Our last trip to Northern Ireland, almost exactly a year ago, was undertaken with the express intention of visiting the Titanic Museum; a very simple aim that was thwarted by the people of northern Europe’s oldest and mightiest foe: the weather. A few days before we were scheduled to fly to Belfast, Storm Kathleen dislodged a portion of the museum’s roof (very important to preface the name ‘Kathleen’ with ‘Storm’ else you’ll be imagining some giant, maniacal woman scaling the building like King Kong, demanding to see the manager), and it was closed for repairs. This necessitated a swift reworking of our itinerary, and though the day trip wasn’t without its upsets and logistical challenges we managed to have a fun and fulfilling time. It’s hard to feel too aggrieved when you’re driving along beautiful, rugged coastlines under cold blue skies, and hopscotching over the Giant’s Causeway (where I witnessed my first-born, Jack, clambering onto a huddle of monstrously large boulders and proclaiming: ‘Hey, these look like huge testicles’).
We shook ourselves awake at 5am and got a lift from my bleary-eyed sister to the airport. No delays this year. Everything went like clockwork. A couple of hours later we had picked up our hire car at Belfast International and were on our way to Belfast. Having never driven in Belfast before, I was glad that SatNav existed.
SatNav has become so ubiquitous it’s almost as indivisible from us as a microchip in the brain. The memory of my mum and step-dad as they pored over a crumpled map unfolded so it almost blotted out the entire windscreen of the car, edging ever closer to divorce or murder as they tried to determine just where the fuck we were, may as well be in sepia tones with old-timey music playing over it, and if we ever had to return to those ancient days I dare say I’d just stop going anywhere. And I mean anywhere. I’d just sit in my house strapped to my armchair like Hannibal Lecter, pissing and shitting myself all day rather than face a trip to the bathroom without the help of a benignly monotonous – but still somehow sexy – computerised voice saying things like: “At the next cistern, sit down, and unbutton trousers. Stay on toilet for 10 minutes. Make a U-Bend.”
Certainly, navigating my way through Belfast city centre using a physical map would’ve been a torture comparable to taking a heavily-armed hamster dressed as a medieval knight up the bum, given that even with SatNav I managed to take a wrong turn three times. And on two of those times it was the same wrong turn.
“Slight left? IT’S EITHER A FUCKING LEFT OR IT ISN’T!” is a phrase I’m certain escaped my lips. That and: “I hope you like this stretch of motorway, boys, because apparently we’re going to be spending the next three days driving up and down the fucker.”
In my defence, my difficulties weren’t born entirely of incompetence. When I’m driving in an unfamiliar place and there are cars whooshing on all sides, weaving to and fro like maniacal dodgem cars, and I’m trying anticipate what each of those drivers are doing or are going to do, all the while reciting a mantra in my head – usually “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck” – I don’t have any brain processing power leftover for navigation, much less reasonableness or sanity. I’m reduced to a sweating human fist behind the steering wheel, one who sometimes unfurls into a middle finger [scribbles down movie idea – Imagine ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ meets ‘Transformers’ meets ‘The Fast and the Furious’. You’ve just imagined ‘The Fist and the Fuck-you-rious’, starring Vin Diesel as a giant human fist called Greg, but pronounced ‘Creg’ because apparently Americans don’t know how to speak].
Eventually – half an hour later and the depletion of half a tonne more adrenaline than anticipated – we reached Belfast’s Titanic Quarter (and after the motorway debacle I could’ve comfortably smoked a quarter in relief, chased down with ten litres of pirate grog). We were all starving, having eschewed breakfast due to the ungodly hour at which we’d had to clamber out of our beds. My inner calm, reclaimed from the road, didn’t last long. One look at the prices in the Titanic Museum’s café had my cortisol levels shooting back up and ringing the bell at the top of my Angst-O-Meter. There are only tourist destinations in that quarter of the city, no regular shops, and so the cafes and restaurants have a monopoly on food and snacks. And don’t they ever. The next exclamation to escape my lips was: “Six pounds for a fucking egg sandwich!?” I thought about the thousands who’d lost their lives on the Titanic; the men, women and children who’d bubbled down into the icy tomb of the sea, gargling with choke-mouthed terror as they went, and it quickly occurred to me that at least they’d never been charged £22 for two sandwiches, a croissant, a bottle of water and a small latte. They don’t know they’re dead, they really don’t.
The entry fee for all three of us to enter the museum proper was about £60. Just to put that into perspective: that’s ten egg sandwiches. The opening section of the museum, accessible up a short escalator, was engaging but unremarkable. Lots of giant pictures and diagrams, lots of old clothes and kitchenware behind glass, the odd diorama, much like the layout of any other museum you’ve ever visited, where you wander around nodding intently at things – ‘Oooh, look, it’s a vase from four hundred years ago, isn’t that amazing’ – as you try to pretend that you aren’t so bored you’re about to start pulling bits of your own brain down through your nose just for something interesting to do. There were, admittedly, some cool things to see and do, but we were trapped inside a shambling, ever-growing herd of fellow looksters, so the only thing we could really do without any problems was get pressed into a wall as we muttered obscenities. The farther we shimmied through the labyrinth, squeezed into and between remorseless throngs of people, the more I worried that the museum wasn’t going to get any more entertaining. Had I dragged the kids across an ocean just for them to have as shit a time as we could have been having in Fife for a fraction of the price? At least in Fife we would’ve been able to wolf down at least twenty-five egg sandwiches for the money.
This visit to the museum really was important, especially after our thwarted attempt the year before. Both my kids are fascinated by the Titanic, but my youngest, Christopher, is a proper fan-boy. Because of his passion for and knowledge of the subject his primary four teacher even introduced the Titanic as a class project. I didn’t want to be responsible for wrecking his vibe, sinking his love for the world’s most famous doomed ship to the murky depths of his subconscious.
Luckily, one elevator ride changed everything. Before we knew it we were in the queue for the closest thing this museum had to a rollercoaster. You climb into what looks like a mutant cross between a multi-level dodgem cart and an alpine cable-car, and you’re taken along, around, and down a massive physical structure that’s augmented with ‘sets’ and multi-media displays – of sound, of light, of heat – the whole ride meant to simulate and convey the experience of being on the Titanic’s construction crew. And it’s incredibly impressive. In fact, I give it a five egg-sandwich rating.
From that point on – post cable-car – the kids were engaged and enthused. They pored over the 3-D schematics of the docks like Harland & Wolff CEOs, comparing the model with the very real view outside the window, where the actual Titanic once sat chained before plunging off towards the ocean and onwards to its destiny. They marvelled at the light display that projected the rolling wreckage of the ship beneath their feet. They stood in reverence as the names of the fallen appeared on a giant wall, and recoiled in distaste as flashing statistics revealed the very real class-related disparities in survival outcome. There was a recreation of the first-class deck at the Titanic’s bow, complete with artificial seascape. There was a simulation of a lift that carried you from the bowels of the ship up through the different social strata to the towering funnels above deck, all while you stood still, immersive video screens to your right, left and centre providing the incredible yet slightly disorienting illusion. And, of course, there was a small replica of the bit of the ship that Rose and Jack did their ‘I’m the king of the world’ bit in the 1997 movie, which the boys were keen to utilise, given that they do that ‘I’m the king of the world’ scene most places we go. Wherever there are boats or water (and sometimes neither).
Just when we thought we’d got our sandwiches’ worth from the visit we realised that our ticket entitled us to board the SS Nomadic, berthed in the Hamilton Dry Dock a short-walk from the main museum. The Nomadic was used by the White Star Line to ferry passengers, provisions and mail from dock to ship. In 1912 it would’ve carried passengers from the dock at Cherbourg to the Titanic, which had been moored offshore due to its, well, titanic size (I see what they did there). Being able to walk in the footsteps of people who’d boarded the Titanic added a physical dimension and thus a human one to our understanding of the disaster. An empirical connection isn’t a pre-requisite for empathy, but it helps. To see and feel an experience through someone else’s eyes. And… other body parts. “Dad?” my youngest, Christopher, asked, “Do you think some of the passengers would’ve done a shit in the same toilet I’ve just done one?”
A very worthwhile morning. A sensory feast, a treasure trove of facts and details, a deeply humanising experience. But in a universe where the Titanic’s crew had dodged the iceberg and survived would we have journeyed all this way to visit the more sedate ‘Belfast Nautical Museum’ that I’ve just invented? I doubt it. It says a lot about the rubber-necking nature of us as a species that we sometimes need a wee sprinkling of death to generate or maintain our interest.
Are you enjoying the movie? Bit boring so far actually. Well, keep watching, because someone gets their head blown off in about ten minutes. Great!
Hey, you want to check out these ships? Yawn. Did I mention that thousands drowned? Hot DAMN, why didn’t you say so sooner?!
Our next port of call, far from any actual port this time, perfectly embodied that equation (learning + brutality = 😊). Crumlin Road Gaol is a Victorian-era prison that was operational between 1846 and 1996, during which time it housed everyone from low-level thieves (quite possibly including people who’d stolen expensive egg sandwiches from museum cafes) to combatants and terrorists on both sides of the Troubles.
The Troubles. Not quite a war, civil or otherwise, and they had to call it something, I guess, but ‘the Troubles’ sounds less like a long-standing political and sectarian conflict between two sets of ideas and nation states in which thousands in every strata of society lost their lives or were otherwise maimed or forever changed, and more like how your prudish aunty would describe her period. Whatever its name, it was a conflict that was – much like your aunty’s monthlies – brutal, bloody, and not something you’d want your children mixed up in.
The grisly history of the gaol, as presented on plaques and video screens, and through props and mannequins, was fascinating, but we enjoyed most of all the simple sensation of existing in a place that would normally be blocked to us. Blocked for reasons of historical obsolescence but, hopefully, also because none of the three of us is going to end up in actual jail. It’s my fond hope, though, that if either or both of my children do end up in prison that they enter as the crème de la crème of criminals, like that bit in Goodfellas where they’re all allowed to cook gourmet Italian meals in their cells because they’re the shit.
We learned that the prison itself was an active battleground for the Troubles. In 1991 an IRA bomb went off inside the canteen. A year later, loyalist paramilitaries fired an RPG-7 rocket at the prison. These were sensationalist details, that had the kids raising their eyebrows in both alarm and excitement, the latter probably to do with me having watched far too many action movies with them over the years. In one of the cells we watched a short animated film that summarised the history of the island of Ireland and the Troubles, from the 12th century right up to the Good Friday agreement and beyond. Even though I’ve a smattering of knowledge on the subject, I found it just as instructive as the kids did.
The tour – which was largely free-range until the end – came to a close in the room where they hanged the condemned prisoners, complete with noose dangling from the ceiling and a giant lever bolted to the floor. We left the gaol and wandered down the street to the Shankhill Road to see the murals of and from the Troubles – many of them astonishingly artistic – that were still displayed on the gable-ends of shops and houses. Just as it was hard to connect the real and brutal history of Crumlin Road Gaol with the benign building we visited – with its photo opportunities and on-site restaurant/steakhouse; hell, people even get married there these days – it was difficult to imagine this pleasant and painted street being patrolled by British soldiers. From there we walked to the Peace Wall, and tried to comprehend what it must’ve been like to live in a city so polarised and divided – literally and physically divided. The whole length of the wall, top to bottom, was covered in messages, slogans and graffiti, stretching as far as the eye could see. Some of it was poetic, some philosophical. Somewhere, I’m sure, though I never saw it, was the insinuation that Tracey takes it up the arse. It was sobering, though. The difference between then and now. I guess, given enough time, everything becomes a tourist attraction: castles where blood ran like water and heads used to be lined up on pikes (“Cheer up, mate, they’ll be selling keyrings of your decapitated face here in a few hundred years”); jails where people huddled and died in misery, and sometimes got their bollocks blow-torched off; Fife
To be continued.
Next time: caves, castles and crap weather.
(I’m still not over the price of that sandwich)