It used to be that I was the well-known one – I had a column in the local paper, I stirred up all kinds of shit – but just as terrorists eventually hang up their guns and enter politics, I had long since resigned myself to the security and boredom of the post-Troubles newsroom. Belfast is like any city that has suffered war or pestilence or disaster – hugely relieved to no longer be the focus of world attention, but also slightly aggrieved that it isn't. In the old days you could say, 'I'm from Belfast,' anywhere in the world and it was like shorthand: a thousand images of explosions and soldiers and barbed wire and rioting and foam-mouthed politicians were thrown up by that simple statement. You were automatically hard, even if you were a freckle-armed accountant in National Health specs; you earned the sympathy of slack-jawed women for surviving so long, and you habitually buffed up your life story like you'd just crawled out of the Warsaw ghetto. You joked about the Troubles, but in such a way that you made it seem like you were covering something up. Perhaps you said you were once in a lift with that Gerry Adams and you thought he bore a remarkable resemblance to Rolf Harris, and you pointed out that you never saw the two of them in the same place at the same time, and your audience laughed and said, 'Right enough,' but at the same time you knew what they were thinking, that you were making light of it because actually you'd suffered horribly at the hands of masked terrorists or your mother had been blown through a window at Omagh or your father was shot down on the Bogside for demanding basic human rights. To say you were from Belfast was to say you were a Jew in Berlin, or a soldier of the Somme. But no longer. And as the Troubles had waned, so had the world's interest, and so had my star.
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