Little shopping, mostly horrors

Nestling in at the IFI, Sunday afternoon. The movie was The Orphanage (right), a horror that could have been a great drama about living with the echoes of child abuse. Instead it played off the emotional potency of tragedies involving children, exploiting a ready excuse to round up the usual clichéd devices and dole them out at regular intervals.

You can picture the scene: a desolate vista of emotionally distraught characters whose lives have been permanently ruined by traumatic events in the past.

Except that actually describes Saturday afternoon, in Belfast. It was the most grisly tourist happy fun bus I've ever taken, even if the guide's patter was unintentionally hilarious at times. Myself and Megan had a great time seeing Jonatha Brooke perform candidly in front of a fraction of her usual crowd, but I have to say it seems the ten years I put off visiting Belfast to allow for the bad old days to disappear made for an overly optimistic timeframe.

I couldn't decide which eyesore was worse. There's the sectarian 'peace line' that uses corrugated fencing to separate the Falls Road and the Shankill Road, with the road between the two closed all weekend. The two roads themselves, which basically consist of a series of tit-for-tat, violence-glorifying acts of painted vandalism wedged in between dilapidated buildings and angry-looking men with no hair. Or the five-metre blast wall outside the old courthouse right in the centre of the city, a car bomb retardant that is so thick it doesn't even stick out at first glance because it looks big enough to be a subsidiary court building.

Of course the times are changing, as the tour bus lady says proudly and cheerfully, because we've got a 24-hour Tesco 'right here in the city' (on the side of a dual carriageway). You had to laugh at its inclusion alongside the rest of the travelling shop of horrors, and I can vouch that 6.55pm on a regular Friday evening was more like that of a Bank Holiday evening in Dublin, with only restaurants and pubs open.

So while one must be seen to be politically correct about Northern Ireland, I think they know most of us down here don't go there too often. We were practically cheering at the sight of Dublin unfolding before our eyes on the drive back down an empty A1/M1. For fans of Shakespearean imagery, it was grey and wet when we left Belfast, giving way to bright, bright sun due south. Enough said.