The Centre Cannot Hold

 I'm writing this instead of the film I'm supposed to be writing. I'm writing this instead of doing anything useful. The sun has finally reached Northern Ireland. I'm sat in my office, with the window open, so I can serenade the neighbours in their garden with David Bowie's Blackstar. There is a huge vase of white lilies in a green glass jug on the table next to me, the thick drooping stamens, sticky with tobacco coloured pollen. Its curling white flesh is latticed with veins in the sunlight. Lilies are my favourite flowers, but they are morbid buggers: that sickly sweet smell, their marble skin, the sumptuous decay. I'm thinking about death. There's a lot of it about, even on a sunny day. 

Susan and I went into town yesterday. A date day. The sun makes the Irish countryside beautiful. Because it rains all the time, this place never looks washed out, its always splendidly verdant, the rolling mossy hills, the brilliant trees. Never sallow or faded. That's the country. There is no such "beauty face" for the urban environment. Belfast is ugly. It suits the rain. It is glinting and amphibious, a bejeweled toad.  In the sunshine its cracks are exposed. Its decrepitude manifest, its lack of self regard obvious. It's let itself go. It stinks. 

There are good places in the town, but the connective tissue between them is diseased. There's no way of avoiding it, the arterial routes are rotten. All is scaffolding, uncompleted building projects, closed, boarded up shops, dead pubs, rubble. Stink. 

I'm sure it's the same everywhere. But I don't live everywhere. I live here. Except, I don't - it's August and I've been in the town centre three times this year. I've spent more time in Galway. The Burger King next to M&S has been closed since January and I didn't know. How does Burger King go out of business? The only shops that seemed to be doing business were Centra (gangs of teenagers standing around outside - I don't know whether that's good for trade or not) and Carolls, the Irish tat shop. In the past month I've been to Dublin, Galway and Belfast and Carrolls was doing a roaring trade in all of them - people buying Aran sweaters in a heatwave. I will never understand people. This might have impacted on my work. 

There is a general sense that everything is getting worse all the time. I live in a country without a government that relies on another country with no government for money. Consequently there is no money. Deals here are done in back rooms, envelopes are exchanged, mysterious fires happen, Belfast loses its historic buildings and half completed hotels for nobody rear their ugly heads. Businessmen, rev their Audis, and flash a Rylan smile into the review mirror. 

Over the Irish sea two liars lie to appease the basest desires of the worst people you've ever met (I'm from the south of England - I've met them) so they might further derail the country, as they have done for the last 12 years. We will never be rid of them because this is what the English people want. It's all they've ever wanted. They've laid siege to themselves. They've dragged back the ladder, slammed down the Port Cullis, and they're waiting now for disease and cannibalism to consume them, unaware or unbothered, that there is no one beyond the gates. No one wants to sack the castle - they have nothing anybody needs. 

This is worse than usual. Apologies. A friend appears to be dying. So I'm thinking about death. The start, the middle, the ending of death. I don't consider it a Great Adventure, more a massive disappointment.