High finance in Northern Ireland

Second report from Belfast, on just miscellaneous stuff.

I started out my day with the Irish breakfast at my hotel:

Scrambled eggs, bacon (looks like ham to Americans), pork sausages, blood sausages and sourdough toast. I told my server to forget the baked beans. Even if they’re “chipotle baked beans”.

Sadly I had not anticipated the quantities, and left about half of it. I hate wasting food, but I had reached the vanishing point.

All the GBP I had have been made obsolete by HM government some time in the 10 years I was last there. I had £35 that wouldn’t spend. Stevie, my taxi guide, told me that any of the banks in the town center could swap them out for current-issue notes. The first bank I came upon was Barclays. The queue for “counter service” was almost out the door. And there was a total of exactly two windows, so the maximum bandwidth of customer service their counter could give was two. But for part of the time, there was only one person working.

Seriously, I was in line for 20 minutes. During which time I saw a notice to the effect that, starting last November, if you want to pay cash into your account at the “counter service”, you have to have a preprinted cash payment slip or (I think) an ATM card. I thought this is an extraordinary position to take by an institution that basically deals in money. “No, no—we’re British. No cash.” The Barclays motto seems to be: you're our customers now. Suck it.

When I got up to the counter and pulled out my notes, the guy wasn’t best pleased. Where was I from? The US. Where do I bank? Scuse me? I bank with a credit union. Not Bank of America? No. Apparently they have some kind of reciprocal agreement with BofA, but I have absolutely no notion of what that might have to do with swapping old British currency for new British currency.

Anyhow, after a bit of faffing about, he counted out a twenty and three fivers, counted my twenty and three fivers, and recounted the twenty and three fivers.

(And now, Twitter is recommending that I follow Barclay's Investment Bank. Eat dirt and die, Twitter. And you, too, Barclays.)

But later, when I was paying the server at the bar at the top of the hotel, I discovered that my pound coins are also obsolete. WTF? Who does that? (Apparently the Brits.) But my two pound coin was still valid, so I used that.

That bar, on the 23^rd floor, has very nice views of Belfast. Here, for example is the City Hall.

And here is another building that clearly doesn’t get much sun; that green stuff is moss.

I do not know what’s up with that bar. They serve afternoon tea (for £10 more than the £30 charged at the bar on the first floor), but you have to book 24 hours in advance. Also, the only way you can get up to the bar is to be escorted in the special elevator by one of the concierges. I don’t know why.

The fella who took me up, the older by far of the two I’ve seen working, had recommended earlier that I visit St. Malachy’s church. I’d asked about a residential area nearby, which seemed to flummox both of the concierges, but St. Malachy’s was near such a neighborhood, so I stopped in. The exterior of the place was unimpressive; looks like all the inner city churches I’ve seen in Chicago or Boston. But the interior was indeed pretty, although I didn’t get any pix because I got there just as the 1300 mass was starting.

Anyway, on our way up to the 23^rd floor, we chatted about St. Malachy’s. He said he likes churches. He mentioned the Clonard monastery, which I’d seen as part of my taxi tour. During WWII, the Redemptorists offered their basement as an air raid shelter. Protestants refused to go there because: Catholic. The head Redemptorist pointed out that Luftwaffe bombs don’t distinguish between Protestant and Catholic, so they eventually agreed to seek shelter there. But they had to be kept separate from the Catholics.

During the 80s, groups representing Unionist and Republican factions met there in secret to lay the groundwork for the peace process that eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement.

Stevie told me I should check out the organ, and it was impressive:

The walls also had very interesting mosaics, which isn’t something I usually associate with Irish ecclesiastical decorative arts:

And here was one of those little details you come across: an air freshener device in the priest's confessional booth. What stories do you think prompted that addition?

After Clonard, the concierge fella said St. Anne’s church is quite nice, and then muttered, “They charge a fee.” I told him I got in for free because I walked the labyrinth. I don’t think he knew about the labyrinth, and I do think he leans more towards Catholicism than Church of Ireland.

I decided to try the Observatory bar at the top of the hotel basically because my room still hadn’t been cleaned by 1430, and I needed somewhere to think and write. The views there were indeed impressive, and the place was practically empty. They had a lot of what looked to me like expensive froofy cocktails, but there was also a list of Irish whiskeys. I was going to go with the Bushmills 12-year (Bushmills being distilled somewhere near Belfast), but the barman brought out the triple distilled, and I thought, why not have a go at that.

It was truly lovely. Just aromatic, smooth, and with the tiniest hint of sweetness. I was also pleasantly pleased to discover that, at £6, it was less than half the price of all the other whiskeys on the menu.

The rest of my evening was writing my tour post, getting some dinner and reading Max Hastings’ Armageddon, a the history of the last months in the war against Germany. Just as I started writing this paragraph, I noticed I was getting a little sleepy. So time to pack it in.

Good times, man.