They Might Be (Have Been) Giants: Belfast, the Cathedral Girls Choir and the Giant’s Causeway, (part one,

In case you hadn't heard, middle daughter Rose is part of an Anglican Girls' Choir, hosted at Ottawa's Christ Church Cathedral on Sparks Street, and they had organized a tour, performing in Belfast, Galway and Dublin, so we decided to (as a couple of other parents did as well) play tag-along, taking our Aoife along with (and we've also a reading in Dublin near the end, which is exciting). We couldn't let Rose wander across Ireland and not provide Aoife the same, really. As well, Rose had been two years begging for a cellphone, which we'd been aiming to ignore for another two years, but the fact of her on another continent and not under our direct supervision made the gift for this trip seem like good planning. In case she needed to touch base with us, in case she got separated from the group. It was also good to be able to at least send her "good morning" texts throughout, even if she didn't directly respond terribly often.

It has been a while since we've done a whole big trip, although you know we went to Picton not long ago, read together in Vancouver back in February, in Calgary last fall and Picton last summer. But do you remember when Christine and I took the kids to London last year or when we did our own child-free big Scotland/England trip back in 2018? Some pretty cool stuff around there. Odd to think how many times we've travelled over the past decade or so, barring the Covid-era, of course.

Wednesday, July 2, 2025: We met up at the Cathedral on Sparks Street, and took a shared bus to the Montreal airport, where we flew overnight to Dublin. Rose had already leaned into her cohorts, and away from us, occasionally sending texts requesting Starbucks (which we would not provide). En route to the airport, I read through the opening pages of Kate Colby's new (and brilliant) PARADOXX (Essay Press, 2025), or at least the uncorrected of such. I took notes, naturally. A new notebook, purchased for this particular trip. A two-plus hour drive from Ottawa to the Montreal airport. We did catch the airport lounge, thanks to passes from father-in-law, with Rose and her choir in another section of airport, meeting up once more at the gate. Once we boarded our flight, I attempted sleep as best as I could. Ottawa poet Dave Stymeist and his wife, Sarah, were also tag-along parents, but they quickly disappeared once we landed in Dublin. Did you see the two poem "poem" handout I produced for the trip? Better one handout with both of us on than two handouts: see Christine's poem posted online here, see mine posted here. I've already been handing copies out.

Thursday, July 3, 2025: We land, we head for the shared bus the choir has already arranged, for the sake of taking us to our youth hostel in Belfast. We catch visions of Roman aqueducts through the trees along the A1. The main highway, at least. Offside, sheep, goats, cows (and their associated smells). Small hamlets, church steeples, further highways. Green fields and hills, even as the crew floats through various degrees between awake and asleep. Peat farms, little black bricks set up in rows. I take notes on the hills, catch wind farms, more than I might have imagined. I move through American poet Josh Fomon's latest, Our Human Shores (Black Ocean, 2025). I make notes. These poems are quite good.

Did you know the Titanic had been constructed in Belfast? Something I hadn't known, and an interesting counterpoint to the trip Stephen Brockwell and I did around Ireland in 2022, reading in Galway, Cobh, Dingle, before returning to Dublin. We read at the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, set beside the old White Star Line building, one that held a pub called the Titanic, designed via photographs taken by a minister who boarded at Liverpool, but got off in Cobh, before heading west out to sea, and into disaster.

Once we land at the youth hostel (a drive of a few hours, from Dublin airport into Belfast, including crossing the border), the group heads in one direction (a walking tour of Belfast, led by one of the organizers/parents of the assembly, John Serrati, who is also a Classics/History professor at the University of Ottawa), Christine crashes and Aoife and I head out to wander, discovering murals and food, church buildings and plaques for the famous or infamous who used to live or work in particular corners. Did you know that Queen's University Belfast has The Seamus Heaney Centre? We walked by and saw the sign, I said we had to go in. Aoife rolled her eyes.

She rolled her eyes, but she still sat and looked at the museum element [I had not heard of Leontia Flynn before this]. Apparently they've creative writing classes in the space, which is cool. I left them some handouts, naturally.

Curious to discover that Belfast writer Glenn Patterson is the current Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre. I remember when he came through Ottawa to read, as part of the first year of the Ottawa International Writers Festival in 1997, part of a contingent of seventeen (I believe) Irish writers to come through the festival. I did like him quite a lot, got to spend a few days hanging out with him, which was pretty cool. Apparently that was the largest single gathering of Irish writers at a festival, Sean Wilson said at the time, outside of Ireland. I remember, some years later, reading Patterson's memoir, Once Upon A Hill - Love in Troubled Times (2008) and enjoying it. At the Centre, I purchased some postcards, was offered a small pamphlet, THE QUARTER-INCH COMPENSATION, written by Patterson for an exhibit we caught in the space, of work by Donovan Wylie. I purchased Aoife her pen, which was, of course, some three or four pounds, thereabouts. She was quite pleased. I left a small cluster of "poem" handouts at the front desk for the writing students (with permission, of course).

Much to Aoife's relief, we left the Centre, and headed towards our proper destination, The Ulster Museum, something she'd caught on a map and decided we needed to get to. Sure, sure. On the campus of Queen's University, Belfast, which is quite a stunning main building. We saw all the students in their caps and gowns, parents in their fineries with cameras capturing the occasion with cameras and cellphones. And, once we made for the gardens, en route to the museum, a statue of Lord Kelvin (1824-1907), British mathematician, mathematical physicist and engineer.

The museum was grand! They recommended we begin at the top floor at move down, so we did, with elements that reminded of the National Gallery of Canada (arrays of oil paintings in cool, dark rooms) to the Museum of Nature (dinosaur and other exhibits) to Civilization (a whole photo-essay on razing and rebuilding neighbourhoods in the 1970s and an expansive exhibit on the Troubles). Aoife didn't have much patience for the paintings, but I held her back, some, from rushing ahead into further rooms so I could actually look at the artwork. I was quite fond of the work of Irish painter Paul Henry (1876-1958), specifically his landscapes. Some lovely elements of tone, colour. A kind of wash. 

Aoife, on her part, enjoyed catching a couple of kid-specific rooms, including one for origami and other physical possibilities. Don't look at me, I don't know how to do any of this, the fella in the origami room said, if anyone looked his way. Aoife also conducted a short puppet show for my (and her) amusement. She drew some animals, but ignored the felt.

And then to the paintings again, which, again, wore on Aoife's patience. That second one, again, by Paul Henry. See what I mean about tone? 

"Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. / Why wouldn’t the man shut up?" I hear John Thompson clatter on, again, from Stilt Jack [see a note I wrote around such here]. Another room, as Aoife attended crafts, I caught a greenhouse outside, along the other side of the building. I'd already caught multiple signs saying one shouldn't  leave children unattended, wondering if the graveyard outside had anything to do with such. How concerned should I be about my unattended child?

No, no, she said. That's the Friar's Bush Graveyard, the oldest one in the city, pre-dating Belfast. First of all, I hadn't realized Belfast was so young, first chartered as an English settlement in 1613. The graveyard, she said, has a stone going back as far as 485, with multiple generations of Belfast families throughout. It isn't used anymore, and a mother fox has been there recently, with two kits. The staff have been enjoying seeing them run through, although they hadn't seen such lately. As I discovered afterwards, the graveyard isn't accessible to the public, only through organized tours, so I couldn't wander through and look at anything. I wandered multiple times around the museum; I couldn't even figure out how to get in (I suspect this is purposeful).

Right by the museum, as well, was the Post Office, where I garnered a mound of international stamps for my postcards. An important part of any journey.

Later on, Aoife and I made it back to our room and met up with Christine, as well as our pal, Susan Johnston, who also has a daughter in the group. Susan had wandered through John's Belfast walking tour, and we made for the downtown for the sake of food, the choir itself having a pre-made plan of their own in their own direction. Who was this statue? Why was she there?

The waiter at our particular pub, who stopped suddenly, mid-order, and complimented my array of postcard-writing. Wonderful! People don't do that anymore! I had that said of me at a small venue in Winnipeg, back when I was there, also. That was a whole thing.

We went by City Hall (which Susan had already seen as part of John's walking tour), and various locations, including an intriguing sign for a Belfast Ukulele Jam (oh, for Aoife to have brought her ukulele). We had dinner in a lovely small pub, and then made for our beds, barely fifteen hours into our landing into the country.

Friday, July 4, 2025: Have we been here a day yet? It already feels like a week. From Kate Colby's PARADOXX (2025): "When I'm driving I look into the other cars and wonder what it's like in there, all those minds, experiences, perspectives. Where is everyone headed?" A good question, that. Christine and I wake from our lower bunk beds (as Aoife above on one side, the other side where my laptop resides), and join the choir en route to adventuring into the Giant's Causeway, something I'd heard of, but clearly hadn't understood the meaning of at all until I finally looked it up. Tales of what look like a gigantic land bridge that might once have spanned from these cliffs over to Scotland, and the tales of the Irish and Scottish giants who might have travailed them.

Tales of giants, and the small handheld device we're each given for our walking tour, at our own pace, at our own speed. We walk down a lengthy path a kilometre at least until I realize that it but a fraction of the rest of it, the whole of the Isles obsessed with walking. Aoife is delighted, of course, but we wear, we wear. It is cold, rainy. Fifteen degrees, at best. All those documentaries I've watched with Tony Robinson walking around the British Isles, a good pair of shoes, proper rainwear and a good constitution for walking. I have none of those. As well, I've had a particular (Sir) Bob Geldof song in my head the past few days, leading up to this, "The House at the Top of the World," from his 1992 album the happy club, a particular favourite song of mine. Even though he's from County Dublin in Ireland, not here. The song speaks of the "Leopardstown Dual Carriageway," so I think it's the linkage in my mind between "Carriageway" and "Causeway," two words that aren't used much in my part of the world, but both set in this particular landscape.

We see Rose here and there, who acknowledges us, but keeps moving. Such is the way of things.

And walking. Such a length of it. 

And such cliffs. And such distances. Along one whole stretch, unable to look up nor down. I took few pictures, there.

Christine's energy tanked mid-through, and she returned up the stairs, instead of further, around the path. We ventured nearly as far as the choir, but turned, also. There was a doorway we saw, there in the rock, the choir members disappearing through. After a walk of a few kilometres, the stairs were treacherous, leading straight up a few hundred feet or more. What is distance, anymore? The hills and the grass and the sheep, and the sheer drop down. A land of giants, wherever they may be. If they might ever return.

Upon the bus again, we made for Derry/Londonderry, and John led the young ladies (and us) through another walking tour, one that made first for the Derry Girls mural, of course, before to the infamous sign and further murals, from Bloody Sunday and surrounding histories. And what is this fort, are these walls? Seventeenth century, far younger than I might have presumed, also. Not the Roman history of such as Chichester [remember when we were there?] or Medieval Galway. History is a strange thing, certainly. It never happens the way you think it does. And: does that make me the James of this particular group?

And then dinner, at a fine restaurant at Bushmills. The distillery may have been closed, but I caught a wee bottle at the corner store, two doors down. And a mound of postcards, obviously.

Saturday, July 5, 2025: the choir made for one direction, and we in another. We caught one of the city bus tours, floating around town to see what there was to see. I hadn't been to Belfast before, nor had Christine. A destination we'd heard was worth attending was the Titanic museum, as I hadn't previously understood the great ship was built here, a vast swath of the former shipyards converted to tourist vista, half of which acknowledges the work and the workers and the community of Belfast. So much of the city, the people, went into that great ship (and all the rest they made here). Apparently much of the shipping industry fell apart in no small part due to the Irish government unattending German bombers, which ripped a war-sized hole that it never recovered from. At least now the work and the workers acknowledged, as well as those lost in that terrible disaster.

The scale, the scale. The shipyards were epic, as was the ship. As was the disaster. To even wrap your mind around it. The first half of the tour about the people, the workers, the community and culture of builders and how they survived it, and the second half, about the great launch and the disaster, character descriptions of those who worked to build it, those who worked on it, and those passengers, some of whom made it, most of whom didn't. A list of the lost at the end in a silent room, pushing the air out of everyone. A silence, set upon the space. There were even a few items that survived the ship, each of which told their own story. A violin by one of the musicians. A flask, handed to a man by one of the passengers. It discovered floating, returned to the woman thanks to her family crest on the side. The body of the man she'd handed it to was never found.

Later that night, requiring a bit of a grounding, I made for the pub for a bit of quiet time, reading. Christine and Aoife retired to the room. I found a relatively quiet pub and read for a bit, working through some books picked up through bookstore finds, including a Kimberly Campanello I saw I had a credit in the back (from the chapbook of hers I produced through above/ground), and Eireann Lorsung's latest, in preparation for our upcoming reading together. I'd been wanting to pick up Denise Riley's work for some time [I wrote about her selected poems here, moons back], and this is a reissue of two separate pieces, both writing on grief around losing her son. Some powerful stuff in there, and I'm appreciating the opportunity to go through all three (and I am making notes on all of these, don't you worry about that).

The pub was an interesting one. I had thought the pool hall across the way a bit loud, and possibly not the smartest idea to wander into as a stranger, especially one attempting to read a book. The next bar was just too loud, so I asked the bouncer his thoughts, and he pointed me across the way to Laverys, which made me reminiscent for the late Ottawa writer John Lavery (1949-2011). He was good people, that one, and a stellar prose writer. I headed there just after 8pm for a pint or two and some reading, and managed back to our room around midnight, five or six pints in. Just after 10pm, I ended up in lengthy conversation with a local fella, there with a handful of other regulars, all of whom agreed that me considering that pool hall across the way would have been a terrible idea. He spoke of Belfast in the 1980s (maybe half a decade or more elder to myself), and getting out of here mid-decade, ending up in Atlantic City, where he met a number of folk across his two years there run aground financially by a Mr. Donald Tr*mp. Shades of what would come, certainly. After that, he ended up in Berlin before the Wall came down, before returning home.

The kids today don't know what Belfast was like, he said. And that's a good thing.

Sunday, July 6, 2025: A morning, again. We made our way through breakfast and headed to Belfast Cathedral, the Cathedral Church of St. Anne, where Rose and her choir were performing as part of the morning service, the Choral Eucharist. Led by their Choir Director, James Calkin, they were stunning, and much appreciated by the congregation and church ministers. They did a second performance at a shorter service as well later that same afternoon, Rose sending us texts to make sure we attended, although she didn't really interact with us while we were there. A woman there who said she was from Halifax, although her parents were from Belfast. As she got older, herself, she simply moved back home. She was very pleased to see us there, especially at both services. And we all sang happy birthday to an elder parishioner after the first service, and shared in her birthday cake, along with tea and coffee. At seeing Rose wander the crowd once they were changed, Aoife made her way over and captured a hug. 

What did we do in-between? The choir attended their own activities, and we headed back to the Ulster Museum, as Christine hadn't seen it. While they wandered the upper floors, I moved through some of the lower floors, what I hadn't caught the first time around. I caught the "Belfast Archive Project," in which a young local was gifted a camera during a particular chaotic period of Belfast construction, tearing down poorly-built neighbourhoods for newer replacements, displacing and shifting neighbourhoods and erasing local community points and establishments. The shifts were documented from the inside, and the young lad eventually grew to become a journalist. Another exhibit documented decades of the Troubles, managing a fine balance between the two sides, and archival documents, videos, photographs and write-ups on a disturbing swath of Northern Irish history that still holds the occasional ripple.

From there, we made for the Belfast City Tours bus again (Christine had purchased us a two-day pass), and caught, once more, a short history of the city, and the region. How it would have been impossible to intermarry between religions without being ostracized by one's family, although those barriers were less rampant in the rural areas. Belfast, and Derry/Londonderry, were a tighter focus of the conflict. I always marvel at the density of such geographies out this way, from the narrower streets to smaller residences and shops, and note the array of walls separating buildings, streets, communities. Locked gates and security systems. Smile, you're on camera. If you part illegally, your car will be immediately get the boot (we saw this in Galway, also). And a culture awash in murals, whether depicting losses and moments from the Troubles to other memorials, historical events, cultural moments. Small posters wishing luck to the local team in their regional finals, even. All their moments are broadcast, held as a kind of living, community history. We stopped by Sinn Féin headquarters, another focus of murals and memorials, articulating history as something to acknowledge as a kind of presence. These things happened, even if communities shift, and perhaps move beyond such crises. It's a fascinating difference between cultures (one can't make any kind of mural in Ottawa without the City suspending activity and forcing one to remove it).

Following the afternoon service, we joined up with Susan Johnson, and made for dinner at whites, Belfast's oldest tavern, founded 1630. How many times now have we set foot in spaces older than our actual country? We caught murals, and statues. We saw American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman Frederick Douglass (1818-1895). It was quite interesting to see the Belfast/Northern Irish engagement with "struggle," whether through acknowledgements of abolitionists, Nelson Mandela or Palestine, engaged with further struggles beyond their own borders, holding to what else they saw or see in the world.

And then of course the BELFAST sign, with wee Aoife sitting upon it. Walking back to the youth hostel, we chanced upon the Crown, a venue recommended via social media by both Canadian expat (in Wales) poet Wanda O'Connor (did you know she was in Doctor Who?) and Vancouver writer Michael Turner.

And, walking closer to our hostel, we came upon this set-up, preparing for the July 12th bonfires. celebrating the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, when King James II riled up the Irish after being turfed from the British throne by the populace, in favour of William III of Normandy. You are freaking everyone out, the population said to James II, being too openly Catholic (he was the last English Monarch to be so openly Catholic). England called for William, who was the son of a Mary Stuart, to come over and marry James' daughter, also a Mary Stuart, to solidify William's claim (William and Mary became England's first and only co-regents). I've been years blaming James II for things, including the fact that he'd run away to France before William was half-way to England, so he had no business riling up the Irish to "take back" his throne. My high school pal Patrick Leroux even wrote and directed a play around the whole business, Le Beau Prince d'Orange, which I caught in Ottawa back in 1993. He portrayed the Battle of Limerick as two armies tossing limericks at each other, which was quite delightful. The Orange army defeated James' forces so well, that they parade annually, still, through the traditionally Green region to celebrate, which is still a source of local tension (the massacre at Glencoe is also one I blame James II for, by the way; you should look that up). Stupid James II.

Apparently our Youth Hostel annually closed during the period of July 12, so we were just under the wire. Just under the wire, and perhaps good to stand clear.