ‘grand’ in this context chill me, as the in-built hubris almost guarantees disappointment.
The VanHool Articulated bus, all 18 metres of it, including the bendy bit in the middle, did not disappoint. It arrived bang on time at the Lanyon Place Halt, as given by a digital time-table and schedule. Did I get a ticket using my free travel pass? There certainly was a ticket machine. Memory fogs the details.
There was already a small number of passengers on board, none of them on the odyssey I was undertaking. I struck up a light conversation with an elderly man. He was tucked into the space behind the driver in his electric wheelchair. We were two gabby, older men, enjoying the chat, not a mobile phone nor an ear bud in sight. We were in the now, in the moment, in the space and in the company. On the Glider.
The man praised the Glider, said he travelled on it at least three times a week, knew the drivers and the inspectors. He told me he was going to ‘get some goods’. He wasn’t surprised by my odyssey. Age and free travel have their benefits.
My accent carries sufficient residual warmth of a south of Ireland brogue to cause him to think I am a tourist, rather than a resident of Derry, one hundred kilometres west of us. I gave a nod towards local sensibilities, when he asked where I was from.
He reckoned I was from Dublin. I said I was from Londonderry, as the Glider crossed the River Lagan across the Albert Bridge and trundled gamely onto the road called after it. Jousting with city names remains a feature of social intercourse of our place. I had direct experience of it when I toured my plays to non-theatre and community venues in the area in the late nineteen nineties.
I recognised shop fronts and buildings. Red bricks, both new build and old build. The community centre that hosted the theatre company that produced my plays had a different name, but bore the same transient, impoverished look its predecessor bore, when myself and actors worked in halls and clubs in its vicinity. No change there.
I write this soon after over one thousand members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), in military (khaki) and civilian (white shirts, black ties and trousers) uniforms marched along the Glider route I took in February, showing their strength and readiness. The UVF is on the UK list of terrorist organisations.
Another year marked out in stamping feet.
Another year marked out in shoe leather.
Another year trodden underfoot.
Another year.
The interface remains the interface.
The man in the wheelchair got off near the Connswater Shopping Centre. The Glider eased to a stop at a Halt, doors opened and the man exited comfortably, via the special drop-kerb designed to align bus, pavement and wheelchair for easy access and egress. Not exactly Vorsprung durch Technik, but certainly technical progress. And German.
Two young ticket inspectors got on. I showed them my senior citizen Smart Pass for free travel. I told them my plan. They were mildly amused, but helpful. They didn’t see themselves as tourist guides, working on one of the open-topped, red double deckers. They had a chat, then one of them took my pass again and performed a work-around on his hand-held computer that meant I would not have to show it again.
The Glider turned right off the Albertbridge Road onto the Newtownards Road, at a junction where, while touring one of my plays, I rear-ended a local’s car at the traffic lights. I was driving a car hired by the theatre company, containing actors, costumes and the play-set. Police came. Traffic backed up. Insurance details were swapped. I remember a chilly spring evening. I worried if we would be late for the performance, but matters were handled with speed and ease. The show must got on and it did.
I passed churches, with adjacent halls. I remembered theatre work I’d made there. I recalled lugging the four heavy walls of the set for my play AH 6905 up the gloomy stairs of a large lodge – Orange? Freemason? - to a cavernous room, where a small and attentive audience engaged intently with the brave actor who, from his imagined hospital bed, took them through the search for the truth of the violence he and they lived with.
If I open my innards to this truth recovery and let the world listen to the thrum of blood in my heart, the gush of bile in my spleen, the susurrations of air in my lungs, the drip, drip, drip of urine in my kidneys, the clatter of corpuscles and platelets in my arteries, when I sound them all from deep inside where the dead reside, will I be healed?
The legacy remains the legacy.
We traversed Ballyhackamore (Baile Hacamar), along the Upper Newtownards Road, with its fine library and assorted restaurants and cafés. Though still seeming to be in Belfast city, at least the suburbs, we had entered Castlereagh (An Caisleán Riabhach) in County Down. The place names retain their Gaelic underpinning, no matter how severely the geographers garbled them.
Were the shops and the houses becoming more affluent? Is that a pawn brokers? Every motion is an act of observing and omitting, confusing memories and casting images into a personal oblivion. We were well up the Newtownards Road, still heading east, when, as pert as a rabbit out of a hat, Stormont, the seat of government appeared.
The Parliament building is visible as a stately home atop a hillock at the end of an avenue ascending from the road. It is surrounded by parklands, lawns and trees, open to the public. It exudes the distant, stolid air of a mercantile and imperial past. It is one of a cluster of buildings of different ages, serving civil service and government functions. It is a political hub of a devolved region of the Kingdom, now housing the intermittent Legislative Assembly. It’s where ‘softer’ manifestations of the conflict, seen in marching and opposition to marching, that occur on the streets, plays out in procedures and debates, spancilled by the key-holders of the Treasury in London.
War is over. War continues.
I’m waiting for history to begin again. It’s a funny thing. When you actually take part in history, not just live your life as an innocent bystander, but take centre-stage, even in small way, history stops. I’m waiting for it to restart.
We glode past the Stormont Estate and reached Dundonald, a leafy suburb, where the Ulster Hospital rose up on the left. I know there is an ice-rink nearby, but we didn’t pass it. Seeing the hospital reminded me that I had an appointment in another hospital in the early afternoon. As I write, some months later, I recall that I declined to go forward with a below-the-knee amputation of my left leg. I plumped for conservative treatment, rather than surgery. I still have both legs and their part-amputated feet. Podiatry sustains me, week by week.
Soon after the hospital, the glider pulled into its eastern terminus at the Dundonald Park and Ride, which had me grinning at the thought of a publicly provided facility for ‘dogging’. The car park was full, but not active, in that sense. We stayed for ten minutes. The two young inspectors got off and joined another Glider, pulling away as we arrived. Our driver got out, stretched his legs, had a cigarette, then off we went once more.
What you see depends on where you look at it from. We were on the other side of the road, heading east to west. Still in the east – the Orient - we headed for the west, the Occident of Belfast. Going east to west revealed sights I hadn’t seen earlier.
I fellow-travelled with Edward Said.
Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires.
We pass Cherry Hill. The sense that we are gliding through middle class suburbs quickens. Denizens of these houses work in the government buildings, the hospital and the shops nearby, as well as in shops and offices in the city centre. I know we are near the Ballybeen Estate, but the Glider stays on the main road. The estate has a fine tradition of amateur theatre productions. I worked with theatre makers there long before the Glider ploughed along the main route into the city.
There are trees, but no blossoms yet in February, cherry or otherwise. People get on, nodding to each other and settle in with friends and acquaintances, already aboard. There is chat about the weather. Chilly outside. People wearing coats. Hoodies and caps. The Glider is cosy.
One woman asks about my feet, pointing at my crutches – did you break it? I reply with the short version. I weary of boring people with tales of my medical, not accidental, problems, my lack of toes, my ulcerated stumps and suppurating wounds, my vascular impediments, the absence of blood-flow, the traduced lungs, the wasting muscles and the ‘partridge in a pear tree’. The woman is happy with my line about medical problems.
Ailing is the common human condition.
We pass the hospital again. It never stops working. We pass Parliament Buildings, which stopsintermittently, but then staggers on. The Glider glides past a Visitor Centre, highlighting the writer CS Lewis. A local yearning for attachment to a notable historical figure receives an airing.
Graffiti we pass is engaging. Support for the Northern Ireland Football team is by-lined ‘… our wee country’. A wall has the four letter word HOPE painted squarely across it. I see it later, further west. Hope, but not Peace?
We pass Conn’s Water, named for the native landowner Conn Bacach O’Neill, who submitted to King Henry V111, and was then dubbed First Earl of Tyrone. The water dips under the road, submitting to the tar and the roadworks, before re-emerging to continue its journey to the Lagan and the Irish Sea. I sound his middle name: bacach. In English, the word is ‘lame’. Without any irony, it can also be used to mean ‘beggarly’.
We return over the eastern road. I look left and right confirming the sites I passed earlier. I get a better view of the eye-catching home of Bright Umbrella theatre company in an old church and I smile. I favour the humanist rituals of theatre over the divine rituals of religion.
The transition from east to west is marked by flags. An occasional Israeli flag was visible on my glide to the east. Now Palestinian flags appear. There are never many of either, but it always surprising that the flags of two places far away should be adorning street furniture on the Glider route. Territorial marking has long been a feature of cities and towns where I live. The destruction of Gaza and the immolation of multitudes by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) draws flag-waving from this place.
The switch in flag-waving coincides with our arrival at the city centre. We glide past one of Belfast’s gems, St George’s Market. I imagine I can smell the fresh bread and soups being devilled up for lunch. But not yet. It opens on weekends and I still have the western odyssey to complete.
We are now on the same streets as Glider 2, which loops between the City Hall and the Titanic Quarter, the site of a museum to a sunken passenger liner, which draws thousands of people to ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at engineering work and unequal opulence. I stay on the G1, which is well-appointed, if not opulent, with admirable engineering, keeping travellers in egalitarian safety and comfort.
The city centre is busy, with workers, shoppers and visitors. We move with ease and, as well as picking up some other west bound voyagers, the Glider picks up another language. Signage becomes bi-lingual, with Irish added to the English names for Halts.
Millfield/Páirc an Mhuillinn presents us with a motorway, after which we pass Divis Tower. A sense of recent history rises within me, not memories of grainy black and white images of gun-battles and vehicle burnings, but of social deprivation that adheres to most urban scenes of high-rise public housing. We glide up the Falls Road, beside a wall of murals covering international and local conflicts. They are images of resistance and resilience, in the face of war. They are tourist magnets.
The most famous one is of Bobby Sands, a commander in The Irish Republican Army (IRA). He died in prison, while on hunger strike. I think of Gandhi, who used, and urged others to use, the hunger strike weapon. I think of violence and non-violence and my own fragile efforts to use art as a tool for non-violence. The two forms are enmeshed with one another, directly and indirectly.
Earth has no wonders greater than us
And yet, being earthly, why all the fuss?
We fight and bicker, shout and squawk
But find it hard to simply talk.
And harder still to simply listen
Do we know what we are missing?
Then the surprising green of Dunville Park appears on my left before we cross the Grosvenor/Falls/Springfield junction to halt outside Royal Victoria Hospital. I’ve been there a number of times, for consultations, surgeries and to visit friends. Each time I visit there, I quietly vow I will never go there again, except to visit friends. It’s a vow certain to disappointment me.
The main entrance is deep inside the vast complex, not on the Glider route. I entered it over twelve years ago, a survivor of a critical illness and a stay in my local hospital’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU), frail, yet upright. My wife was with me. An older woman was helped into a wheelchair by her son. When I overheard them ask for directions at the desk, I learned we were going to the same ward. We joined ten other infirm patients.
Later a surgeon cut a slice from my thigh muscle, held it in the air and intoned: “There’s a nice slice of steak for you”. His junior stitched me up and I returned to the ward. The man in the bed next to me welcomed me and we chatted about medical matters and books. The woman I’d seen earlier was down in surgery. I didn’t see her return. I have become her, in the years since, less frail but more often in a wheelchair and needing assistance now.
Years go by. Time passes.
It’s still humans hunched over machines. It’s still clocking on and clocking off and the clock on the wall is still stuck at twenty to three, only now it’s twenty to three in the morning because they’re wide awake all over the world and nobody sleeps anymore because the great wonder of manufacture is a tireless reptile with no eyelids.
More Palestinian flags now. Gaza is everywhere and, as world phenomenon, it will be with us for years to come, even after all the flags come down. I will write more plays and novels. Is that enough?
We pass the teacher training college on the right, then An Cultúrlann, Belfast’s Irish language and culture centre, on the left. I recall work I made in the theatre upstairs. Full houses for work in English and in Irish. Heartening ephemera and a livelihood. Does it count? Does it have weight in the social balance? Does it make for better living for the makers and the audience? These are the hard wonderings that captivate me, as the glider passes the City Cemetery and Falls Park, the dead and living side by side.
We had a box in the attic. Not a very big box. And the attic is as cold as the grave. Come the day I couldn't get up there anymore, they took the box down for me, to keep in the wardrobe. The dust tried to cover it, but I brushed it off. The dust is covering him and that’s too much. So I wouldn’t let it near the box.
We pulled in beside the Kennedy Centre, the shopping arcade serving the area. I bought socks there once. I can’t remember why, though I was staying in a B and B across the road. Why did I need socks?
A complicated junction moves the Glider from Falls to Andersonstown and we pass the derelict sports arena, Casement Park. Plans to create a stadium fit to host major international tournaments and concerts are floundering on rising costs, political wrangling and local objections. The stadium is owned by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), but games haven’t taken place there for a number of years. Precedents for having non-GAA games played in GAA stadiums have been set, notably in Croke Park, where soccer and rugby games have taken place, when the relevant sporting associations needed a large venue. An Ireland-England rugby international in 2007 laid down a marker that such events could be possible. But that was Dublin and this is Belfast.
As I write, Euros 2024 is underway, with teams from Albania to Scotland and countries in between bringing the best of European footballers to compete in stadiums across Germany. The next tournament in 2028 will use stadiums in Ireland and the UK. A redeveloped Casement Park is listed as one of the venues for games, but without a sod turned, the chances of games happening at the Andersonstown Road venue look slim.
Now the road rises to the hills on the western edge of the city, taking Stewartstown Road at the junction with Shaws Road. Housing estates perch on the high ground, as we glide along the floor of Colin Glen, the ravine and river that were there long covered with human development. Urban though it definitely is, the landscape makes me wonder if we haven’t actually left the city.
Suffolk and the sub-villages of Dunmurry sit cheek by jowl, in one of the most demographically complex areas of the city. Flags appear again. Irish tricolours. Palestinian.
Arriving at Lagmore feels like achieving a summit. Streets upon streets climb to the right. Where meadows, parkland and farms once held the ground, suburbanites gather, including the families of those who worked in the ill-fated De Lorean car production plant. This is the home of ‘back-to-the-future’. We are at the western end of the glide when we arrive at the McKinstry Road roundabout, confident that the urban sprawl continues on to the next city, almost without interruption, at Lisburn.
The Glider pulls in. I am the only passenger. The driver gets off and strolls around, stretching his shoulders and smoking. I send a text message to my wife, hoping her odyssey for hiking boots has been successful. I suggest we meet for lunch. I suggest a time and a place. She message’s back that she got the boots she wanted and agrees to meet.
The driver remounts for my last leg. School children get on, travel a stretch, then get off. A young mother skilfully manoeuvres a double buggy safely aboard, its twin denizens sound asleep. She gets off at the hospital. I hope the children are well.
Lunch is in the City Centre, at The Linenhall Library. There is a stop just outside. Inside are books, people, a café and a history of endeavours towards social and political justice launched by artisans in 1788. It holds an archive of the first ten years of the work of Sole Purpose Productions, the theatre company that produced the plays quoted here. I am pleased to have something lodged within an archive of work by people pushing against oppressions for over two hundred years.
The soup is a hearty, vegetable broth. My wife’s boots are two brown, soft-coated, but hardy, puppies, snuggled together in a tissue-lined box. She’s pleased with them. We chat about our separate mornings and make plans for the afternoon’s medical appointment. It will involve me facing down the surgeon’s blade and limping onwards.
Ever onwards. On crutches. In a wheelchair. Aboard a mobility scooter.
Gliding all over the world.
Plays in a Peace Process, Dave Duggan, Guildhall Press, Derry, 2008
Orientalism, Edward W. Said, Vintage, London, 2014
East Belfast Memorial Parade, 15.6.2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66Wxlb3HfOk
Dave Duggan is a dramatist and novelist, living and working in Derry.
www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter
