Guest post - Those Were The Days, My Friend…

My cartoon of Kellys Cellars, Belfast to accompany the guest post by Jason O'Rourke

Do you remember when there used to be a metal paling fence outside Kelly’s Cellars that made a sort of corridor? It had a turnstile at the end, by St Mary’s. And there were those big gates at the end of Castle Street. Turnstile there too: once you left the city centre you couldn’t get back in. It was a real pain for guitar and banjo players to get through. They had to hold the cases tight to their body and shuffle through like prisoners on a chain gang. It was difficult enough when you’d had a few pints, never mind carrying a big case like that. I think those gates on Castle Street were the last ones to be removed.

We always used to play in Kelly’s on a Saturday evening, in the wee snug opposite the top door. It was just big enough for a small table and about seven people. It was brilliant, because once you were in there you could play away to your heart’s content, and the noise from the bar didn’t bother you. The ones at the edge of the session, where it spilled out into the bar, always got the melters asking for ‘Carrickfergus’, or the kids trying to sell jokes or cigarette lighters. So, you had to get there early enough to get a seat in the snug, and then you were on the pig’s back. It was no place for a non-smoker though; turned into a gas chamber within minutes of the session starting. You’d sit there playing tunes and there would be five Regal burning away in the ashtray, with nobody actually smoking them. Rollups were better because they’d just go out. There was so much free drink you would be steaming by ten. The bars used to close earlier back then, and once you were thrown out of one, you’d generally be trying to get in somewhere else for a late pint.

Guest Post - Moon Child

Jason O'Rourke gives a read in Belfast city centre

During the winter it gets dark early in Belfast. You may grudgingly accept that this is the price you pay for those heady long summer nights, but even so, it’s December now, and June is a long way off. It’s difficult to conjure the memory of warmth and blue evening skies when it’s pitch black at 5 p.m.

Tonight it is icy outside; the air is clean and clear. Despite interference from the orange streetlamps the evening sky is deep and massive; a myriad of stars can be seen in sharp focus. There are no clouds to hinder your view. On nights like this, when all these stars are visible, you look up at the sky in awe of the scale of it all: there are so many possibilities out there. The moon is a fat, blunt-ended, waxing crescent; almost gibbous. It hangs low in the sky, a colossal presence above the roof-ridges of the terraced houses, and its crater-pocks and lines are easily visible. Belfast is bathed in its pale light; the frosty pavements and rooftops glitter in its glow. It is entrancing; you want to stop the car to look at it.

(Guest post) Special Delivery: a Screenplay

The characters:

John McCarthy: Journalist, and former hostage during the Lebanon Hostage Crisis, held captive for five years from 1986 to 1991. Now making a documentary series for the BBC with Sandi Toksvig called Island Race.


 Big Tony: Taxi driver for AA Taxis on the Lower Ormeau Road. Sound big fella.

Act 1. Scene 1: The A2 between Belfast and Bangor, 1995, hedged rural landscape. Dawn is just breaking and the taxi’s headlamps are on. We see the car from behind, rolling calmly along the otherwise deserted road in the half-light. Big Tony is a reliable driver, and has been specifically sought out and tasked with collecting John McCarthy early in the morning. He knows who is in his cab. John is going to Bangor to visit his old cell mate Brian Keenan.

[We can hear the conversation from inside the taxi]:

Big Tony: Do I know you from somewhere?

John McCarthy: I’m John McCarthy.

Guest post - Big Fish

It is a beautiful, sunny Saturday in early June, and I am driving along the Ormeau past the old Post Office. On the other side of the road, outside the Bangla Bazar, are two Romanian men. They are probably in their forties, wearing tatty black trousers and mismatched shiny-elbowed suit jackets. The balding one with the Saddam Hussein moustache is my neighbour; he lives across the street from me, in a household of two families. The two men are passing an oversized bottle of white wine between them. It is nearly empty. My neighbour holds on to his bicycle with his left hand as he takes a good long swig from the bottle. His bike is old, the black paint giving way to patches of rust. There is a wicker basket attached to the front, suspended between the handlebars and the battered mudguard, and sticking out of it is a massive fish. Its dead black eyes glare accusingly at the living world around it. I don’t know what sort of fish it is, or what seas it came from. It is fat, oval shaped; the body must be at least two feet long. It is going to take some cooking.

Guest post - Wifeless

Jason O'Rourke giving a reading in Belfast city centre

I am waiting outside Botanic Station. I had been in Bangor earlier, playing some music for a charity event in a bar near the seafront. It was hosted by a TV sports journalist with a face made for Widescreen; it was, unexpectedly, even flatter and broader in the flesh than it looked on the news. I thought you were supposed to look bigger on the telly, not the other way round. He was very friendly and professional. I did my bit, got paid, and cleared off. Despite the offer of free pints, there would be no drinking for me – my wife and I had made plans for the afternoon, and soon she would be coming to lift me in the car.

It is busy outside the station, with ones going into the hairdressers and cafés, students getting carryouts from the off-licence, and music-lovers going into the second-hand record store over the road. I love that shop; it has a great selection of vinyl LPs and cassettes as well as CDs, and it’s not too pricey. Next door is a brilliant place that has an array of mops, clothes-pegs on cardboard, buckets, rubber washing-up gloves in packets, step ladders, laundry baskets, and all manner of other useful stuff, suspended and stacked around the door. The entrance entices with promises of an Aladdin’s Cave of plastic goods inside. I vow to go in and explore when I have a minute.