Disoriented in Dublin and Belfast

Let me collect my thoughts. Right now, Kay and I are at one of those airport hotels near the Dublin airport. Not bad, but no place you’d want to hang out for any length of time if you had options. Kay and I have a noonish flight out of here, and since we gain some time heading west, we should get there about 2:00 PM. Then we catch the C&J bus up to Portsmouth; beyond that I have not projected.

On Wednesday we were in Belfast in Northern Ireland. We took the train up, and it’s hard to comprehend that you are actually entering a different country. There is no border checkpoint, and the people don’t seem any different. But they do use different money; it’s the euro in the Republic of Ireland and the pound in Northern Ireland. Also, as soon as we hit the border, the SIM card I bought for my phone stopped working and I had to pick up a new one once we got to our hotel.

Belfast itself was very interesting. It’s a bit grittier than Dublin, probably because there are fewer tourists. The first night we were there, there were any number of inebriated folks staggering down the center of the streets or passed out on the benches. They have great pubs, but I noticed that the bouncers (who prefer to be called “door supervisors”) weren’t there for show. These guys were all business, scanning the crowd and circulating.

I’ve worked in a few bars and even shown a few troublemakers the door. I should mention that when someone was being a pain in these bars, sometimes they were told to go home for the rest of the night. If they made a habit of this, they could be, in the universal parlance of the restaurant business, “86ed.” Former FBI director James Comey is being prosecuted by the US DOJ for posting this picture:

This did not mean we beat them up or murdered them. The term is literally never used that way. Merriam‑Webster defines “eighty‑six” primarily as “to refuse to serve (a customer)” and more broadly as “to eject, dismiss, or remove (someone)” and “to remove (an item) from a menu.” And our Dear Leader, who has owned plenty of restaurants, knows that. I’m going to enjoy watching the DOJ lawyers try to make that case. If I were the judge hearing the case, I would throw it out, sanction the prosecution lawyers, and refer them for investigation to their bar associations. Who knows, maybe they’d be 86ed from the legal profession. But again, I digress.

But Belfast has some of the most atmospheric pubs I’ve ever seen. But don’t take my word for it:

I’ve reached the point in my travels where I am having trouble sequencing events. Yesterday in Belfast, Kay and I booked a Black Cab tour, which is essentially hiring a local taxi driver as your historian and storyteller. They drive you through areas most tourists would never find on their own, including the Republican Falls Road and the Loyalist Shankill Road, to see the political murals and the peace wall. It was pretty amazing in a deeply disturbing way.

I should say here that this blog is free; it isn’t a commercial enterprise, and I’m not trying to make my fortune as an influencer. I write because I like to write, and this blog is my online journal for friends, family, and anyone else who might be interested. So if I plug something, it’s because I want to give credit where credit is due; nobody pays me to say that their pizza was awesome. With that out of the way, I want to say that our black cab driver in Belfast, Jim, was exceptional. He was deeply knowledgeable and explained the Troubles in a remarkably even‑handed way. If you find yourself in Belfast and want to understand the conflict that took thousands of lives over decades, I would strongly recommend a Black Cab tour with Jim—his website is https://niblacktaxitours.com/.

There are murals depicting some of the leaders from both sides of the conflict:

I know we went to the Giant’s Causeway yesterday. Kay and I caught the “Paddy-Wagon” busline there, and they had a great/driver-tour guide.  BTW, I realize that some might see the term “paddy wagon” to be, at minimum, a microaggression. It seems to me that if the actual Irish aren’t offended, you shouldn’t be either. In the course of his commentary, he mentioned that Viagra is made by Pfizer in a factory outside the city of Cork, which is true. He also asserted that a gang of “hardened criminals” hijacked a truckload of the stuff some years ago (Yuk yuk).

It takes about an hour and change to travel from Belfast to the Giant’s Causeway. Samuel Johnson was supposedly asked whether the Giant’s Causeway was worth seeing. Wait, who was Samuel Johnson?

Samuel Johnson was an 18th‑century English writer, critic, and all‑purpose opinion machine who more or less installed himself as the voice of literary authority for his generation. He’s best known for producing a massive dictionary of the English language more or less by hand, with the help of a few underpaid assistants and a lot of coffee (or whatever passed for it in 1755). He wrote essays, biographies, poems, and long, sternly worded judgments about other people’s writing, many of which are still quotable and some of which are still annoying.

Johnson was also a world‑class talker, which is why we remember him so vividly. His friend James Boswell followed him around, writing down his conversations and quirks in obsessive detail, so we have this almost modern, documentary sense of the man: brilliant, pious, depressed, funny, often kind, sometimes cruel, and absolutely certain of his views. If there had been cable news in his day, he’d have had his own show and terrified the producers. Instead, we have Boswell’s Life of Johnson and a trail of sharp remarks like the Giant’s Causeway line—perfect little sound bites from a time before anyone knew what a sound bite was. For example:

• “Hell is paved with good intentions.”
• “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
• “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”
• “A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”

Good stuff. But when asked about the Giant’s Causeway, he is quoted as saying, “Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.”

Well, you can’t be right about everything. My investigations lead me to believe that this comment was less about the Causeway itself and more about Johnson’s disinclination toward travel than the Causeway. Boswell, his biographer quotes him as saying,

“Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

Well, I’ve always loved London, but I also like to get out in the countryside now and again. Here’s the Giant’s Causeway; judge for yourself.

On the way back, we also drove by a country lane that doubled as the King’s Road in the Game of Thrones series. You can’t stop; the bus driver has to crawl by slowly. This spot was so popular with Game of Thrones fans that the exhaust from their vehicles started killing the trees. 

A brief digression regarding Game of Thrones. I may be one of the few people in the United States who never made it through a full episode. I like a good hack and slash movie as much as the next guy, maybe even more. But the show was simply too violent for me. I did make it most of the way through the first book. It wasn’t bad. I’ve read a lot of fantasy and science fiction in my time and George Martin is a pretty good author. But I think my reaction is best summed up by a conversation I had with a book editor at one of the psychological conventions I attended. We were talking because she was selling one of my books, Getting Started in Forensic Psychology Practice (available on Amazon at competitive prices). Not sure how we got on the subject, but she asked me how I liked the book. She seemed stunned when I told her that the book filled me with despair. I explained that it was ok but seemed more like a soap opera with murder, torture, and dismemberment than a great fantasy book. But that wasn’t the deal breaker.

The first book is about 700 pages long. The next four books (and there are two more that may or may not be written) add up to another 3500 pages. A single-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien is about 1200 pages tops, and while I really enjoyed it, that was plenty, the endless poetry and Tom Bombadil notwithstanding. The idea of slogging through another 3500 pages of Game of Thrones sounded more like a punishment than a good read, and George Martin is no J.R.R. Tolkien. But to each his own.

I really enjoyed the half-day excursion. Belfast is in the Northern Ireland county of Antrim, and once you get out of the city, the views from the bus are great. Just to be clear, there are good reasons to go to Dublin and Belfast: Trinity College, shopping, history, all that. But once you have done that, Ireland (for us tourists) is mostly about scenic drives along the coast, castles (both ruined and going concerns), churches, pubs, and music. If you fly into Shannon, rent a car, and drive up through Clare, Sligo, and Donegal and then around the northern coast of Northern Ireland, you won’t be sorry, plus it will be a bit cheaper than the south.

I imagine I’ll do another post summing up my experiences and the deep insights drawn from my latest wander. Until then, my best to all of you—may the road rise to meet you, and may your travels be a little less germ-laden than mine.