Planes, Trains and Automobiles

(Actually, that’s a bit of a misleading title as there were no automobiles involved.  Well, one on Skye, but it doesn’t really factor into this post.  Buses, though, lots of buses.)

I’m not a particularly high-maintenance traveller.  This year, I’m especially good at going with the flow; I like wandering around without much of a plan beyond “Oh, I think maybe I’ll go there next”, and when you don’t really have an agenda set in stone, it’s easy to shrug and change your plans to fit what’s possible, even if it’s not quite what you originally set out to do.  A useful ability to have in this epic UK winter, one of the worst and earliest they’ve seen in years.

Things, on occasion, went awry.  Take, for example, Orkney.  My one “must see” on Orkney, Skara Brae (a Neolithic village dating back several thousand years) is shut when I'm there because the roads are impassable in the snow.  Okay, Plan B:  hike around Orkney to see smaller sites (but still very old and very interesting), doing my best not to die of exposure before I get back to the hostel that night.

Successfully accomplishing the not-dying, I hop a ferry back to the mainland and think I might toodle along the north coast over to Durness.  Another detour:  buses from Thurso (the ferry port) to Durness only run once a week (five days from now) in the winter, and — given current weather — in all likelihood won't go at all.  Okay, Plan B:  rather than waiting around a week or two for a bus that may not ever go till spring, hop a bus back to Inverness and then a train over to Ullapool, where I catch a ferry to Lewis.

No particular issues on Lewis, or getting from there to Skye, but leaving Skye, another detour:  I plan to catch the ferry from Skye to Mallaig on the mainland, and from there take the glorious West Highland line down to Oban.  Oops, no dice; ferry cancelled on account of weather (which I discover only AFTER I wait fruitlessly at the bus stop for an hour).  Okay, Plan B:  take the bus over the Skye bridge to Kyle of Lochalsh on the mainland, and either (a) catch a train from there back up to Inverness (completely the wrong way for Oban, but the most beautiful train ride ever so worth the detour), or (b) get a bus to Fort William and then on to Oban.

No trains running, so bye-bye, option (a).  Option (b) still possible, I just have to wait an hour or so for the Fort William bus.  It’s late, I’m frozen stiff by the time it arrives —but at least it arrives, so I’m on my way to Oban.  About 20 minutes outside Fort William, another detour:  no buses will be going further south that day, as the roads are closed.  My bus will go back to Skye, with any passengers who wish to return and try their luck again tomorrow. 

This causes great consternation on the part of the woman in the seat behind me, who keeps repeating "but I just don't know what to do" — should she go back to Skye for another night (but it's so expensive!), stay in Fort William and get an onward bus tomorrow (but where would she stay?), or go somewhere else like Inverness and down from there (but what if she gets stuck in Inverness? and wouldn't she get home really, really late?)  I finally interrupt her confused monologue and take her with me to the train station, to see if trains were running or not.  She clings to me like a leech all the way to the station (practically next door, but she is terrified about getting lost!) and we get tickets, so she is all sorted out. 

I memorize the streets of downtown Fort William as I traipse around for hours, finally landing in a coffee shop offering free Wi-Fi.  Train does go, eventually, although later than its promised 17:45 departure; I don’t mind leaving late.  At least I’m actually leaving.  (Fort William has no appeal.)

I get off at Crianlarich, where I must switch trains; wait is supposed to be about 20 minutes, but stretches out more than an hour, which I spend trying to stay warm.  There’s a little waiting room, with a heater activated by a push-button on the wall; the heater’s at one end and the button’s at the other, the heater’s on a five-minute timer and I am only warm while standing 6 inches from the heater.  So every five minutes, I dash out of the tiny circle of warmth to jab the “on” button and race back; at least I get my exercise while waiting for the train, but even so I have lost all feeling in my fingers and toes by the time it arrives.  But I get safely to Oban, so all ends well.

Leaving Oban, another detour:  no morning train.  I wait for the noon train, but it is not running either.  ScotRail is putting on a bus instead, but we have to wait a couple of hours while the bus gets driven to Oban and then for a new driver to be found (the first guy has logged too many hours at the wheel).  By late afternoon, finally on our way; another long, slow, treacherous journey.  My seatmate (7-year-old Willow) and I entertain ourselves with a drawing game:  one person draws a shape on the paper, and the other has to turn it into a picture of something.  We spend about three hours doing this, during which time she also questions me incessantly about Canada and tries to convince her mother (sitting across the aisle) to take her there for their next trip.  Eventually we’re in Glasgow and life is fine again for a while.

No problems with bus/ferry combo over to Belfast, or getting from Belfast to Derry on the train.  Deciding to cross the entire country in one fell swoop (Derry to Cork in a day) may be a questionable choice:  it’s not that far, distance-wise, but it’s a convoluted trip and requires changes of buses in Omagh, Longford, Athlone, and Limerick, with tight connections at each juncture.  No issues until the Athlone-to-Limerick leg, when the bus driver goes unspeakably slowly.  He dismisses our complaints with a “it’s the weather” shrug (even though there’s no snow to be seen, anywhere).  We’ve missed the connecting bus to Cork and will now have to hang around Limerick bus station for an extra hour and a half.  But eventually I get to Cork.  

My plan is to go visit Cobh (where I’d learned my O’Neill ancestors departed from) and its Heritage Centre with a genealogy centre and lots of information about the famine ships.  Slight detour in Cobh, as the genealogy researcher is on vacation.  But the helpful girl at the desk copies down her name, email address and phone numbers, and has a long chat with me about what kinds of information are helpful to have as starting points for further research.    I realize just looking for a “Dominick O’Neill” (no birthdate, county of residence or year of departure) might not net me much.  (Or, rather, it will net me far too many Dominicks and I’ll have no idea which is the correct one.).  So I resolve to track down more info when I get home.

Next step in the Irish plan (modified by spur-of-the-moment jaunt to Cork) calls for me to work my way back north to visit some of Sligo and Donegal before reverse bus/ferry trip back to Glasgow.  Unfortunately, “weather” hits Ireland too so — rather than head northwest where (if I even get there) I’m likely to get stuck and unable to get out — I decide to go northeast to Dublin instead.  Easy trip on the train from Cork.

I start to get worried about ever-more-ominous reports of flight problems at Heathrow and think it's more prudent to head back that way instead of more time in Ireland.  No ferry tickets either from Dublin or Belfast available for days, so I book a flight on Ryanair.  I opt to go back to Edinburgh and eke out a couple more travel days before London.

All’s well leaving Dublin, but about halfway there the co-pilot comes on the loudspeaker to tell us that Edinburgh airport is closed and we’ll be diverted to either Glasgow or Newcastle.  Glasgow?  No problem, loads of trains to Edinburgh, where I’ve already booked and paid for my hotel.  Newcastle?  More of an issue; went there once in 1994 to catch a ferry to Norway and have no desire to return.

Of course it's Newcastle.

 Ryanair says they’re organizing a bus to take us to Edinburgh (about two hours’ drive in good weather); we wait around the airport for close to three hours.  I keep hearing “Edinburgh” repeated in an announcement and finally clue in it`s my bus; I can’t understand a bloody word in the Newcastle accent.  The two-hour trip becomes more than four, as we crawl slowly north through a winter wonderland of swirling snow and hail.  I finish my book about half an hour in, and it’s too bumpy to write so I start reading the same book again (even though it’s very bad).  Everybody else sleeping so no one to talk to.  I am happier to see Edinburgh than I’ve ever been to see any city.

Getting back OUT of Edinburgh is a bit of a challenge.  I don’t want to fly (London airports still a mess), so I get a train ticket.  Check the morning of departure and learn that the sleeper trains are NOT going to go; tracks are closed between Peterborough and London so trains on the East Coast line are stopping there.  The ScotRail ticket guy is willing to give me a ticket for the morning train anyway (at the full London-Edinburgh fare), but tells me it’s my own problem what to do once I get to Peterborough, there may or may not be buses from there, he can’t say.  Shrug.

I traipse over to the bus station instead, where I learn that buses are indeed going, but I’ve missed the only morning bus so there’s only the 10 p.m. night bus.  Ugh.  Overnight on a night bus in Argentina or Chile is quite delightful; in North America or the UK it’s pretty dire.

So I go back to the train station, where I get a much more helpful ticket lady this time; she tells me I can go a less direct way to London with a couple of changes of train, and I decide on that plan instead.  I get on the next train leaving for London, which leaves late and runs well behind schedule on the way to York, where I make my first connection for Sheffield.  The train rolls in late to Sheffield as well, but I make a different connection than I’d originally planned (fortunately, lots of trains to London) and head south.  I arrive in London late, but at least I get there.

Finally, it’s Christmas Eve and I head to Heathrow for the epic journey home.  I line up once to use the self-serve check-in kiosk; the printout tells me I have to see a live person.  I line up to do that, for another 40 minutes, and she tells me I’m flying standby (despite having a ticket booked six weeks ago), so I have to go to yet another line and wait to see if I will get a seat.  The security guard keeping order in the pandemonium sends me over to yet another line, where I wait for about 45 minutes (nervously watching the clock tick down toward my flight time); I finally flag down a British Airways person, who tells me I’m in entirely the wrong line.  Fortunately, I’m the first one in the RIGHT line, so as soon as the counter flashes its "Toronto – Flight BA0093” sign, I’m in business.  I get a seat, race over to security and run full tilt to the departure gate.  They’re on the final boarding call for my flight, so I get on nearly last (but not actually LAST, which is good, since the last person always gets glares from everyone else on board for holding up the flight).

Flight home is delightful, with a roast turkey dinner and some good movies to choose from on my personal TV screen.  Oh, and I’ve landed in the middle class (BA has one between business and economy), despite having booked economy, so I get a much larger seat and more leg room.  Oh, and as much wine as I want so the flight passes in a pleasant haze. 

Small hitch when I get back to Toronto, in that my backpack neglected to make the trip with me.  I realize this after about half an hour of waiting at the baggage carousel, when someone new starts making the announcements; apparently they’ve been paging “Passenger MacLellan” the whole time, but my name had been so mangled by the previous announcer that I hadn’t recognized it.  Bag arrives, finally, on Boxing Day and travel mania is over.

Ahhh. 

You Can't Go Home Again

It’s an odd thing, going back to places you’ve been before ... but after a long interval, when you’re a different person at a different point in life.  The last few weeks in the UK and Ireland have been a lot of that.  Oh, I’ve been a lot of new places, too, which I loved, but I got the chance to go back to a few from “the last time around”. 

Let me back up a bit.  I tend to assume that everyone already knows this, but as a bunch of the people reading this will be people I’ve met since it all happened, they may not actually know.  Anyway ... my sister Julie and I went to the UK on Working Holidaymaker visas (as they were then called —temporary visas for people under the age of 27) just after university and camped out in London for a while.  (I do mean “camped out” —our bedsit was pretty primitive.  But it only cost 30 pounds a week, so who’s complaining?).  We also had shorter visas for Ireland (up to 4 months only, unlike the more generous two years in the UK), and migrated over there the following spring.

Julie went over before I did —I think she got tired of waiting for me.   I kept stalling, since I was head over heels in love with this English guy and really didn’t want to leave London.  I had a hunch we wouldn’t survive any long-distance thing, which proved to be true when the relationship crashed and burned later that summer.  (More on that in a subsequent post!)

I’ve been back to London since, and it was a very different experience going back “on holiday” as a working professional with money to spend —London was a lot of fun when I was a poor starving backpacker, but having a bit of cash in your pocket opens up a whole other world of possibilities that you don’t see as a wandering 20-something making a few pounds an hour and living in a grotty bedsit.  It isn’t necessarily better, though —I loved the time I lived in London, despite having scarcely a penny to my name the whole time, and by my most recent trip to the city (before this) I was substantially better off but starting to get restless and unhappy in my little working rut.  (Being happy, and having money, don’t necessarily go together.)

Going back to London this time was an odd combination of the two.  I’m not the same girl I was in my 20’s when I lived in London, but I’m kind of back in the same budget category.  It’s an odd feeling now, saying to someone, “Er, I can’t actually afford to go to that restaurant ...”; when I was working in Toronto, I’d gotten quite used to going out where I pleased and paying the bill without even needing to check how much I was spending.  I don’t have that kind of financial freedom right now, but I have again the same kind of freedom I had in during my 20-something London days —the freedom to wander at will, go where I wanted and do what I wanted without having to answer to a time clock.  (I think I value that kind of freedom more than the financial kind, although it would be really nice if they’d go together.  If anyone cracks that problem — how to have unlimited time and unlimited money at the same time — let me know.)

Going back to Dublin was perhaps even more of a shock.  I went there after leaving Cork — I’d originally planned to work my way back north and see more of Ulster, but weather intervened and I opted for the more prudent choice (i.e. where I was more likely to be able to get out again).   I hadn’t been back at all since I lived there while on my Irish work visa, and it felt surprisingly unfamiliar.  Oh, there were a few things I recognized (my old “local” The Bleeding Horse, for one), but for the most part I felt like I was wandering around a strange city i’d never seen before.

I suppose it’s because I didn’t really live there very long, compared with the length of time I spent in London.  In hindsight, I wish I’d spent as much time there as my visa would have allowed —but, at the time, I made the choices that worked for me then.  It seemed more important, then, to see where that relationship might go, than to move away from him to a strange city; who knows, maybe it was even the right choice.  We didn`t end up together (and thank god for that, it would have been a disaster) but it taught me a lot about relationships, and, if I hadn`t tried, I might have always wondered “what would have been”. 

Dublin’s still a great city, familiar or not, and like every other Irish city I’ve ever been in it lives up to the stereotypes —the people are really friendly, the accents are delightful, they do drink a lot and there is a pub on every street corner (sometimes more than one).  It’s compact enough that you can walk around the central bit, and there’s a couple of new tram lines (well, new since I last visited) for the times it just started to feel too damn cold to keep walking.  All the pubs came in handy in the cold, too; whenever I started to lose feeling in my fingers and toes, I’d just nip in to the nearest pub and have a pint while I warmed up.  I even went to the oldest pub in Ireland —probably the oldest pretty much anywhere, since it was founded in 1198 A.D.!  (How many cities take their drinking so seriously that they’ve kept the same pub in business for more than eight hundred years?)

I’d have loved to spend more time there, but you might’ve heard something about the kind of weather they were getting over there — I was getting worried about getting back to London at all (let alone getting out of Heathrow when I got there), so I thought I’d better start heading back that way. 

But it was good to go back, to there and to London and to every other place I revisited.  But it reminded me that you CAN’T go back, really; the UK and Ireland are inextricably linked in my memory with a particular, significant period in my life, and I find myself thinking about that time whenever I’m back over that way.  But it struck me very strongly this time that I’m not that person any more, and — what’s more — I don’t want to be.  I like having challenging work, and some money to indulge myself occasionally, and a place that I can call home (where it doesn't feel like camping out!).

Oh, there’s some things I’d like to get back again.  I think I wrote about this before — how I remember feeling very alive back then, much more so than in recent years – with the “higher highs” and the “lower lows”, it was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, but I feel like I threw myself into my life with much more passion than I’ve been able to summon for the last few years.  This past year excepted — while I’m not the same wide-eyed innocent who headed off to a new life in London way back when (and I’m glad, she was a bit of a dolt about many things!), I have found some of that passion and joy and enthusiasm that had gotten lost somewhere along the way.

Now, whether or not I can keep this attitude when I have to go back to earning a living again ... that’s really the question. Talk to me again this time next year to see how well l've managed it ...

Who Do You Think You Are? (Part IV)

(As promised, I’m back again to pick up the story from Derry.  I’m sure you’ve been waiting with bated breath.)

Okay, I got a little sidetracked as I was starting to write this.  The next steps in my travels after Derry had much to do with family history; I was thinking about it and was online anyway, so I started googling (yes, it’s a verb) to see if I could track down anything about my great-great-grandfather Dominic O’Neill (born in Ireland, emigrated to Canada during the Famine).

Lo and behold, there are a multitude of free, searchable databases out there (the National Archives of Canada has a wealth of information) and he popped up in a few places. I think I found his parents’ names (on his death record in 1909) —Henry O’Neill and Ellen Needham —so I can go back another generation for one line of the family.  Then I started looking at the information my mother has gathered and trying to put all the pieces together and puzzle out how I was related to all of these names.  (My father has information somewhere for his side of the family, too, so I’m sure I’ll get distracted again once he locates it.)

It’s addictive.  I think this is going to be my project for next year, when I’m back to working for a living, and when I can’t afford to go anywhere because I’m paying off credit card bills from this year off.  (I don’t have any yet, but ...)

Anyway, I digress.  Why I started down this tangent in the first place was prompted by starting to write about going from Derry to Cork and Dublin; in both places learned a lot about what it would have been like for my Irish ancestors fleeing from the Famine.   The Dominic O’Neill of my Google search was the last generation who left Ireland — he was a child at the time, so presumably went to Canada in the company of his parents and siblings (but I haven’t figured that out yet).

Cobh, about 15 kilometres outside Cork and an easy train ride, was one of the main departure points for the so-called “famine ships” (or, more graphically, “coffin ships” – so called for the horrendous death toll during the Atlantic crossing) in the 1840’s and 1850’s.  More recently, it was the last port of call for the Titanic before it headed out to sea for its fateful date with an iceberg.  The excellent Cobh Heritage Centre has a wealth of information about both; the Titanic stuff was interesting enough, but I found the discussion of the famine ships much more riveting.  Some of my people were on those ships!

I can barely imagine what it must have been like for the people who left – my family, way back when, and a million other folk who went on to found thriving Irish communities all over the world.  Another million or so never got the chance to leave, as they died of starvation in Ireland.  The country’s population went from 8 million in 1840 to just over 4 million by the end of the century, and it’s never bounced back to its peak; I think current-day Ireland is about 6 million people.

The more I learn about the Famine, actually, the more astounded I am than the country and any of its people actually survived.  With a vast segment of the population dependent on the potato crop, its utter failure in the mid-1840’s wrought devastation on the country.  Small tenant farmers could not pay their rents, triggering mass evictions as landlords sought to rid themselves of the problem.  The more unscrupulous landowners rented the most notorious of the “coffin ships”, with the cheapest ships and crew (read: oldest and least sea-worthy for the ships, dregs of society for the crew).

Whether or not they really thought that all of their former tenants had a fighting chance of surviving the voyage to the New World I don`t know; what does seem apparent is that many of them didn`t really care much one way or another.  Out of sight, out of mind – get the problem (the poor Irish tenants) off the land, put the land to better use, and if the tenants didn`t last the trip, well ... what’s a few Irish Catholics more or less?  (They weren’t all Catholic, of course, but Catholics were disproportionately represented – they weren’t allowed to own land at the time and made up the majority of the tenant population.)

Passenger quarters on a 'famine ship'

These weren't healthy people to start with – some had been reduced to eating grass by the time they boarded ships out of Ireland.  The voyage would have taken two months, more or less, through the wild weather of the North Atlantic.  The ships were crowded and the passengers were not always allowed up on deck for fresh air.  Provisions were basic at best and insufficient at worst; disease and death ran rampant on many ships in the crowded and poorly-ventilated quarters.    There’s a replica of one of the famine ships (the Jeannie Johnston) now berthed in the River Liffey in Dublin (touring it was a fascinating afternoon) – it was one of few good ones, with a perfect record and every passenger arriving safely, alive, at the other side of the Atlantic.

Even getting to North America was no guarantee; ships could be held up at the quarantine island of Grosse-Ile in Quebec for another few weeks before passengers were allowed to continue on their way.  Some died while the ship was still waiting, and they are buried at Grosse-Ile (now a Canadian National Historic Site).

But some made it, despite the odds stacked against them.  My family, and millions of other part-Irish North Americans, are here as living proof.

No Retreat, Baby, No Surrender

(I was going to go with the more obvious musical reference -- U2's "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" -- for this post but opted for the Boss instead.  What the heck.)

Derry-slash-Londonderry is a pretty cool city, even if it does have a bit of an identity crisis.  No one seems quite sure whether its name ought to be Derry (most people seem to refer to it this way in conversation) or Londonderry (it mostly shows up this way on formal things like bus schedules and such).   It was "Derry" before it was "Londonderry", changing to the longer name in 1613 when the City of London played a role in the so-called 'plantation' of Ulster with Protestant settlers.  So it's been more than a bit contentious ever since which it ought to be called -- particularly during the Troubles, when choosing one or the other would instantly mark you out as belonging to a particular side.

And it hasn't been a terribly peaceful place, so picking a side could be a dangerous thing to do.  As far back as the Siege of Derry in 1688-89, Catholics and Protestants have been at war here -- when Catholic followers of the ousted King James II surrounded the city in an effort to take it back, 13 apprentice boys (revered ever after as local heroes) barred the city gates with a cry of "There'll be no surrender!"  Loyalist (Protestant) supporters adopted "No Surrender" as a slogan, and you used to see it adorning the walls of Belfast's Shankill neighbourhood.  (You get now how the song reference fits in, right?)

More recently, the “Battle of the Bogside” in this city in 1969 — a running battle between residents of the Catholic Bogside neighbourhood and the Royal Ulster Constabulary — prompted the British government to send troops into Northern Ireland.   (They were still there, when I first came to Ulster in 1994.)  A few years later, it was the site of the infamous Bloody Sunday of U2's song, a day in January 1972 when 26 civil rights protesters were shot by British soldiers; 13 died immediately (6 of them just 17 years old), and one a few months later, of injuries received that day. 

Peace Mural, Derry

By any reckoning, odds are it shouldn't be a positive or optimistic place.  Yet it seems to be; it's lively and friendly and welcoming, and a fascinating place to walk around.  (There's also a fine pub or two that make the welcome even warmer.)  Unlike Belfast, Derry didn't have murals in the Troubles, but has added them since 1997; done by three local artists, these commemorate events of the Troubles in a thought-provoking way.  There’s also a couple of memorials, one to the hunger strikers of 1980-81 (including the most well-known, Bobby Sands, who was elected to Parliament shortly before he died), and one to the people who died on Bloody Sunday.  Of the murals, The Death of Innocence is probably the most moving; it's a mural depicting a 14-year-old schoolgirl who became the 100^th victim of the Troubles in 1971 when she was shot in the crossfire between the IRA and the British Army.  The whole array manages to end on a positive note, with its most recent mural of a huge stylized dove of peace. 

It's interesting, anyway.  I hadn't been to Derry before, but it's shown up in literature I`ve encountered; the books that stick in my mind the most are probably Leon Uris's Trinity and Redemption (he's not exactly impartial in his depictions of Ireland, but he tells a good story).  So while I felt a little like I'd been there before, in spirit, I was very glad to get there for real. 

In the footsteps of giants

Well worth a visit, if you've never been —and, even better, the Giant's Causeway is within easy reach of the city, for a perfect day trip.   If you don't already know, that's the remnants of the path built by the Irish giant Fionn MacCool, so that his rival, the Scottish giant Benandonner, could cross the sea and face him in battle.  Seeing the Scot approaching, Fionn was so terrified by the size of his rival that he fled home, asking his wife to hide him.  She did, in a huge cradle, and when Benandonner arrived in search of Fionn, told him that the figure in the cradle was Fionn's child.  Alarmed by the size of the “infant” and assuming the father must therefore be truly gigantic, Benandonner raced back to Scotland, tearing up the Causeway behind him in case Fionn tried to follow.  That's why only the ends remain — off the Antrim coast of Northern Ireland (where I went), and off the Scottish isle of Staffa.

Believe it?  Well, maybe not, but it makes a good story.  And how else could I say that I've walked in the footsteps of giants?

(P.S. -- I tried to add pictures, but Blogger isn't co=operating.  Have a look on Shutterfly if you're curious.)

(P.S.2 -- okay, it let me add pictures the next day.)

Who Do You Think You Are? (Part III)

Family is a wonderful thing.  But sometimes I wonder about mine. 

On my dad’s side (the MacLellans), I’m descended from sheep rustlers (but, in their defence, it was either an act of political protest or they were starving and desperate for food, after being forced off their farmland in the Highland Clearances).  The MacLellan family motto is “Think On”, which isn’t, as you might be inclined to think, a reference to our noted intellectualism.  No, it’s from a 12^th or 13^th century MacLellan chieftain who rode up to his enemy’s castle with the enemy’s emissary’s lopped-off head spiked on a sword, and yelled out to him to “Think on’t” (Think about it) before crossing him again. 

On Mom’s side (the O’Neill half), I’m descended from former High Kings of Ireland, but with slightly unsavoury reputations. The Red Hand of Ulster —now on the Northern Irish flag, and co-opted by the Ulster Volunteer Force as part of their insignia in “the Troubles” —was originally an O’Neill emblem.  Legend has it that the O’Neill chief of a raiding party, in an effort to inspire his warriors, decreed that the land of Ulster would belong to the first man to lay his right hand on the ground.  One bright spark cut off his right hand and lobbed it off the boat on to shore, in his determination to win the prize.

Yikes.   

So if genetics have anything to do with it, I`m prone to violence, thievery, and so ruthless in my ambition that I will, without batting an eyelash, kill anyone who gets in my way or even maim myself to achieve my goals. 

Are you sure you want to admit to knowing me?

The Walls of West Belfast

I went back to Belfast recently, and found it’s changed enormously since I was last there in 1994.  Most of it is change for the better; I was quite happy to be able to walk into the centre of town at night without being stopped by a British soldier saying “Good evening” as he swung his machine gun around to point it at me.  (This happened, last time I was there.)  But some of the things I found so intriguing about Belfast on that first visit are starting to disappear.  Is it a good thing, or a bad thing?  I can’t decide.

I`m talking about the murals.  There are two tradionally “working-class” neighbourhoods in West Belfast:  the Falls Road, the Catholic neighbourhood; and the Shankill, its Protestant equivalent.  When I visited in 1994, you couldn’t cross from one neighbourhood to another directly — there was a huge brick wall, topped by barbed wire, separating the two (ironically called the “Peace Line”), and you had to walk all the way back to the centre of town from one and head back out to the other.  I remember seeing one schoolyard that backed right on to the Peace Line, and thinking how sad it was that the children in that schoolyard would grow up hating the people on the other side of the wall — just because it had been that way for generations. (Now, you can walk between the two.  Parts of the  Peace Line are still there, but streets have been opened up again.)

Protestant Shankill

The walls in the Shankill were adorned with huge murals portraying UVF insignia (Ulster Volunteer Force, the Loyalist/Protestant paramilitary that you never hear about in North America), the “red hand” of Ulster, and letters 3 feet high proclaiming “No Surrender” and “Remember 1690”.  (That last is the year of the Battle of the Boyne, when Ireland came under English control; memories are long here.)  The walls of the Falls Road were adorned with Catholic imagery of Madonna and Child, IRA slogans (the Irish Republic Army, the better-known Nationalist/Republican/Catholic paramilitary), and words of warning to the British to go home, that Ireland would fight to the death to be reunited.

Catholic Falls Road

Many of those murals are gone now.  There are still a few left, and some new ones have been added —but the new ones are mostly about other causes (Palestinian or Basque nationalism, or environmental activism), and the old ones have in many cases been painted over.

Why is Che always there somewhere?

I tend to think that’s a bad thing, but that’s what I can’t quite decide.  I think that it is a dangerous thing to forget history (who was it who said, “Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it”?) and wonder if it isn’t better to preserve these reminders of Belfast’s (and Northern Ireland’s) past, so that society doesn’t forget what it has lived through and slip back into that kind of division.  Belfast should keeps its murals for the same reason that concentration camps in Europe have been preserved and opened to tourism:  for people to see, and remember, and think “Never again”.  And it is absorbing, as a visitor, to wander the streets and take in the murals, as you think about the all-too-recent violence in this city, and I think Belfast would lose some of its identity if they were no longer there.

But is it better, for the people of Belfast, that they’re still there?  If you lived through a concentration camp in Europe in the Second World War, you might choose to go back and visit one day —but you don’t have to be smacked in the face with the reminder, day after day, as you go about your daily life.  The people of Belfast who lived through “the Troubles” do, as they walk the streets of their neighbourhoods and see the grim reminders of violence.  Should they be allowed to wipe those reminders away, and start afresh, without having to see it and relive it day in and day out?

That’s what I can’t decide.  What do you think?

Separated by a Common Language

You can get very spoiled, as an English-speaker, many places that you travel in the world.  If you don’t want to try to learn any of the local language (whatever it is), your odds of finding someone who speaks yours are better than if your native tongue was, say, Afrikaans.  It’s the language of business, and of tourism, in much of the world, and vast numbers of people in other countries aspire to learn what I grew up speaking; I even met other backpackers in South America from non-English-speaking countries that had learned English specifically to travel (instead of learning Spanish – they figured English would be more useful for speaking to other backpackers, and it would take them more places in the world). 

(And thank God I grew up speaking English, that’s all I can say.  I can’t even begin to imagine trying to learn it as an adult – it’s got to be the most illogical and pernicious perverse language on earth.  I wouldn’t stand a chance if I hadn’t learned it by osmosis when I was too young to know how tricky it is.)

But the thing travel teaches you —in addition to just how useful knowing English can be —is that English isn’t just English.  It’s Aussie, and Canadian, and Kiwi, and Irish, and Scots, and (God help us) American, and it isn’t even consistent across any one of those countries.  Oh, sure there are some national consistencies (if you hear someone talking about being on “pogey”, wearing a “tuque”, asking for a “double-double”, or showing off his “Molson muscle” while buying a “two-four”, you’ve got a Canadian), but even in my own country it changes:  a Newfy sounds about as much like me as I sound like an Aussie, and Albertans twang like they belong in Texas.

And some of those versions of English?  Good luck trying to understand them!  Edinburgh (my first stop in Scotland) wasn’t so bad; some of them sound delightfully easy-to-understand Scottish, but many sound more English than the English because of their private-school educations (would you think, listening to him, that Tony Blair is an Edinburgh boy?). 

As I went further north and west, though, things started to change.  And, interestingly, people started to recognize my accent as Canadian more readily (I don’t think I was mistaken for American, ever, outside of Edinburgh); one woman told me that Canadians sound like Scottish people trying to sound American.  (I think it was supposed to be a compliment.  Anyway, she likes our accents.)

I thought I was really out of depth with the Scots accent when I arrived on the Isle of Lewis, as I listened to people talking on buses and on the streets, and couldn’t make out a word that they were saying.  I clued in, finally, that I was actually hearing Gaelic (not English); something like 60% of the population of Lewis is fluent in Gaelic and it’s used as an everyday language.  Street signs are bilingual, with Gaelic displayed in bigger, more prominent font; you hear Gaelic spoken in shops, on television, on radio, everywhere.  (And I learned it’s pronounced “GALL-ic”, not “GAY-lick”, for the Scots version.)  Their accents in English were noticeably stronger than the east coast, but I could still (mostly) understand them.  Skye and Oban weren’t too bad, either.

Then I got to Glasgow.

Did you know that Glaswegian is another language?  It’s not just an accent, my friends, it is way beyond that.  They have their own vocabulary and pronunciation and phraseology that often bears little resemblance to English as it’s spoken elsewhere in the world.  Read this, for example, and tell me what you think it means: 

“Ah hink yoo're huir uv a bonnie. Dae ye want tae gang fur a bevvy?”

I heard this from a Glaswegian in a bar.  It means, more or less, “I think you’re cute, can I buy you a drink?”  (I had to ask him to write down what he said so I could share it here later – it took about four tries before I finally got the gist of what he was actually asking, so maybe not the most successful chat-up line ever.)

I can’t quite make heads or tails of what exactly renders it so unique.  One thing they do, though (along with other West Coasters) is something I’d previously thought was distinctly Kiwi —they turn “i” into “u” when they pronounce it.  For example:  “minute” comes out something more like “munnet”, and “fish and chips” is (you guessed it) “fush and chups”.  (They don’t sound much like Kiwis, otherwise, but perhaps that explains where that particular Kiwi quirk originally came from.)

Then, just when I was kind of getting the hang of Weegie-speak and actually able to talk to people without saying “Pardon me? What did you say?” every other sentence, I crossed over the sea to Ireland.

Wow.  Belfast is another strange little pocket of language, too.  The cute wee Irish boy (from elsewhere in the North) working in my Belfast hostel told me they have a “Wa-wa” accent —so called because every non-Belfast person listening to them has to keep saying, “wha’? wha’?”  (as in “Pardon me? What did you say?”)

Things have calmed down, language-wise, outside of Belfast, and I’ve been able to understand people.  You can’t help but get lots of practice in the Irish accent, as people will talk to you, unprompted, everywhere you go.  Seriously, just stay still for a few seconds next to a person in a small town in Ireland and I guarantee they’ll be deep in conversation with you shortly thereafter; this is a very friendly country.

I’m not proficient enough yet in the subtleties of Irish English to tell you how the North differs from the South, or the east from the west; perhaps I’ll just have to come back.  If nothing else, I have one burning question to settle:  if I had to pick one or the other, would I choose to listen to a cute Scottish boy, or a cute Irish one?  The jury’s still out on that one.

Who Do You Think You Are? (Part II)

I’m leaving Scotland temporarily and am on my way to Ireland (on the very swish Stena Line ferry that has free Wi-Fi in the middle of the Irish Sea).  Well, Northern Ireland, but as far as I’m concerned it’s all “Ireland” (I realize I’d probably offend some people in Ulster by saying that, so I’ll keep the opinion to myself while there).  I love travelling pretty much anywhere, but both Ireland and Scotland have special places in my travel heart; it’s an entirely different experience to travel somewhere that you feel some kind of connection to. 

There are other places I’ve been that I’ve loved —Machu Picchu, Morocco, Tuscany, Tikal to name but a few— but they don’t grip me the same way.  There`s more than a few drops of Celtic blood in my veins, so I feel like I`m coming “home” in a very real sense when I come here instead.  It’s not too many generations back that my great-(great)-grandparents left; these are my people.  Hey, they look like me (this is one part of the world where I blend into the crowd completely), and they know how to spell my last name.  I definitely feel at home.

(My karate instructor claims that my Irish/Scots heritage explains my attitude to martial arts; he used to marvel that, no matter how many times I got knocked down while sparring, I’d just get back up and plunge in again.  Whether this is a compliment to the Celts I’m not sure; it could mean we’re valiant and determined not to quit, or just too pigheaded or too stupid to know when we’re beaten.)

I`m most clear about where the MacLellan line of my family came from; I probably feel most like a "MacLellan", too, by virtue of carrying the name.  (Never underestimate the power of your name as part of your identity -- I am as much an O'Neill or Hefferan or King as I am a MacLellan, but what I call myself adds more weight to that name. In the unlikely event I choose to get married, I won't be changing it.)

Ferry from Oban to Mull, in Oban Harbour

I paid a visit to that part of the world after leaving Skye, and spent a few days in and around Oban.  It’s a pretty wee town, set on a snug little harbour on the west coast of Scotland about 3 hours’ journey north of Glasgow.  There’s not a great deal of tourist-y stuff to do, but there are a few ruins to wander around and see, and it’s a lovely place to just go for a walk.  (And I never, not once, had to spell my last name for anyone.)

I took one day to visit the islands off the coast, spending most of the time on Iona; it’s gorgeous and green even in the beginning of winter (warm air from the Gulf Stream, apparently) and has been considered a holy place since the 6^th century, when St. Columba first landed from Ireland with the intent of Christian-izing the savage heathen Scots.  The famous Book of Kells (an illustrated 9^th century Bible, now residing in Dublin’s Trinity College) was probably produced by monks here, but shipped to Ireland when Viking raids became a significant threat.  (The Vikings weren’t stupid; they knew that monasteries and convents had all the wealth in those days.)   The existing Abbey isn’t quite that old (parts of it date back to the 13^th century, but most of it is 15^th century), but it’s magnificent; the man on duty in the gift shop was quite thrilled to see me (I think he’s not seen many tourists for weeks) so he was quite happy to give me a detailed description of the Abbey`s history and architecture.

The MacLellans don`t go back in Oban quite as far as the Abbey, I don`t think; but it’s still pretty cool to walk the streets and think that, some time around the Clearances, three MacLellan brothers decided to leave (or fled for their lives, whichever story you choose to believe) and ended up in Canada.  Further back, however, there is a 12^th or 13^th century “MacLellan’s Castle” in Kirkcudbright (pronounced something like “kirk-COO-bree”) in southern Scotland, which is the ancient stronghold of the Clan Chief.  (I suppose the fact that it’s in ruins now says something about how far the family fortunes have fallen in the centuries since!)

For the O`Neills (maternal grandmother`s family), my parents tell me that great-great-grandfather Dominic O`Neill left when he was a child of 4, in 1841 (presumably with his parents, if they were still alive) —at the height of the Potato Famine as one of the hundreds of thousands who ended up in the New World.  I`d thought he came from County Tyrone in the north, but opinion`s divided (one cousin thinks they came from County Cork).  One day I`ll have to track down more details; in the meantime I`m going to wander around a bit of the North as I haven`t seen anything of it beyond Belfast.  (And I last saw Belfast in 1994, when “the Troubles” were still a reality and paramilitaries on both sides still set off bombs —so I imagine it’s changed quite a bit in the intervening years.)

Of the Hefferans and Kings (paternal grandmother`s and maternal grandfather`s families, respectively), I know not very much at all.  I`m assuming that Hefferan is also irish and they came from over here somewhere as well; King is probably English but I really don`t know.

I think this’ll be my project for next year, when I’m back at work and travel days are but a distant memory.  I don’t want to wonder; I want to know!  But in the meantime, I still feel like I’ve come home.  

P.S.  Glasgow people thought I was crazy for going ALL THAT WAY to Belfast in one day without flying.  Please, it`s only going to take six hours by bus and ferry; in Canadian terms, that`s practically next door.  My mother used to do that length of trip twice in one day (to Ottawa and back to pick up my sister from university.